Case study

Effort Tracking: from Google Spreadsheets to a school web app

Robin Nagy, director of Effort Tracking, had an eight-year process for measuring student effort (motivation and character). CoSource designed the backend database and a web frontend.

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Customer

Effort Tracking

Industry

Education

Business problem

Schools wanted effort as well as academic results

Solution

Vue single-page app, ASP.NET Core, SQL Server, hosted on Azure

Outcome

Teachers had greater insights. The platform is already used by several schools.

Website

www.efforttracking.com

Background

For eight years, Robin Nagy developed a process for measuring and tracking student effort, to improve motivation for learning and character growth. It started in Google Spreadsheets. He asked CoSource to design the backend database and build a web frontend.

The three users of the platform are school administrators, teachers, and students.

Challenge

Schools wanted to see effort alongside academic results, so they had a more complete view of a student.

  • Database design: students, teachers, classes, reporting periods, and scores
  • A usable interface
  • Security for student and teacher data
  • Concurrent grading by hundreds of students and teachers at the same time

Solution

A single-page web application.

Stack: Vue SPA, ASP.NET Core with EF Core, SQL Server, Azure DevOps for CI/CD, hosted on Azure so it can scale with users.

School administrators

  • Import and export
  • Set up teachers, classes, and students
  • Define reporting periods
  • Reminders for students to complete grading
  • Define the effort-tracking metrics

Teachers

For each reporting period, teachers grade students on configurable metrics and scale.

  • Class list, with students
  • Ungraded classes highlighted
  • Summaries from prior periods, including what students entered

Students

  • Current-period grading UI: it needed to look good
  • A dashboard with an overall score and a breakdown

Results

Teachers had greater insights into their students. The platform is already used by several schools. Feedback from school users has been positive.

Simple design and very user friendly.
This website is a significantly better alternative to the previous system.
Really liking the new updates for effort tracking. Much easier to use for all the students.

More about the product: www.efforttracking.com

Technology stack

  • Vue: single-page frontend
  • ASP.NET Core + EF Core: web API and data access
  • SQL Server: database
  • Azure DevOps: CI/CD
  • Azure: hosting, scale with users

Talk through a line-of-business web app

Thirty minutes. Bring a URL or a sentence about the process still living in a spreadsheet. We will tell you whether a web frontend and a real database is the job.

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