Outline Course Repository Project

The Outline.uwaterloo.ca project (henceforth referred to as simply Outline) is a locally-developed digital course outline repository. 

Among other features, the project intends to satisfy the following requirements: 

1. Provide an intuitive interface for instructors to author course outlines which are consistent, accessible, and directly correlated to quest data 

2. Provide students with a method to view current and past course outlines published on the platform 

3. Provide faculty administrators with a repository of course outlines, as well as the ability to influence or directly manage course outline content 

4. Act as a query-able database of key outline data, such as learning outcomes, required materials, and grading schemes 

Development 

Outline is developed and maintained by Science Computing. The project was initialized in 2017 in partnership with the Faculty of Math, who provided co-op funding and worked closely with us on project specifications and deployment. 

After initial usage and user feedback, a more user-oriented redesign was implemented in 2018 which has had a positive reception and seen increased user adoption. 

The Science Computing Development team consists of two full-time developers, and is responsible for maintaining and supporting other pieces of software adopted cross-faculty on campus. Notable examples are the campus-adopted course evaluation system (Evaluate), lab-safety platform (Safely) and digital signage solution (Scinage). 

Some of these projects have been in production for 7+ years, and are still fully supported by our team. 

Science Computing's development attempts to follow a design philosophy which maximizes usability, discoverability, and intuitiveness to minimize the amount of support tickets generated by each of our projects. Through this, our team is able to provide support for our entire catalog of software. 

Usage 

Outline does not currently restrict any faculty member from using the software, and any registered instructor in Quest is able to log in and author course outlines for the courses they teach, regardless of official faculty adoption. 

Faculties can request administrative privileges for their undergraduate administrators and associate deans, adding management and tracking capabilities to course outlines.

This Wiki serves as a general purpose guide for the trickier aspects of the software. For basic usage (course outlines for a single section or multiple sections taught by the same instructor), most instructors should be able to log in and get started without a manual! 

Support 

Support for Outline is provided directly by Science Computing developers, as well as by liaisons and administrators in respective faculties. For technical support or to report bugs, contact the lead developer Mirko Vucicevich.

As part of our effort to support the whole campus, we ensure that each participating faculty has: 

1. A key administrator staff member to work directly with us. This person will usually act as a go-between with the Science Computing team and users within their faculty. They receive direct training from our developers and will generally be able to handle Tier-one questions and have elevated access within the software. 2

2.  (When possible) a developer liaison capable of understanding the codebase. These individuals are given direct access to the Outline source code, and are able to work directly on the project or review changes when needed.  

Critical or security-related bugs are always dealt with ASAP directly by Science Computing, and we have an excellent track record of user and administrator support with our other cross-campus software. 

We have been working directly with the associate deans of undergraduate studies in participating faculties to ensure smooth adoption, feature addition, and user migration. 

Long Term Support 

Science computing intends to run the software with full developer focus for a minimum of the next 5 years (2026), meaning the software can expect impactful feature updates and upgrades for at least this amount of time. Barring radical changes to the underlying QUEST data and APIs, the software would be able to run indefinitely after that without full-time developer focus (support only). The software has also been designed to be able to easily re-implement the underlying data interface to account for a potential shift away from QUEST or to a new QUEST API in the future. 

At this time, we have 2 full-time developers in Science Computing capable of providing direct support to the software, as well as a developer in Math’s computing facilities, and will be working closely with the developer of the third faculty we are in the process of onboarding to ensure long-term supportability. 

As the outline repository provided by the platform will contain important documents to faculty members and students, we are working to ensure all faculties utilising the software are not “locked in” to the platform, and have options available if moving away from the platform is ever necessary: 

• Outline will provide faculties with the ability to export all their course outlines to local files, ensuring an easy escape hatch in the case of a faculty deciding to move to other platforms. 

• We will be ensuring that developer liaisons from other faculties are capable of "forking" the current running instance of **Outline**, as well as relevant data from backups, in order to run a separate instance in the case that the science opts to no longer support the software directly.