Automated Student Tracking Now Available at CTP

Linda Pratt, a member of CTP’s board of directors, contributed a great deal of personal time, technical skills and recruited a volunteer to develop a great new part of CTP’s IT infrastructure. CTP asked Linda to describe the new systems and why it is important to CTP’s work. Here is what she sent us. -Alex

In response to the detailed reporting requirements associated with Fee for Service billing, along with our goal of increasing our student body, CTP has developed an application to record the student’s demonstrated level of competence in their assignments, attendance, and conduct while producing course work at CTP. The system will save time for the instructors and allow them to track many more students simultaneously; it will catalog all the pertinent student data in a single repository and generate student-specific reports that will benefit CTP, the student and the Department of Rehab.

The student’s enrollment date is used to marry the student’s profile with the class plan of the selected course. A customized class schedule, matched to the current-day calendar is produced for each student. The instructor is given online screen areas to check off and grade each assignment, to record absences (including comments regarding the student’s notification of said absence), and a conduct sheet that allows for documenting extraordinary efforts or substandard behavior by the student.

CTP’s new Student Tracking system will be in production in February, 2009, giving the instructors an automated and standard documentation tool to fully record each student’s classroom experience. Since the system was built to be “scalable”, the next component is expected to be the accounting piece. The pro bono developer of this snazzy system is Michael Kremer from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. We thank him profusely for bringing us into the 21 century.

— Linda Pratt