Matt Refghi

Projects > CAL

CAL is a language center management system that I built with Joseph Pereira (jper...@gmail.com) when we were studying Computer Science at Champlain College. This application was designed to reduce the amount of paper that was being used for everyday managerial tasks. By providing students with a web-based system to use, we are able to track student progress in a centralized location, allowing teachers, monitors, and administrators to access their information.

Students log into the system to start their language center sessions. They then have access to the history of their previous sessions, which allows them to quickly assess how many visits they have accumulated, as well as which exercises were completed.

Monitors have the ability to validate or invalidate student sessions, and they are also able to determine how long a student has been using the system. They also have the ability to write down notes along with each student session, and they can send alert messages, which is a quick and discreet way of notifying students of a misconduct.
Teachers can easily determine how students have been progressing, as well as which exercises they have completed. This information can be organized by course section, faciliating the task of gathering data about a particular class.
Administrators have access to a wealth of features, allowing them to create, delete, and update courses, course sections, exercises, computers, terms, monitors, teachers, students, student sessions, and much more. They also have access to various reports and statistics. For example, one particular feature allows them to see during which hours students visit - with a configurable date range. Another report allows administrators to see how students are performing, per course section.
If you are interested in the CAL system, you need to know that this specific version will not be released for external use. It is currently only available for internal use, exclusive to Champlain College; however, I've been working on the successor to this CAL system, which I will describe below.

CAL v2 *

CAL v2 is the spiritual successor of the CAL system described above. While it is inspired by the original, it is actually a complete re-write - it has a completely new foundation, and should really be seen as a new system - a new product. While the development efforts were previously limited to my free time, recent changes are going to improve that. I will have more time to work towards a CAL v2 release candidate. CAL v2 will be available to the public as a commercial solution.

The differences between the original CAL, and CAL v2 are numerous. I started working on CAL v2 approximately two years after finishing the original, having worked as a software developer since then. It was the added experience of working in software development that lead me to move towards making a re-write of CAL. I indentified numerous areas where I could improve from the original, and proceeded to put my ideas to action - as a new project.

With CAL v2, the main goal is to produce a strong, flexible core that could be re-used to power multiple applications. This design means that the core will need to be both secure, and performant. As such, this is where most of the development time has been spent so far - security and performance - the internals. Despite this fact, more time has recently been invested in the visual aspects of the application. I've spent a good deal of time designing each page, all with the goal of having intuitive controls, and a clean interface. I'll post an early screenshot of one of these pages in the near future.

This section describes a product in development. Details are likely to change, so check back soon for updates and some early screenshots.

*This is a codename. The official name has not yet been determined.

Information

For more information about these projects, please contact mref...@gmail.com