Hibiscus Blog: News, Tips and Tricks

Employee Attendance Module

2011-05-20T08:06:00.002+05:30

The latest module in Hibiscus is Attendance. The functions of this module are:

Record Daily Attendance
Define Holidays
Flexible rules for Marking attendance by day / by hours
Import Leave records

LIS:: Barcodes

2010-12-01T09:15:00.001+05:30

A new feature to print barcodes with Call Numbers was introduced.

No need to buy a barcode printer. You can print a sequence of numbers or a set of user defined numbers as barcode.

AIS::Programming Contest Manager

2010-10-16T11:29:00.003+05:30

A feature after a long time :)

When I was researching on conducting a programming contest in IIIT, I came across contest manager programs. One of them was Rocktest. Another one was DomJudge. I started playing with these programmes. They were good but not great. It took a lot of time to set up and make them work. But I got ideas about what they are about to do.

I thought why not add a feature contest manager to Hibiscus. So during the Puja vacation, I took some time out and added Contest Manager feature to Hibiscus. There are three kinds of people involved here:

Contest Manager
Participating Teams
Judges

This works as follows:

The Contest manager sets up a contest and
He assigns problems to the Contest
He assigns judges teams to the contest
The Contestants upload the programs
The Judges view, compile and execute the program against a test data set and gie marks.

The Final Results can be computed and downloaded as a worksheet.

We will try this in our first contest to be held in IIIT after the Puja Hols.

AIS: Faculty can authorize his secretary to manage CMS

2010-07-16T07:54:00.002+05:30

The Courseware component of AIS always required the faculty to manage it. It was a little tedious. For example for the faculty member to enter 100 questions would be rather boring. The faculty members were suggesting if their assistant could do this work.

Now, a faculty member can authorize his secretary to manage the cms for a course. Of course the sensitive parts of the cms such as feedback etc will not be visible to the faculty.

The secretary can create resources, assignments, quizzes etc.

Groupware: Aggregation of Blogs

2010-04-09T08:26:00.001+05:30

When I was meeting students at IIIT, they expressed their desire to write blogs. However, my concern was how to make these blogs visible to each other. The solution that came to my mind is Google Reader. However, GReader does not have a public interface. Hence, it is difficult to share the subscriptions with the public.

So the new minapp rssAggregator. This application can aggregate a lot of rss feeds in a controlled a manner and visible to public.

Take a look at IIIT Blogs

AIS: Bulletin Board and CMS Discussion Forum Updated

2010-04-01T11:04:00.005+05:30

Courseware Discussion Forum is one of very popular components of Hibiscus. To keep the discussion simple, we allowed two levels in a discussion: Topic and Response.

Some of our faculty members suggested that a three level forum would be more effective. Hence, this upgrade.

Now. we have three levels of discussion forum: Topic, Responses and Comments. You can respond to a topic and comment on a response.

Further, the inputs can be can be in HTML, Wiki or Text format.

We are planning to add a dashboard to view statistics of the discussions.

Upload Interim Grades like Quizzes, Assignements etc

2010-02-11T15:06:00.007+05:30

You (Faculty login) can upload the interim grades for students in the course. This will help student to view their grade / marks online in different component patterns of that course.

First you (Faculty Login) have to create the component pattern (Evaluation Pattern) in the course page. Please refer to the given link....

You can select the CSV file to upload grade / marks when you want to give the grade / marks to students. Please refer to the given link...

Once the file successfully uploaded then the student can view the grades / marks of individual component for that course.

New:: Survey

2009-12-06T22:47:00.002+05:30

In last few months, we faced situations when we needed to collect information from people from within and outside the Institute. One occasion was when we wanted to get job applications for faculty. Another one was when we wanted to collect admission applications from students.
Yet another was when we wanted to collect placement CVs from students.

I used Google Forms to collect the data and get a spreadsheet of the data. Then I used Mail Merge to create one page information.

I wanted to build a similar feature in Hibiscus. The result is survey. It uses reusable attributes. It allows document uploads. It has time window to collect information.

It can collect info from Hibiscus users and anonymous users.

AIS::New Interface in Online Attendance Screen

2009-09-29T08:09:00.002+05:30

On line attendance is a very useful extension to the AIS module of Hibiscus.

By default, when you enter the online attendance page, every one is marked present. You clicked against a student's name if he was absent. The interface was designed to save the status instantly when you click. Some times when the connections is slow like in a highly loaded WIFI connection, the response will be slow.

At the request of some faculty members we have changed the interface. Now, there are three radio buttons against each name. Select the absent button when a student is absent. Finally click on the submit button to save the attendance status.

One more feature allows the faculty to write a comment against each session after the class. This was an idea which came up when we were discussion the ICT matters at BPUT.

AIS:: Online Quiz

2009-07-27T16:07:00.004+05:30

Online quiz is another milestone achievements in AIS. Instead of taking quiz with paper based system, this online quiz is helping a lot in saving the time.

Faculty members can do the online quiz for students. The quiz questions can be multiple type or subjective type. The quiz can be administered by concern faculty only.

