CIS: A Web-Based Course Information System

This report surveys the design and implementation of CIS, a web-based Course Information System. CIS has been developed for the Computer Science I/II courses held between 2000 and 2003 by Prof. Dr. R. Loos, which were attended by 300 to 450 students. It maintains and presents each student’s submissions and grades and holds related information such as worksheet texts, submission deadlines and the assignment of students to teaching assistents. In short, it covers most of the administrative data that comes up in regular university courses. CIS is designed to be used by first-year students conveniently. It aims at modelling real-world procedures, so that the system behaviour can be explained in well-known analogies. It is minimalistic, in the sense that it only takes on the routine work, while leaving the teacher free in any questions of structuring the contents of the course. Our problem statement and analysis focuses to two aspects: The requirements on the central data base and the interfaces for three groups of users: Students, teaching assistants, and teachers/administrators. The actual implementation is straightforward, and we only mention particular decisions taken herein. CIS has been in use at the Wilhelm-Schickard Institut for three years, in courses organized both by the authors and others. The experiences indicate that the system can be considered reliable and mature. As the effort of setting up CIS is small, it has become feasible to employ it for several advanced courses with fewer than 20 students.