Using A Web Based Tour Registration System To Track Student Preference And Attendance

The Introduction to Engineering and Science course at Clemson includes attending tours of selected engineering and science departments. A system using sign-up sheets, although it had been improved incrementally over years of use, still had significant drawbacks for students, faculty, and the General Engineering Program staff. A web-based registration system introduced in 2001 and improved in 2002 not only proved to be an elegant solution to these problems, but also provided more flexibility than ever before. The paper includes snapshots of the inputs to the registration system at various points in time and a description of the implementation of the system, including the database structure. Clemson’s Introduction to Engineering and Science Course The Introduction to Engineering and Science course is the first course in Clemson’s General Engineering curriculum. Clemson’s General Engineering program has coordinated the common first-year engineering curriculum since 1985.1 A closer relationship with the sciences has developed as a result of a reorganization that created the College of Engineering and Science in 1995.2 Most recently, this relationship led to the addition of introductory science content and perspective to the Introduction to Engineering course to create an Introduction to Engineering and Science course.3 The course in this new format is required of all students in the General Engineering program and is described in greater detail elsewhere by Ohland, Sill, and Crockett.4 Tours as a Required Course Component Each of the departments participating in the course offers “open house” tours during the semester. In 2001, students were required to visit at least three tours of engineering programs and two tours of science programs. In 2002, this requirement was changed to require attendance at five total tours, including at least one engineering and one science tour (this change had little effect on the overall distribution of attendance, but provided more flexibility to a minority of students.) Before the tours begin, other course elements help students to narrow their choices down to a few departments that most interest them. The tours then provide an opportunity to see a program in its own element—with its faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, and its facilities. Tours Page 8.239.1 Proceedings of the 2003 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2003, American Society for Engineering Education are conducted in the evenings and there are at least two opportunities to visit each department—at a minimum, departments hold tours on two days, one chosen from Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and the other chosen from Tuesday and Thursday, and over a range of times from early afternoon through evening on both days. Students with conflicts are expected to make arrangements to attend the tours, and have ample time to accommodate this. Tour sizes are set by the department and range from 15 to 40, depending on facilities and on demand.Tour attendance counts significantly in the final grade, since each tour counts for 6 percent. Tour registration occurs about a month into the semester, once a complete tour schedule has been determined, and once students have enough information to select tours. The General Engineering and other departmental offices are not responsible for coordinating the tours. Tour Management Using a Paper-and-Pencil System In the fall semester of 2000, tour registration was managed by using sign-up sheets. Each department provided coauthor Collins with the number of tours they would host per day, the beginning times for each tour, and the number of students they could accommodate in each tour group. She used that information to make sign-up sheets for each department. Notebooks were created that sorted the sign-up sheets chronologically by department. Students were informed when the sign-up sheets were available, and students who wanted to take a particular department’s tour would come to the General Engineering office, look in that department’s notebook, find a date and time that was suitable, and sign up on the appropriate sheet. At the end of the registration period, the sign-up sheets were photocopied and copies were given to the respective departments so that they would know how many students to expect per tour and so they could take attendance. Attendance was taken by having the the students sign next to their (printed) name on copies of the sign-up sheets. Students were told in advance (and reminded several times) that they were only guaranteed credit for attending a tour if they had previously signed up to attend that tour during that specific time slot. This allowed the departments the discretion of allowing students to sign in if there was room in a tour. Difficulties with the Paper-and-Pencil System In previous years, there were problems with students who signed up for full tours by writing their names on the back of the sign-up sheets or in the margins. In an attempt to prevent that, the signup sheets were printed front and back and left very little margin so that there was no blank space for to use to write in extra names. The students were warned in class and with written instructions posted at the registration desk that only names on numbered lines would be considered valid registration. Another problem in previous years had been students showing up for different tours than the ones they had registered for, which made it impossible to prevent overcrowding, and defeated the purpose of having a sign-up sheet. Using the sign-up sheets as tour attendance roll sheets helped overcome that problem. P ge 8.239.2 Proceedings of the 2003 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2003, American Society for Engineering Education For the staff in the GE office, the primary frustrations with paper-and-pencil tour registration were managing the flow of 800 or so students who came by the office to sign up for the tours, and dealing with the pleas of those students who came by after the sign-up period was over. This system was also inherently unfair to students who heard that the lists were available later in the day, because some tour times would fill up quickly. As a result, students in the earlier classes would give their friends in later classes advance warning, thus worsening the problem of managing the flow of students. Furthermore, establishing an accurate forecast of student tour attendance using the paper-andpencil system required a review of all the pages in all the notebooks. This forecasting is essential to ensure tour availability for the students and to give planning information to the faculty who deliver the tours. The burden of manual review prohibits the discovery of a variety of more complicated errors in the sign-up sheets: Students signing up for tours with conflicting times • Students failing to sign up for enough tours • Students signing up for the wrong combination of tours • (something other than 3 engineering and 2 science) Certain tour times go underfilled • The paper-and-pencil system also requires paper record storage, since these records must be used to investigate challenges by students who claim to have not received credit for a tour they attended. Students also refer to the sign-up sheets to verify that they had met the tour requirement, a redundant step taken by many grade-conscious students. A New Web-Based System for Tour Management In the fall semester of 2001, a web-based tour management system was introduced. This system was designed by the three authors and programmed by co-author Foreman during the summer of 2001 in order to alleviate the many problems inherent in the paper-and-pencil system. This system included a pre-registration component to help with forecasting and a registration component both to register students for the tours and to keep track of attendance. Students could visit the tour registration website directly or follow a link from the course WebCT site. Using the website, students indicated their tour preferences early in the semester, checked the tour schedule, signed up for tours, and confirmed that their attendance had been recorded. The Pre-registration System Early in the semester, a special module surveyed the students regarding which 3 engineering tours and which 2 science tours they anticipated attending. This information was used to help departments decide how many tours to offer. This provided important information to the science departments, who were giving tours for the first time, and did not know how many to expect. The pre-registration module only tracked students and their preferences, since tour schedules were not available. During registration, students were not required to maintain any correlation to their preP ge 8.239.3 Proceedings of the 2003 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2003, American Society for Engineering Education registration requests. This system was disabled in 2002 as a result of the data gathered on student preferences in 2001 and because of the predictability of student preferences as discussed later. The Registration System The General Engineering Tour Registration System consists of three modules. The three modules are respectively designed to perform the following functions: to download data from the Registrar’s database on the mainframe and populates a • table in a smaller database dedicated to tour registration; to allow students to register for tours, review their tour schedules, and change their • minds about which tours they want as often as they wish; to enable administrators to monitor registrations, record attendance, and track • compliance. The tour registration system, like all computer programs, is capable of imposing certain restrictions with 100% compliance. Some of the criteria imposed by system design are: students cannot register for a tour beyo