Student Tutoring Agency Business Processes

 

The Student Tutoring Agency (STA) is a not-for-profit tutoring organization run on-campus to assist students who need help in first- and second-year courses at OU.  Students can get regular tutoring for a semester or more from volunteer tutors in subjects they are experiencing difficulties with. 

 

Each student is assigned one or more tutors.  A tutor may tutor in one or more courses, but each assignment is for a single course (a tutor may not tutor a specific student in more than one course).  Each assignment consists of several sessions (usually weekly) of about one hour.  Each assignment is reported on by a session report and each assignment is also reported on by an assignment report when the last session is completed. 

 

Here’s the way things work.  Students have to apply for tutoring in the second or third week of classes each semester (fall, winter, S/S).  They do this by filling out an application form with their names, grizz ids, status (1st year, second year), course tutoring requirement (they must be registered in a course to receive tutoring), semester and year, phone number and email address.  A student may be rejected for the following reasons: not eligible (wrong year, not registered in the course requested, incomplete application), no tutor available, tutoring status of “terminated”.  Successful student registration is good only for one semester.  Tutors, too, have to apply (any time) and be approved.  Tutors are accepted only if they are third or fourth year students who have taken the courses they want to tutor in at OU and have received a 3.5 or above (transcript required).  Tutor information includes grizz ids, status, courses offered, phone number and email address.  Tutor information is kept permanently until the tutor notifies the STA that the tutor has graduated. 

 

Approvals of student and tutor applications are performed by the agency officers (agency management processes are not included here).  They have some discretion to make exceptions or to reject tutors or students.  Matches are made on a first-come, first-served basis (matching requests with available tutors) and are also approved by agency officers who might reject a suggested match.   When a match is approved, emails are sent to both student and tutor notifying them of the match with an attached copy of the session report and the assignment report.

 

The session report contains only the grizz ids of the student and the tutor, a date, and a blank space for the tutor to write anything pertaining to the session.  Similarly, the assignment report has the grizz ids, the semester and year.  Each report is sent by the tutor to the STA office and is filed by student grizz id.  STA officers use these reports to determine whether or not to accept prior student-clients and –tutors again.

 

Exercises:

  1. Produce an ERD that tells a story of the entities and their relationships
  2. Create a goal chart for STA activities
  3. Create a context DFD (one “bubble”) showing external actors
  4. Create a level-1 DFD (one bubble for each goal)
  5. Create a level-2 DFD (a set of bubbles for each goal)

For charts, click here (.doc) or here (.ppt)