Details

• Saru was our semester project at Babaria Institute of Technology (BIT) in fall of 2006.
• Starting out as just a discussion platform, we found it useful to extend the set of features to be usable for all the classes and departments of our college.
• Saru is tailored for universities in India where each university (e.g. Gujarat University) has many colleges (e.g. Babaria Institute of Technology), each college has many departments (Computer Engineering) and each department is divided into semesters (mostly 8).
• Each department in the college has a set of faculty members (e.g. Hiren Pandya) and a Head of the Department (e.g. S. K. Agrawal).
• The semesters for each department have a set number of classes or subjects that are offered and are mostly mandatory. The department assigns the subject to faculty members on the basis of their experience and expertise. Students move to the next semester when they pass the subjects offered in that semester.

Faculty Members

Faculty members are assigned to teach one or more subjects across various semesters throughout the department.

Features

• Personal Profile.
• Conduct and grade tests.
• Keep track of students' scores in the tests and see who needs more attention.
• Post questions or discussions as a part of the class. This allows to check the understanding of the subject among students or to promote students to explore more about the topics.
• Make important announcements to the class.
• Questions have a period during which they are active. After the active period ends all the answers are visible to all students.
• Post an ideal answer or correct answer to the question which would be visible to students after question becomes inactive.

Information available

• Number of colleges, departments, students and other faculty members they are connected to
• The subjects they are assigned to
• Students for each subject.
• Student scores
• List of active questions and inactive questions for each subject
• List of questions that have answers not evaluated by them
• List of active discussions and announcements

Students

Students are subscribed to the subjects they are going to study in their current semester.

Features

• Personal profile
• Score for each subject
• Answer a question during its active period
• Look at other students' responses and the ideal answer after the active period ends
• Post a discussion or comment in an ongoing discussion

Information available

• Number of colleges, departments, students and other faculty members they are connected to
• Subjects they are subscribed to
• List of active questions and inactive questions for each subject
• List of questions they have not answered yet
• Activity period and maximum score for each question
• List of active discussions and announcements
• The number of students ahead of them or behind them when scores are compared e.g. 30 < rutvij < 16

Moderators

Moderators are faculty members with administration privileges. Each college has a super-moderator who creates other moderators and assigns specific privileges to them.

Features

• Give moderator rights to other faculty members
• Block users
• Reset passwords
• At the end of semester, move students that have passed to the next semester.
• Create, edit or delete
• Departments
• Subjects
• Students
• Faculty members
• Questions, comments, discussion topics or announcements