Smart Placement – CSE Senior Design

Team Name

Smart Placement Team
Fantastic V

Timeline

Fall 2022 – Spring 2023

Students

Abhay Dere
Miguel Leal
Bryson Neel
Saurav Sah
Deependra Thakur

Syed Ali
Tony Kha
Julie Le
Nehemie Mampaka
Johnny Nguyen

Sponsor

UT Arlington – School of Social Work

Abstract

In order to graduate, students belonging to the University of Texas at Arlington’s School of Social Work must complete fieldwork with a third-party agency in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Smart Placement is a web application that has been developed to facilitate the process of matching students with agencies for the required fieldwork as well as to track the course of the students’ fieldwork. The web application will cater to the needs of four types of users: administrators, agencies, field instructors, and students.

Background

The School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Arlington currently uses a web application called InPlace for their placement process and supervision of the students’ fieldwork. However, this system has been met with many complaints and dissatisfaction such as being too cluttered, non-intuitive, and tedious to navigate for even the simplest of tasks. Furthermore, it lacks core features that are required by the customer, such as the lack of status updates regarding applications for certain users. Because InPlace has failed to meet the customer’s needs time and time again, Smart Placement has been sponsored by the customer to replace their current system.

Smart Placement aims to simplify the placement process and the course of the students’ fieldwork for all users. Agencies can request students for placement with their desired requirements specified, and students can submit an application for agencies based on their top three areas of interest. An administrator will match a student with an agency that best fits both the student’s and agency’s interests and requirements using the algorithm implemented by the web application. Students will submit necessary documents and undergo interviews with their matched agency before the placement is finalized. Students can record timesheets and daily logs while field instructors can evaluate them, give them feedback, and grade their reports.

Previous Senior Design teams developed a baseline version of the web application during past semesters. The main features included agency application, student application, and student placement. Our teams have updated the web application to include more features, improved UI, and greater stability.

Project Requirements

Allow admins to match a student with an agency
Allow students to upload important documents required for fieldwork
Allow students to submit their timesheets
Allow field instructors to view and evaluate students’ timesheets
Allow agencies to approve or deny field instructors
Allow agencies to assign field instructors to students
Notify users regarding essential updates such as approvals and placement
Allow users to clear notifications
Allow users to reset their password
Fix bugs from the previous senior design team’s code

System Overview

Four layers constitute the system: agencies, field instructors, students, and administrators. Each layer has its own subsystems, and each layer sends and receives data via the database as well as the cloud APIs.

Results

The entire user interface has been updated with stylings and components from Material-UI for a cleaner and more modern look and feel. Many minor and major bugs were fixed as well, such as correcting typos on the forms and fixing the feature that matches a student with an agency. New features have also been developed like timesheets, notifications, password resets, and approving/denying/assigning field instructors. Details of our results are further explained in the demo videos below.

Demo (link)

Future Work

Because there was no response or guidance from the sponsor, there is much to be developed and improved upon in the future that the new senior design team can work on. For instance, access to MyMav to fetch student data still needs to be granted. Validation also needs to be added in order to ensure that the third-party agency is in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Other features that need to be added or improved upon are the automatic student report generator, user-switching functionality, contracts between the agency and administrators, and input validation. The website will also need to be redeployed using a new external database.