ReportTool

Premise

Almost every university department has to create, track and distribute reports on students' progress. It's much easier to do this on the web than on paper. There should be an open source web application to meet this need.

What ReportTool does

ReportTool allows staff and students to create, view and comment on reports about student progress; it can also collect online feedback from students and manage seminar groups.

How it works

1. An administrator imports data about staff and students, their degrees and course options.
2. Teaching staff write reports on their students.
3. Meanwhile, students can leave feedback on their modules.
4. Once reports have been approved, students can view and comment on their own reports.
5. Staff can view or export their students' reports, and feedback on their modules
6. Adminstrators can export reports and feedback by department in pdf or csv (spreadsheet) format.

Features

• simple to install and run
• can serve one or many departments
• designed to work with existing student databases, not compete with them.
• easy to customise the format of reports and online feedback forms for different departments
• can import a wide variety of data in csv format
• available under an open source licence (see 'Status' below)

Implementation

• runs on PostgreSQL by default, can run on almost any database
• easy to add code for custom imports (e.g. of student data)
• written in Java using Hibernate and the Spring Framework for easy maintenance and extension
• re-written in Python using the turbogears freamwork for easier maintenance and extension
• some automated test coverage (127 tests and counting), plus functional testing with selenium

Status

ReportTool has been in continuous use for over three years in Warwick's Department of Philosophy. It's fairly stable (can run unattended for months) and under active development. No major new features are planned, it's complete. Because this hasn't been done yet, implementing ReportTool for other sites would require quite a bit of work refining the processes. The documentation could be improved too.

Licence

ReportTool is available under the GPL 2.0 licence. If another licence would be more convenient, please ask.

Team

ReportTool was mainly written by Steve Butterfill. Patrick Gemmell conrtibuted ideas and code for a re-write. Randy Metcalfe looks after communications and licensing.