CIS Summer Projects

With half of summer already gone,  CIS is knee-deep in projects.  Thankfully, we have an excellent team of interns helping us this summer:

• Chris Butler ’20
• Harry Fetsch ’20
• Andrew Pham ’20
• Aomsin Pongpiriyakam ’20
• Kainoa Correa ’20
• Xingyao Chen ’20
• Anthony Romm ’18
• Johan Hoeger ’17

Our team of summer interns is working on multiple projects that scale in size from small updates to improve workflows, to a complete overhaul of the HMC website to improve accessibility.  They are helping us support multiple departments throughout the college.

Here’s a glimpse at some of the projects we are working on currently:

Accessibility Project
Perhaps the biggest task our interns are undertaking is the accessibility project. Students are evaluating HMC’s website to determine whether the documents, forms, and structure are in the most accessible format. Students have met with the Communications department to outline the task and obtain access to the college’s WordPress site. We are already in the process of converting documents to webpage formats, making them easier to use. Over 800 PDFs and pageviews have been collected! The owners of the documents have been identified and the level of access to these forms has been determined as well. While this is a major undertaking, these changes are critical to improving users’ experiences online! You can learn more about this project here.

Electronic Forms Project
Students are putting their coding skills to work by converting the Registrars’ paper forms to Google Forms. Goals in this project include reducing the use of paper forms and adding automation and efficiency for tracking the status of requests and approvals between students, faculty, and the Registrar Office. Many of these forms have both student and faculty versions that are designed to automatically store responses and send reminder emails to advisors for approval. Students are currently testing the Transfer Course Approval form and the Independent Study form. More information about this project is outlined here.

Help Desk Chat Support
CIS is always looking for ways to expand on the service we provide faculty, staff, and students! While you can always call, email, or visit the Help Desk, we wanted to integrate another option for users on the go: chat support! Utilizing Google Hangouts, the chat service is currently being designed to provide automated responses and direct users to information for after-hours support. Faculty, staff, and students can also receive real-time support from CIS staff via the chat option. If a response is not received within a specific amount of time, the chat bot will provide an automatic response. Our interns are using programming to develop and deploy the service. You can learn more about the chat bot project here.

HMC Lecture Capture Migration
Many students on campus have taken at least one class that utilizes the Lecture Capture service. Faculty may request semester-long recordings of their lectures and provide them to students. In addition, the service may be used for special presentations, events, and guest lectures throughout the academic year. All recorded media is migrated from MediaSite to an HMC Google Drive maintained by the CIS department. Our students have already successfully archived the 2016 Fall – 2017 Spring academic year! You can find out more about this project here.

Shanahan Center Audio Visual Equipment Checks and Repairs
You may have seen the CIS staff throughout the course of the semester testing classroom equipment in the Shanahan building. Our interns join alongside us during the summer to ensure all equipment is tested and ready to go for the upcoming fall semester. No task is too small – classroom functionality is critical to the success of our faculty and students!

These projects represent only a handful of the responsibilities our interns are taking on this summer. Several other projects will be starting up later this summer and we’re excited to share our progress with you! If you’re interested in learning more, feel free to stop by Sprague this summer! You can always call or email the Help Desk too!