Algonquin Curriculum Maintenance Application

Posted on Tuesday, August 3rd, 2021

Algonquin College curriculum maintenance application banner image.

Client	Surbhi Bahri
Professor(s)	Leanne Seaward,
Program	Computer Programmer
Students	Team Lead: – Jason Chow Team Members: – Yu-Yun Chu – Mohee-Aldeen Alsaadi – Nanchun Chen

Project Description:

Every year, changes to the curriculum for courses at Algonquin College are made or considered. Feedback from students, Algonquin faculty members, and industry professionals is used to determine what changes should be made to improve each course. The client has asked for a web application that allows users to share their opinions and have the related faculty members for each course review the feedback. At the end of term, students at Algonquin may access the web application for a limited period and leave a review on courses that they have successfully completed. Throughout each year, Algonquin staff members may also leave reviews on relevant courses and input comments on behalf of industry professionals’ recommendations.

To fulfill the requirements, a web application was developed using Python for the back end, Django as a web framework, MySQL for database connection, and React for the front-end UI components. Only Algonquin staff and students may use this application with their algonquinlive.com email addresses. The project is ongoing and, in the future, single sign-on (SSO) will be integrated with Algonquin systems. Currently the application features a sign-up feature that requires users to sign up with an algonquinlive.com email address. Users may sign up as either staff or students and once they are registered, they may select a course that is relevant to them. Both staff and students may leave reviews and staff have the additional option to view all reviews for courses relevant to them. The staff review page provides a summary of the reviews left for courses and allows staff members to scroll through a list of user comments.

By taking on this project, the team has learned about many technologies new to them and how to work in a group development environment. None of the team was especially proficient with any of the technologies used to develop the project however, team members conducted research, experimented with code, and successfully implemented many working features. In addition, the team followed Agile software development methodologies and realized the many benefits of incremental development of working prototypes over the traditional waterfall development model.