(1169)USE OF THE DUET SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT SYSTEM FORUNIVERSITY-WIDE WEB BASED APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT

摘要

Personnel and organizational changes created an opportunity to improve themanagement of English oral proficiency screening for international graduate students atNorth Carolina State University in the fall of 2007. Opportunities to automate thecoordination of the screening process, which involved repeated administrations of theSPEAK test to approximately 120 students over the course of an academic year, inspireda web-based management system called STARS (SPEAK Test Access and ReportingSystem). The system provided role-sensitive access to information for graduatedepartmental administrators, graduate students taking the SPEAK test, the raters whoscored the test, and the primary screening administrator in the Graduate School. Itcoordinated details from scheduling testing and make-up dates, controlling the labseating based on test-day computer functionality, tracking the test forms used at eachadministration to guard against students sharing test information, to flagging testaverages with too wide a margin between raters. The success of this system motivatedits adaptation to serve as a registration system to handle a new, multi-program initiative inthe Graduate School called Preparing Future Leaders. With significant adaptations, thePreparing Future Leaders Signup And Reporting System (PFLSARS) now servesapproximately 1100 participants per semester, providing students and postdocs withinformation about their past and future event attendance and program administrators withdetailed data about participants’ program affiliations, departments, and degree programs.The development of the software was mode possible using the Duet method ofeducational software development created at the North Carolina State University. Themethod, based on the musical term duet, utilizes two persons as the architects anddesigners of the software: one person who is a content expert and who is technologicallyliterate and another person who has some content knowledge who is the expert inproducing software. A discussion of how using this method provides the most directtranslation of model concepts directly into software code will be provided along with theauthors' experience with two successful uses of the Duet method, the STARS andPFLSARS Web based applications, testing, seminars.