Thoughts on System Design

Site Structure

We will use a parent site (the University Site) and a number of subsites, one for each organizational unit that a course proposal needs to travel through, e.g. a department, a college, a university office or committee. The main reason to choose this structure over a single-site structure is to distribute the administrative workload. For example, the CS department site admin will be responsible for keeping track of who is a CS faculty, who is the CS department chair, and who is in CS IAC.

The subsites can all be on the same level, or we could have two levels where the college subsites are parents to the department subsites. There seems to be no difference in terms of site administration and operation, so we will choose the one that is easier to implement, and right now that appears to be the one-level structure.

Data Storage and Access

All the data, which include all the course proposals, the lists of colleges and departments and so on, will be stored in the parent site.

Workflow