NCI Placement 360: Technical Report

NCI Placement 360 is a responsive web application designed for National College of Ireland (NCI) students, faculty of NCI and employers who work within NCI to evaluate students during internships. It allows students and managers to enter their monthly reports, enter in skills used throughout their internship, complete final year evaluations and make contact with their contact point from NCI. The application allows students and employers to enter data into the application, which is then shown in a visual chart dashboard. NCI can then use this data to update curriculums and adequately prepare students upon graduation. This data can be mined directly from the application and visualised using various chart frameworks dynamically. In order to encourage users to enter skills into the web app, gamification is integrated directly into Placement 360 for students. Elements of gamification include a progress circle showing how many entries they’ve made towards 100 total entries, badges on their dashboard and a “trophy case” displaying the user’s currently collected badges. Recently, mobile internet traffic overtook desktop traffic. This is a big milestone and when you take just younger demographics into account, this percentage would be even higher. With this trend in mind, NCI’s student offerings were looked at. The online portal, MyNCIStudent, isn’t mobile responsive. Unless it’s viewed on Internet Explorer, users can’t scroll down the page. This is ineffective given that the majority of users of this portal don’t use Internet Explorer and a large number of students want to access this system on their smartphones. If students and employers use Placement 360 to fill in their monthly reports instead of the paper method, it will save time for both parties but above all provide a visual representation in a 360 degree angle. The graphs section allows the School of Computing to stay as up to date as possible in its course content. When looking at implementation, a responsive web app seemed like the most effective option. After researching Placement 360 as a mobile app, it seemed ineffective due to users having multiple different mobile operating systems, which would require multiple native apps for full coverage. Placement 360 also needs to be available on desktop so a responsive web app was the best option.