Tutortrac 4.0

As I think about my experience with Tutortrac, I wonder if at some point all of this activity has become about collecting data for its own sake rather than for the sake of making informed and purposeful decisions.  I wonder as well if Redrock software does a robust enough job of empowering users by routinizing the tedious and difficult task of turning data into information. [ignore the code] [database][inumbers]

For example, when students check out of our center they are given the opportunity to answer three questions, were you satisfied with your visit, are you planning to return, may we contact you about your responses.  This information is time sensitive and therefore should be easy to access, perhaps displayed on an administrator dashboard with other key metrics available upon login, it should be displayed both numerically and/or graphically depending on user pre-selection, and be tweakable by date, tutor, range, etc.  Since we are interested in actionable information some means for comparison over time and across tutors should be possible. [Google Analytics]   Perhaps also a means for having the program flag occurrences that fall within a certain threshold.  This information should be printable and be easily exportable in industry standard formats such as Word, Excel, and XML.

The point of the above requirements is that the application should be scripted to provide relevant information at the moment when that information would be most useful and to do so without an overwhelming amount of clerical intervention from the user.

This focus on actionable information should be the goal for upgrading Tutortrac, as really very fundamental questions such as which students am I seeing today or how many students are presently in the center require far more effort than necessary to locate and attention to interpret.  In essence the application redistributes tedious tasks rather than removing them altogether, which afterall was the great promise of computerization.

Yet despite these objections, I still think this application worthy of the attention that it will take to make it a better product, if nothing more than there are few viable options.  But, this is a 14 year old application and by any recognizable standard that should be sufficient time for it to have developed into its maturity  complete with the functions that are  standard for a modern internet based product and given the cost, reasonable to expect.

I’m hoping that with this upgrade Redrock Software will deliver on the promise of Tutortrac, that they will do what Steve Jobs famously criticized Microsoft for not doing.  That they will use this opportunity to push to be the sector leader in bringing truly innovative products to their customers.  I’m hoping that Tutortrac 4.0 will be both an evolution and a bold and forthright step into the 21st century.

Meeting Planner & Timesaver

Just discovered this web application, Diarised, that allows you to arrange a few meeting times, enter an email list of potential attendees, and invite them to indicate their availability.  Log into their website to see who can make it when and to confirm the best times all in one shot.  This saves countless emails and return calls.  Diarised is cost free and requires no registration.  Tried it and it couldn’t have been easier.

Not coming to a theatre near you

Am currently working on a new tutorial that I believe will give our students more direction on how to use our online services.  The number of applications used to produce this under four minutes epic is remarkable.  You can see the finished product on our Tutortrac page.

Screenflow (MAC) – screen capture

Mousepose 3 (MAC) – cursor highlighting

Canon Powershot A520 – live video capture

iPhoto ’09 (MAC) – live video downloading

iMovie ’09 (MAC) – video editing

Camtasia Studio 6 (PC) – video annotations

Quicktime Pro (MAC) – video conversions

Flowplayer (web app) – video embedding

JW Player (web app) – video embedding

Tutortrac database design

Tutortrac’s database setup is interesting.  There is only one database of students and this database gets updated each time there is an upload.  What this means is that individual semesters aren’t repositories of snapshot data.  For example, you can’t go back six years, say, to find out how many freshmen came to your center.  Why?  Because all of the freshmen have now graduated and they are no longer freshmen.  For this reason, you cannot do trend analysis on key metrics without having saved each semester’s data outside of Tutortrac.  No one would think to do this as this peculiar behavior is not widely publicized and unless you’re a database expert it’s unlikely that you’d ask.  This is not a feature.  It was a poor design decision that speaks to the disconnect between what users need and what RedRock is prepared to deliver.  Certainly there should be more documentation available and perhaps popup notification every time that an upload is attempted.  There should also be a one click function for exporting the database into some separate repository where it can be easily accessed when needed.