The quiz parameter is selected with number of students, number of questions. The quiz time is scheduled to start from a particular time.

Once the quiz is over then there is automatically evaluation can done. Then students can view the marks instantly. Also students can view the answers with questions if there is permission given by the concern faculty.

Click Here to view the Quiz help

AIS::Interface for Guardians

2009-07-26T07:51:00.000+05:30

AIS was developed in XIMB and was used in management schools like XLRI and GIM. In a b-school with mature and adult students, we never felt that a guardian should interfere in the learning process and hence, never created a interface for the Guardians.

Now, that the scope of AIS is expanding and AIS is being used by Engineering Schools, we felt the need for a Guardian Interface. I mooted this idea and Sasmita caught onto it fast.

We have exposed a subset of the student Interface to the the Guardians especially the performance, finance and discipline related components.

With the Hibiscus application Frameowrk in place, this was implemented in two days flat.

AIS::My Courses shows latest course first for faculty

2009-07-21T22:30:00.002+05:30

When the faculty look at their courses, the courses were shown according to the course ID. This is often confusing as you do not see the current courses first.

Now, the faculty will see their current courses first in the my courses.

AIS:: Improvements to the courseware dashboard

2009-07-13T13:00:00.002+05:30

The Courseware dashboard shows the courseware menu along with course outline.

The menu is now enhanced to show the statistics. For example, the menu will show the number of assignments alongside the assignment menu.

LIS::Gate Pass

2009-07-12T20:27:00.003+05:30

The library information system had one deficiency. After issuing the book, the counter person will write the gate-pass details on a piece of paper. This was a inefficient and time-consuming procedure.

Now the gate pass can be printed automatically. At the end of Issue Transaction, a gate pass will be shown on the screen. The counter person has the option to print.

This feature needs a small DM or Thermal printer

AIS::Students get a message when they upload an assignment

2009-07-11T20:26:00.003+05:30

When I was running an assignment, a student sent me a copy of his assignment by mail. He wrote that he was not sure if his assignment has been uploaded.

Hibiscus has a standard message area below the menu to provide feedback on user actions.

Now, a message will appear when the students upload their assignments in the message area.

AIS:: Download Assignments as a Zipped archive

2009-07-08T08:33:00.002+05:30

Evaluation of Student assignments was a very useful feature in AIS. You can ask students to upload assignments and evaluate them.

One feedback we received from faculty members was that it was tedious to download the assignments as it had to be done student by student.

We have addressed this issue. Now you can download all the assignments as a single zipped archive. This can be opened by any Zip tool like Winzip.

Hibiscus::Multiple Logins not allowed

2009-07-04T09:56:00.002+05:30

We faced a problem some time ago. Two persons logged in using the same user ID. This led to enormous confusion.

Now, we have prevented multiple logins. If you have logged in using a particular User ID and another individual logs in using the same user ID, you get logged out.

The last login is allowed to to be active and all other logins are automatically logged out.

AIS:: Upload Student profile from Excel Sheet

2009-06-29T14:14:00.000+05:30

You can upload the student profiles at once from an excel sheet (csv format).
The csv template format can be downloaded and used for profile uploading instantly.

AIS :: Peer Evaluation

2009-06-29T11:17:00.000+05:30

This is a method where a assignment can be given to students for peer evaluation purpose. The assignment can be evaluated in groups or individual subject to the conditions.

In peer evaluation method faculty can randomly assign the assignment to students and the evaluated assignments result marks can be checked by the faculty member after the deadline has been over.

AIS:: Upload Question Bank from Excel File

2009-06-29T07:14:00.000+05:30

Quizzing is one of the very popular modules in AIS.

One of the suggestions expressed by the Faculty members was to make it easy to upload questions to the question bank. I completely understood the problem. Entering questions was a drag in AIS.

I used to upload my questions directly into the database which no nobody else would ever know how to do.

Finally, we thought of a solution and a really elegant one.

You can download a Excel template from the Question Bank screen. Enter the questions yourself or ask your secretary to do that job in the template. Save the Worksheet as a CVS file.

There is link in the Questions Banks screen to upload the questions from a CVS file. Choose this link and choose your topic, upload the question and your question bank is ready.

AIS::Photo Upload

2009-06-29T01:31:00.001+05:30

From the inception of AIS, we kept photographs of Faculty and Students in the AIS. Subsequently, photographs of staff members was added.

The image name matches with ID of the individual. The uploading was a problem. The Sys Admin will copy the pictures directly with samba share or Ftp. Not very convenient. Subsequently, we added photo upload facility to in the edit screen of the faculty, staff and students. Not very convenient again as pictures have to be uploaded one by one.

Now, comes the solution to upload pictures in bulk. Select a bunch of pictures, copy with Ctrl-C and then paste using Ctrl-V or drag the bunch and drop them in the drop-in area.

Little conveniences like converting the file names to uppercase, validating the pictures with the database have been incorporated.

Cheers!

My First Post in Hibiscus Blog

2009-06-28T14:27:00.000+05:30

Here goes the first post in Hibiscus Blog.

All new developments on Hibiscus will be posted here.