Virtual Teaching Assistant

1. Virtual Teaching Assistant Project Development Team John Bailey Project Manager Richard Fitzgerald Presenter/Interviewer Adrian Junes Interviewer Paolo Querimit Multimedia Designer Mike Graves Researcher Greg Watson Researcher

2. Product Scope The VTA or Virtual Teaching Assistant is a software application that will aid teachers and students. It is an automated web-based system that allows the user to get the information needed without having to contact the professor in person or via e-mail. It also can save responses from the teacher into a database and allow it to be searched by the rest of the class in order to cut down on the workload of the teacher

3. What it does • It allows students better access to course information by providing a better way in which to search through and view course material • It allows teachers to get more out of email since it can mail students when important course events have occurred automatically • Teachers will not have to answer the same question over and over since the VTA will save teacher responses to be viewed and searched by others

4. What We are Not • We are not replacing the teacher, the teacher still must prepare course material, we simply allow the students to get more out of the material • We are not Lotus Learning space, the class will not be taught directly over the web page, it will be there to assist with the class

5. Product Goals • To have our application successfully work across multiple platforms, both Unix and Windows NT which includes both the VTA server and the client • To have the VTA be supported across all Web browsers, making the product more marketable since users can use it from anywhere • To make our client software package be supported on all operating systems and make the program easily installed and simple to use • To make the VTA server system easy to setup, update and maintain, thus decreasing the need for any extra administrator for the purchasing party

6. General Approach • Managerial Approach • The complete development team meets every two weeks to discuss the project as a whole • individual team members will meet with other members in their group as needed to talk about individual aspects of the product • Inter employee communication will mostly rely on email to deal with minor project issues

7. WorkingApproach • Work environment - Visual studio and MSDN will be installed at work so being much of the work should be completed at the office • Employee’s will have to show their progress at the meetings , thus decreasing the daily stress since constant supervision and monitoring will not be be taking place

8. Business Goals • To market our product towards educational institutions • To come up with a competitive license Agreement, containing a College , Department, and per individual class licensing option • To design are product with with new features and options not found in competing software packages such as Lotus Notes Learning Space

9. Contractual Aspects Items Customers must supply for implementation • Dedicated Internet Connection to for VTA server - At minimum a dedicated T1 connection • A server to run the VTA • For a Windows NT based system at minimum 400 mhz • For a Unix based system at minimum a Sun Ultra 5 • The need for the server is based upon the amount of classes that the VTA will serve

10. Contractual Aspects • A web server needs to be running on the VTA server • For Unix an Apache Web server • For Windows NT and IIS Web server • A mail server is required to incorporate some of the features • A system administrator to maintain the server • (Not Required) A video camera and audio recorder to record class lectures • (Not Required) Voice recognition software to translate lectures • Artisoft Visual voice - price 7,000

11. Web Interface

12. Potential Problems • Key people have gaps between tasks waiting to be assigned work to do • Having the regular English search engine be able to able to handle sentence’s from the user with bad grammar structure