I am presently having difficulty sleeping, so I thought I would take a look at GITI and see what has been bothering me about it lately. Not seeing any immediate problem that would nag at me the way I have been feeling recently, I decided to diagram. First, I diagramed what GITI represents under its educational umbrella.

Then I took a look at what it presently does in the interface and how things feel in general.

There seems to be a discrepancy in what GITI is supposed to be vs. what it feels like. I am starting to believe that GITI has grown in reverse. Its educational aspects were designed to handle assignments, more specifically, homework, a simple “to do” type interface that also tracked a few grades. In making revisions to reach the 1.0 milestone GITI it also recieved basic ability to handle other assignment types as well as begin to understand the concept of a course (and not have it hard coded). GITI was written during my junior and senior years in high school, simple 1 school, with about 8 classes to manage per year. That concept was broken with my admission to UNCC. Once that happend, I simply added institutional name as a special field to the records for each class, no big deal I thought. Once progressing to there, I added semesters as well.

Now things have reached current state, there are multiple schools, multiple semesters, muliple users (not all of whom were involved in GITI’s creation and therefore may have difficulty using some of my abstract creations) and multiple problems. With distance education and the invention of flex-classes there is a new dimmension of “stuff” that GITI simply does not get. The biggest problem is that GITI simply is too bulky and confusing with all of its new features. I have simply been adding new things to the old things and there has been no rearranging or reorganization to accomodate new things, and more importantly, old code has not been properly been blow out of the interface yet. GITI is in a crucial time and I must address these problems or have all users (including myself) suffering through the chaos that is left. At present, GITI makes no assumptions, but expects its users to assume what it will do.

In general, things are not as bad as they seem, but there are things that used to be no big deal that are a crucial part of course/assignment management that are no longer efficient or useful in their tasks. Sadly, I have allowed the Education and Classes systems to functional independantly for too long. It is time to bring the two brothers back to the same house and not in the house of the red headed step-brothers (remember SCHEDULE and TODO?). Too many parts of the interface treat them seperately. They are the same module now, and not just by name, but by function. In addition, there are some really horrid things left in GITI that need to be cleaned and updated (Class Edit comes to mind). Some new features will also make GITI feel more like home again (bulk add/edit for assignments).

• School 1
  • Semester 2008FA
    • Course A
    • Course B
      • Assignment 1
      • Assignment 2
        • Document Alpha
        • Document Beta
  • Semester 2009SP
• School 2