About Project

Petition-Pronto is expected to be used by students and faculty at Allegheny Collge during the 2019-2020 academic year. Petition-Pronto is a website where students can fill out a form with their information to submit a petition to a specified academic department's faculty. Students could write their petitions to change, for instance, their graduation requirements or substitute one class in the place of another. Once the form is submitted, when faculty members of the specified department login to the website, they will see it appear in the unreviewed petitions section of the homepage for logged in users. They can then click on an "Inspect" button that resides next to the basic petition information, which will display more detailed petition information along with the petition text itself. On this page, they can then approve or disprove the petition. Once the petition is reviewed by all the department's faculty members, an email will be sent to the students and faculty members who reviewed the petition, letting them know the result (whether it was approved or not) of the petition voting.

This tool will greatly improve upon the current petition process, where students must email their petition to a faculty member and wait till all the faculty members meet to vote on the petition or respond to the email. The student then has to follow up with the faculty if they don't remember to let them know the result of the petition voting. Now, everything can be done online and the student will be let know of the petition voting decision as soon as possible. This will make this educational process much more efficient at Allegheny.

Petition-Pronto will be apart of a suite of tools created by the GatorEducator organization on GitHub. This suite of tools will be used for the enhancement of the education experience at Allegheny College. Within this suite of tools, there are several similarly-minded tools being developed by other groups. These tools include a Course Survey tool, which allows students to share their concerns about a course to the instructor, an Academic Advising tool, to improve the communication between student and advisor, and an Interactive Quiz tool, which will allow instructors to create more customized quizzes for their students. Additionally, an Institutional Review Board Checklist tool is being developed which will allow students to get their proposals reviewed by the College's IRB. These tools will join GatorEducator's GatorGrader tool that is in use at Allegheny College and which automatically checks the work of student programmer and writers.