Team Name
School of Social Work Team
Timeline
Fall 2022 – Summer 2022
Students
- Anmol Shrestha
- Dinesh Bhandari
- Michael McKelway Stokes
- Mohammed Hasibul Alam
- Melanie Emily Martinez
Sponsor
UTA School of Social Work
Abstract
Smart Placement is a web application for the School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Arlington. The application is meant to streamline the field education process that students in the School of Social Work must complete in order to graduate. The application will be used by different users such as students, administrators, and agencies. Students will use the system to apply, be assigned, track timesheets, complete weekly supervision logs, and review evaluations. Administrators will use the system to manage agencies, place students, and view all information on students and agencies. While lastly, agencies will use the system to register, request students, assign field instructors, check timesheets and evaluate students. After the completion of the project, it will be in the hands of the School of Social Work to do as they wish with the project.
Background
The School of Social Work needs a web application that is able to aid them in placing social work students into field work with third-party agencies. The system they are currently using is known as “InPlace smart place solutions”, but it is not entirely meeting their needs. InPlace had also promised it would fulfill their needs by the second to the third semester of use but that time has long passed and they still have not. The other systems previously used besides InPlace could not pull student information from MyMav, which is key to easy placement of the students. The actions and features of the previous systems and InPlace are also limited, so they need a better solution. There are 3 main user types that would need access to the application: Administrators, Students, and Third Party Agencies. Currently, the field advisors that handle most of the placing for students mention that there are multiple features that do not work accurately in InPlace, so they must do the task manually which hinders the placement process. They also mention that a lot of the information being displayed in InPlace is unnecessary and just makes the pages feel more cluttered than it needs to be. The verbiage used in InPlace does not match what they use outside of it so that causes confusion among the users. The field advisors also dislike the amount of clicking and moving through pages it takes to do a simple task that could be done much faster if it was condensed down. Overall from the field advisor’s view, many things in InPlace could be discarded or altered to be more user-friendly. The third-party agencies that the students are being placed at have also complained about the non-user-friendly experience of using Inplace. This impedes the placement process since the field advisors must then explain how to use Inplace when the application could just be a bit more intuitive. Students are currently left out of the loop with InPlace when it comes to their applications. If the students could be provided with the status of their application, they would no longer need to ask their field advisor whether or not the application was received and approved, and would benefit the field advisors by not having to answer too many student emails. All of the InPlace users are negatively impacted by its inadequate features and non-intuitive design. So much work and time would be saved if our team were able to provide the School of Social Work with an application that fits their specific needs. The School of Social Work talked with the director of senior design, Dr. McMurrough and he thought it was possible to get a few senior design teams that could work with them and possibly meet all their needs. All these reasons lead to why the School of Social Work is currently looking to us to help them. We can provide them with an application that works seamlessly with MyMav and provides a user-friendly experience for all users in the student field work placement process.
Project Requirements
- Allow admins to view all information on students and agencies
- Allow admins to match and place students at agencies
- Allow agencies to apply and request students
- Allow agencies to assign field instructors to students
- Allow field instructors to check timesheets and complete student evaluations
- Allow students to complete and submit an application to be placed at an agency
- Provide students with a status update for each step completed
- Allow students to complete forms and evaluations (i.e. Learning Contract, student evaluation)
- Allow students to see their evaluations from their Field Instructor (i.e. midterm evaluation and final evaluation)
- Allow students to track their time and weekly supervision
- Download student information from MyMav
System Overview
The system consists of mainly three layers, students, agencies, and administrators. These layers are interconnected with each other in different ways. Like students need administrators to place them in agencies and administrators need students to fill out an application. Those layers are connected to each other by database and cloud APIs. Each of them has its own sub-systems.
Results
The current system is connected to Azure and we have implemented the basic requirements of the project. The application has a login and sign-up page. After the user creates an account and logs in to their respective role they will be taken to a homepage. The homepage includes space for important notifications and a navigation bar at the top. With the current application, students can fill out an application to be placed for admins to view and approve/reject for matching. Admins can also approve/reject agencies after they have filled out an application. If an agency is approved they can request students and from there, admins can start matching students based on their preferred field of interest that they put in their application. This all can be seen in our demo video below:
Future Work
The Smart Placement application is currently incomplete and is just in the starting stages of the project. It was mentioned before we began this project that it would take 3 or more senior design teams in order to complete it. At the present time, there is already a new team that will take lead for next semester. The system still lacks some core features such as timesheet setup and document management that can be done promptly. Other functions of the application will be harder to tackle such as retrieving student data from MyMav. This part of the application since will need efforts made by OIT and Student Accounts to function properly but will be worked on in the future.
Project Files
Project Charter (link)
System Requirements Specification (link)
Architectural Design Specification (link)
Detailed Design Specification (link)
Poster (link)
