Virtual Teaching Assistant

1
Virtual Teaching Assistant

• Project Development Team
• John Bailey Project Manager
• Richard Fitzgerald Presenter/Interviewer
• Adrian Junes Interviewer
• Paolo Querimit Multimedia Designer
• Mike Graves Researcher
• Greg Watson Researcher

2
Product Scope

• The VTA or Virtual Teaching Assistant is a
  software application that will aid teachers and
  students. It is an automated web-based system
  that allows the user to get the information
  needed without having to contact the professor in
  person or via e-mail. It also can save responses
  from the teacher into a database and allow it to
  be searched by the rest of the class in order to
  cut down on the workload of the teacher

3
What it does

• It allows students better access to course
  information by providing a better way in which to
  search through and view course material
  
• It allows teachers to get more out of email since
  it can mail students when important course events
  have occurred automatically
• Teachers will not have to answer the same
  question over and over since the VTA will save
  teacher responses to be viewed and searched by
  others

4
What We are Not

• We are not replacing the teacher, the teacher
  still must prepare course material, we simply
  allow the students to get more out of the
  material
• We are not Lotus Learning space, the class will
  not be taught directly over the web page, it will
  be there to assist with the class

5
Product Goals

• To have our application successfully work across
  multiple platforms, both Unix and Windows NT
  which includes both the VTA server and the client
• To have the VTA be supported across all Web
  browsers, making the product more marketable
  since users can use it from anywhere
• To make our client software package be supported
  on all operating systems and make the program
  easily installed and simple to use
• To make the VTA server system easy to setup,
  update and maintain, thus decreasing the need for
  any extra administrator for the purchasing party

6
General Approach

• Managerial Approach
• The complete development team meets every two
  weeks to discuss the project as a whole
• individual team members will meet with other
  members in their group as needed to talk about
  individual aspects of the product
• Inter employee communication will mostly rely on
  email to deal with minor project issues

7
Working Approach

• Work environment - Visual studio and MSDN will be
  installed at work so being much of the work
  should be completed at the office
• Employees will have to show their progress at
  the meetings , thus decreasing the daily stress
  since constant supervision and monitoring will
  not be be taking place

8
Business Goals

• To market our product towards educational
  institutions
• To come up with a competitive license Agreement,
  containing a College , Department, and per
  individual class licensing option
• To design are product with with new features and
  options not found in competing software packages
  such as Lotus Notes Learning Space

9
Contractual Aspects

• Items Customers must supply for implementation
• Dedicated Internet Connection to for VTA server
• - At minimum a dedicated T1 connection
• A server to run the VTA
• For a Windows NT based system at minimum 400 mhz
• For a Unix based system at minimum a Sun Ultra 5
• The need for the server is based upon the amount
  of classes that the VTA will serve

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Contractual Aspects

• A web server needs to be running on the VTA
  server
• For Unix an Apache Web server
• For Windows NT and IIS Web server
• A mail server is required to incorporate some of
  the features
• A system administrator to maintain the server
• (Not Required) A video camera and audio recorder
  to record class lectures
• (Not Required) Voice recognition software to
  translate lectures
• Artisoft Visual voice - price 7,000

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Web Interface
12
Potential Problems

• Key people have gaps between tasks waiting to be
  assigned work to do
• Having the regular English search engine be able
  to able to handle sentences from the user with
  bad grammar structure