Don Goral

Motivating Issues
I teach four web-based mathematics courses a semester, through the Extended Learning Institute (ELI), with over 100 currently enrolled students each semester. There is continuous registration, and many students continue working for more than one semester. ELI policy allows any student who has completed half of the coursework by the end-of-enrollment date to request an Incomplete and a 4-month extension. Thus, students are starting and stopping at individual times.

My own course format involves sending quizzes to students by e-mail. I give each student 4 days to return each quiz, so I wish to record the date out, date due, date in, and grade. I also record the dates and scores for midterm exams and final exams.

I must also keep track of the start date, withdrawal date, and end-of-enrollment date for each student.

I prefer to have immediate access to this data, in convenient form, when I am grading quizzes and exams offline and when I am communcating with students online.

Using a database program for dynamic record keeping
Previously I had experience using spreadsheets to maintain grades for campus courses, but a spreadsheet does not have a convenient way for isolating a single record, that is, the data pertaining to a single student. I found the features I was seeking in Access, a database program. 

I taught myself how to use Access while designed a database customized for my needs. I constructed a table that contains one row of data for each student in all of my ELI classes. Then, I constructed a form that selects the data for one student at a time. Finally, I am designing a printed record which can replace the log sheets currently used to record the grades of ELI students.

Either offline or online, I can quickly locate a desired form to check on the status of a student and to update records. The entire database for three semesters is about 360 KB and fits easily on a floppy diskette. I use this diskette to update my database on my home computer and campus office computer, and I have a further backup on a zip disk.

The major bottleneck is that I must manually input the original information for each new student. Currently there is no easy way to download registration information, including new registrations and drops, directly from the NVCC computer to my database.