Over the past month, the deployment process was carried out successfully. The process is now working with the production database, a live demonstration was given on the 19th and a board meeting with the RALC was held on the 23rd with positive feedback from the staff members. However, there are still some minor issues with the production database that need to be investigated.
As of March 29th, we have a working process from attendance input to sending automatic SMS.
The system is now able to respond to changes in student time (attendance input), modify absence level and send automatic text messages accordingly.
Tasks that still need to be done are:
The key attribute in our design is the absence level of a student which will decide the outcome of the entire process. We used finite-state machine approach to demonstrate our design because the process has one key attribute which characterizes each “state” of the process.
Here we have 4 absence levels which change based on the condition whether a student is present or absent. If a student missed a class, the absence level will be incremented and the process will move to the higher state. If the student is present the absence level will reset back to 0 regardless of what state he or she is currently in.
Each state has its own attributes that define the entire process:
We use Salesforce Process to implement our solution. We currently have three processes:
Our design takes attendance data from an external source as input and modifies individual’s absence level. The end result is taking action (resets, invokes 360 SMS or sends email) according to the modified absence level. In order to implement our design, we link the processes together as:
Attendance Check –> Absence Level Update –> Absence Level Check
Attendance Check.
Attendance Level Update.
Absence Level Check.
The Openbook Project Website is now up and running.
After weeks of meetings and investigations, we found a solution on how to send texts through Salesforce!
First off, we decided to get rid of the idea of using an app. The app we were going to use did not fit our specifications, and the ones that do are not within our price range.
We decided to send texts by email. By that, we mean sending an email to the user’s phone which will also send a text. To do that, the email address must have the format (phone#@phonecarrier.com). By using that, we are sending a text to the students without it costing the RALC anything.
-Dante
Also, last month, we visited a class where the RALC teaches classes and I took a photo of the class during a session.
During our research, we found out that Salesforce has a selection of applications that offer users where they can be easily integrated into our system and can send SMS messages. In other words, we don’t have to make our own app!
On the downside, each of the apps cost something, some ranging from $120 for 3 months and some ranging $20 a month, with varying lengths of a free trial. So far, we have narrowed it down to one app called “ClickSend”, which provides and extensive free trial and is cheap enough to where it won’t damage the RALC’s budget.
Since we have narrowed it down, we now have to test it out with a “sandbox” (a simulated environment) to test out how to read the data and trigger the system to send SMS messages.
The problem that the RALC is facing is that they need a faster way to communicate with their staff about the attendance of their students. First, the teacher takes the attendance and sends it to their student coordinator to take notes on who was absent, who then sends those notes to one of their volunteer translators, who will contact the student about their absence. This entire process takes about a week. They want to shorten that length to about a day.
Over the past few months, we have been acquainting ourselves with the platform that they use, Salesforce.
Hello!
This post is just a message to whomever is reading this post. This website is dedicated to marking the progress and setbacks of the Richardson Adult Literacy Center and their collaboration with the University of Texas at Dallas.
-Dante
