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Home PageINTRODUCTION
This report is submitted in response to the Call for Tech Camp
4 progress reports by August 15, 2000.
This is a progress report as well as a draft of what I hope will
evolve into a tutorial on how to get started in Web-based data
collection and management at UMD. Thus it is written in less technical
language for the target audience of UMD faculty and their assistants
who may want to undertake one of _many_ similar potential projects
in their own teaching and/or research. It is posted on the Web
to stimulate rapid deployment of these possibilities throughout
the UMD community and to invite your feedback and suggestions
for improvement.
THE GOAL
My main personal development goal at UMD Tech Camp 4 during May 17-25, 2000, was to learn how to use our Unix computing environment at UMD to accomplish the task of collecting information via an interactive Web page, and how to store that information in a database for permanent retention and future reporting. I chose as an example teaching application the challenge of setting up a Web-based assessment form that could be filled out by a student in one of my courses, FMIS 3301 Production and Operations Management at the completion of the first project.
DEMONSTRATION
If you want to pretend that you are a student and experience
a demo, please do the following:
1. Imagine that you have completed doing the first seven steps
of Project 1.
(My plan is for the last step of each project to be filling out
a feedback/assessment form.)
So click
here to go to the last step of Project 1, which is step 8.
2. Then click on the Step 8 "answer a few questions"
link that will take you to the assessment input form.
3. Fill out the input form as if you were a student in the course.
4. Click the SUBMIT button at the bottom of the form.
5. What you will see next is my developer's page for test purposes
only.
It tells a developer that your submitted form was indeed stored
successfully in the database.
(The word "successful" at the bottom of this page is
what I was so delighted to see at Noon on the last day of Tech Camp!)
This developer's page will eventually be replaced by a simple
"thank you" message and a link back to the course.
RESOURCES AT UMD
The UMD Unix systems provide a scripting language called PHP (which stands for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor"). When a Web page is accessed from a browser PHP statements can be executed to manipulate information on the server and to present a tailor-made Web page to the student. The UMD Unix systems also provide a database management system called MySQL, which can be accessed using PHP. For Tech Camp I was issued a new userid/password on the pubinfo.d.umn.edu system for this development work. Our system administrator also created a new, empty database on my MySQL account. It was my own responsibility to create each new tables within the database, and to define the fields within each table that I wanted to store.
HOW TO GET STARTED
My first task was to design the interactive Web page to be presented to the student. In HTML-speak this is called a "form." There are several HTML editors that support forms. I chose to use Adobe PageMill 3 because it is widely available to other faculty and students at UMD. You will find the form capabilities you need under the Adobe PageMill main menu command Insert... Form... where you are presented with a variety of controls including
To see the Web-based assessment input form that I developed click here.
It was very important to design, test and stabilize this form early in the project, because the more difficult technical work of programming PHP and MySQL depend heavily on the input form. Any revision of the input form requires revision of the PHP and MySQL programming. Because of the user friendly software available for form creation, form design is a task that the faculty member or their assistants likely can learn to do largely on their own.
HOW TO PROGRAM THE SERVER
The task of programming the server side of the application was more technical in that it required learning the PHP scripting language and how to use PHP to issue comands to the MySQL version of SQL (System Query Language) for manipulating the database. In this area UMD Faculty are much more likely to need technical assistance and examples that actually work in our particular computing environment.
I can't provide links to the actual Web-pages here because
if you were to access these Web pages (i.e. run the script embedded
in them), you might corrupt my application by, for example, erasing
a data table. However, harmless versions of these files are
available for
download.
They can then be easily adapted for your
own applications after you have your own MySQL userid and password,
and your own database name. Place holders for these authorizations
are indicated in the download files.
During Tech Camp it was necessary for this project to create Web
pages that contain script to accomplish these routine database
administration tasks:
- connect to the UMD MySQL server,
- connect to the MySQL database,
- create a new data table in the database (filename createtable.php),
- after the user clicks on the SUBMIT button on the completed input form (filename inputform.html)
save the responses into the data table (filename record.php), and
- delete (i.e. "drop") a table (filename droptable.php).
WHAT'S NEXT
When I have some more time to work on this project one next step will be to write some MySQL statements to summarize the stored data and present a statistical summary in Web-page form for the instructor. This should be relatively straight forward given the work that has already been completed successfully. After that it will mainly be a matter of duplicating this application and making some minor adaptations for other courses and student activites. The lion's share of the most technical work has been done.
CONCLUSION
My personal teaching philosophy is that every time we give the student a grade, we really should give the student the opportunity to give us a grade. Continuous improvement then becomes a natural process that is "baked into the fabric" of everything we do. In my opinion the Web is as yet an underutilized resource for gathering assessment information and enhancing this organizational change. My understanding at the time of this writing is that we have some system administration and billing issues to be resolved at UMD before the campus can get into these applications in high volume. But this project does demonstrate that the technology is essentially in place today at UMD.
REFERENCES: BOOKS
Atkinson, Leon, Core PHP Programming (Prentice Hall,
paperback, 1999)
Catagnetto, Rawat, Schumann, Scollo, and Veliath, Professional
PHP Programming (WROX Press, paperback, 1999)
Celko, Instant SQL Programming (WROX Press, paperback,
1995)
Meloni, Julie C., PHP Essentials (Prima, paperback, 2000)
Sklar, Joel, Principles of Web Design (Course Technology,
paperback, 2000)
Yarger, Reese and King, MySQL & mSQL (O'Reilly, paperback,
1999)
REFERENCES: LINKS
MySQL Home Page
MySQL Reference
Manual for version 3.21.33.
PHP: Base Library
PHP Builder
PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor Home
Page
PHP Wizard
PX: PHP Code Exchange
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks go to the all the UMD ITSS Staff who helped me with this project, especially Scott Hollatz, and also to all the UMD Administrators who have facilitated these Tech Camp experiences. It was, indeed, very worthwhile, and an excellent continuing adventure.
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