Student Online Record Management

SUMMARY

STORM is a database system designed for large courses and laboratories. It maintains student marks and section/group assignments. It has been used since about 1995 for undergraduate courses at the University of Toronto; these course have enrollments of up to 1000 or more. Access to the database is via the web.

Typically, each individual course has its own database under STORM. There are three classes of users of each STORM database:

• Administrator: This person, often the course coordinator, has overall control of the course database. About 25 different utilities are available for manipulating the database contents.
• TA: These are the teaching assistants in the course. If authorised by the administrator, they may enter designated marks for their students. They may also produce reports on their students.
• Student: The students may view their marks if authorised by the administrator. They may also check their section/group assignments and, if authorised by the administrator, may sign-up for or change their section/group assignment.

STORM is written in Perl; the version of Perl must be at least 5.0. It requires a number of pieces which are not included in the distribution. These include MySQL as the database engine, and the Apache web server compiled with mod_auth_mysql. It also requires the following Perl modules which are not included in the distribution:

• Class::MethodMaker
• DBI and DBD::mysql
• GD.pm, GDGraph, and GDTextUtil
• Statistics::Descriptive

The documentation included in the STORM distribution includes information on how to acquire and install all of the above non-distributed pieces.

The University of Toronto funded much of the early development of STORM and holds the copyright. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License, a copy of which is available here.

The following screen shots, shown in a separate window, are available:

• Part of the Administrator Main Page
• Administrator Mark Statistics Page
• TA Bulk Mark Entry Form
• Form Used by Students to Check Their Section/Group Assignments

STORM runs under GNU/Linux or UNIX. In principle other operating systems are possible but totally untried.

Although the distribution includes lengthy documentation on porting STORM to a new environment, some familiarity with Perl and UNIX or GNU/Linux is good to have; of course you can also use this as an opportunity to achieve such familiarity. Assuming none of the non-included pieces are yet installed on your computer, the port may take up to a day to complete.

DOWNLOAD

README-2.02 (1.7k)

STORM-2.02.tar.gz (288k)

ChangeLog (5.6k)

PEOPLE

The principal maintainer of STORM is David M. Harrison, Department of Physics, University of Toronto, mailto:harrison@physics.utoronto.ca.

Other people who have contributed to the design and/or implementation include:

• Anne Cordon, Department of Botany, University of Toronto.
• Solomon Douglas, University of Toronto.
• Milan Milicic, University of Toronto.
• Andrew Pavacic, University of Toronto.
• John Pitre, Department of Physics, University of Toronto.
• Chris Teplovs, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.

We hope that you will contribute and get your name on the above list.

This document was written by David M. Harrison, July 2001.
This is $Revision: 2.2 $, $Date: 2002/05/30 13:38:02 $ (y/m/d UTC).