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A web based application that allows OSU advisors to quickly create and edit transfer guides.

According to the OSU transfer page, more than 2000 students come from other schools each year. The proportion of these people in the whole university is about 9%. More and more people are moving from community college to Oregon State University, so advisors need an online tool that can quickly generate OSU course transfer guides based on their needs. Currently, transfer guides are created using Microsoft Word by many different advisors. This leads to transfer guides being inconsistently formatted as well as being frustrating to edit or update.

We worked closely with the Transfer Transitions Coordinator and the Senior Associate Director of Transfer Admissions for our development and feedback.

Our project is a website which OSU advisors will use to generate these transfer guides programmatically, leading to consistent styling and formatting, easier editing, and a central location for existing transfer guides to be accessed from. Advisors will enter details in an editor form, which is saved as data on the server. When a transfer guide is requested in a human-readable format, the server populates a template with the specific data and generates a PDF.

The website uses OSU's Single-Sign-On in conjunction with our own permissions system for authentication of advisors and admin-advisors. Admins are allowed to edit the system and add/remove other users, and any advisor is allowed to use the system (including editing transfer guide data). The website is set to be part of the OSU domain and is hosted on a DreamHost server.

We have completed development of: The transfer guide editor for inputting and changing major-specific transfer details, generator for converting the user inputted data into a readable pdf, hosting of the service on a permanent host, and the OSU SSO authentication system for access and usage of the system.