The UCWISE Instructor Portal metadata tool

Project Proposal

Team Members	Core Competencies
Tofer Merritt	Java, C/C++, data structures, OOD, Fireworks MX, Dreamweaver MX, taken an upper division course in HCI at UC San Diego
Minakshi Mukherjee	Java, JavaScript, database design, HTML, XML, ASP, PHP, BS in Computer science, and MSc (Information Technology from BIT university, India)
Lois Wei	C/C++, HTML, PHP, XML, database design; BA in Computer science, worked as a web application designer and developer

Problem Statement

The UCWISE (University of California Web-based Instruction for Science and Engineering) project aims to provide technology and curricula for experimental laboratory-base courses in university level computer science and engineering. This project is funded by CITRIS (www.citris-uc.org) and NSF (National Science Foundation). The UCWISE learning tools are currently used by three courses at UC Berkeley (CS3, CS4, and CS61B) and one course at UC Merced. The current Instructor Portal of the UCWISE system is functional, however it is not user-friendly. Our project goal is to provide a formal usability analysis for the Instructor Portal and propose a user-centered design of the interface. This redesign effort is aimed to offer a more pleasant user experience as well as improving the efficiency of the instructors in carrying out curriculum authoring related tasks.

Primary Users and Goals

The primary users of UC-HIPO are:

teachers of introductory computer science in settings ranging from two-year institutions through universities
the teaching assistances for the computer science and engineering courses that are taught using the UCWISE tools.

The primary user goals are:

Allowing instructors to:

author and customize curriculums
prototype new course elements,
collect review comments from experienced curriculum developers
view students' work (e.g. quiz responses and collaboration activities) in real-time
Allowing teaching assistants to:
edit curriculum content
customize course elements
view students' works

Participants

We will get feedback on the Instructor Portal user interface design by attending the weekly UCWISE project meeting. The computer science instructors who attend the weekly UCWISE meeting are using the UCWISE Instructor Portal. We will also be interviewing some of the CS3, CS61B teaching assistants to get their feedback on using the Instructor Portal.