Credit Where Due

I should have mentioned right off the bat that the original work on this project was done at Coker College in preparation for its 2005 SACS reaccreditation. I got permission from the president to rework it as an open source version. Much of that code had to be rewritten, but the design is largly intact. So kudos to Coker and Pres. Dawson for releasing the original code.

SourceForge

I signed up today for a sourceforge project, to provide a home for the source for openIGOR. The only snag is that the IE interface part is NOT open source because it relies on commercial libraries from Ghostwire. They have a registration process that takes a few days, so we'll see what happens.

Icon Flags

On Monday, a review team from SACS will look at our effectiveness plans on the web-based interface that openIGOR derives from. Since we are just this year converting over to a standard format, there's a lot of pain involved (mostly mine) in converting from the old ad hoc reporting methods. So we have hundreds of objectives and not all of them are completed.

I didn't want the SACS folks to have to poke around playing "Where's Waldo?" in order to find what they were looking for, so I thought of a clever way to save them, and me, time. Now when you look at the objectives tree the icons reflect the completion status of the objective. If it's finished (meaning there is text in the Improvements box), the icon appears normally. Otherwise it has a blue line drawn through it. The picture below illustrates.

So now you can tell at a glance who's naughty or nice. I'll be incorporating this into openIGOR too, although I'll let you turn it off if you don't like it. It slows things down a tiny bit since the server has to do more work.

Integrated Goals and Objectives Reporting (IGOR)

openIGOR is an open-source* project that allows a smallish college to organize its documentation related to attaining goals and objectives. It can be found at openIGOR.com.

The current state of code development will be posted on here, along with (I hope) comments from users.

At this point the code is mostly working, but not ready to release. You can play with the bits that work on the website. Just leave a comment here with your email address, and I'll send you the login info.

The code was originally developed by Coker College, and is being further developed for this project.

*Part of the user interface is coded in Actionscript, and relies on third-party libraries. If you want to modify it, you need a license from the vendor (not me). I've worked out a deal with them, and I don't expect it to be very expensive. This is only a small part of the code, and the rest will be released entirely.