Requirements Document

Part I - Application Overview

Objectives

The primary reason for creating this tool is to provide a means to manage office hours for course instructors and teaching fellows. It can also be used to organize study groups, workshops and other meetings between people.

Currently, there is no centralized means to post and sign up for office hours. It is being done manually in most cases, be means of sign-up sheets, emails between people, and other written forms. There are also a few applications run by individual organizations, but these suffer from not being universally available to all, as well as having different user interfaces and somewhat different requirements.

The proposed tool will be part of the Sakai architecture and as such, can be made available to any course or site in that application. The interface will be standardized, so all users will have the same capabilities. The tool will also be integrated with the Calendar and Email systems in Sakai so that appointments and other meetings and meeting opportunities can be made to automatically appear on a users Calendar. The tool can also send emails to inform users of appointment changes and availability of new sessions.

We are doing this now because this functionality has been requested for many years from legacy systems and Sakai, and because it does not yet exist in the Sakai tool-set.

We feel that instructors, teaching fellows, and students will benefit from the incorporation of this tool into Sakai. Instructors and teaching fellows will be able to easily define and manage meetings with students. They will also be able to easily see their scheduled meetings and be able to make changes which will be communicated to their students. Students will have a convenient, centralized way to see their teachers' availability and arrange to meet with them. Since meetings and appointments will appear on the calendar in Sakai, they will be less likely to miss appointments.

Business Process

The general business process is simply; "people arrange to meet each other." In the case of office hours, the instructor, advisor, or teaching fellow, announces their availability for meetings at a known place for a specified interval of time. Students, then either promise to appear at a specific time to meet privately, agree to appear at the location sometime during the time interval, or simply know that if they should decide to meet the instructor or advisor at that place or time, they may.

User Roles

We will define several roles in this system and would like to avoid assuming roles such as "instructor", "student", etc., because we realize that the tool may be used for sign-ups for events other than office hours. For the purposes of this document, we define the following roles, abstracted from the familiar Sakai roles:

Owner
This is the person who offers a meeting opportunity. Usually, they will be an instructor or teaching fellow, but they could as easily be a student offering to participate in a study group. Owners set up meeting opportunities (sessions), modify and occasionally cancel meetings or appointments, optionally providing a message as to the reason for the cancellation. They agree to be available for attendees, define the nature of the meeting (private, group, or informal). They may optionally also define the subject or agenda for each meeting.

Viewer
This is anyone viewing meeting opportunities or appointments, their own or others. Viewers search for and review meetings and appointments, but make no changes, unless they sign up for a meeting, then they become attendees. Depending on the nature of the meeting and the permissions assigned by the owner, viewers may or may not be able to see various details of meetings, such as availability of the meeting, the agenda, names of attendees, number of attendees, etc.

Attendee
This is someone who has agreed to attend a meeting, either by signing up for a time slot in a private meeting or by agreeing to attend a meeting with a group of other attendees. Attendees agree to appear at a specific time and place to meet with the owner of a meeting. They may optionally provide commentary in advance of the meeting to prepare the owner for whatever agenda they may have. Attendees may also cancel meetings in advance.

Actors in the roles defined here will have one or more Sakai permissions that allow them to undertake actions using the tool in Sakai site(s).

Interaction with Other Sakai Services

The sign-up tool is a component of the Sakai course management system. It will appear as a tool, available to each site, both project sites and course sites. It will interact with the Schedule tool in Sakai by creating calendar entries for offered meetings and well as appointments. It will also communicate via the email service regarding appointments, cancellations, and meeting availability.