OAT is a university-wide suite of tools and an underlying database that provides authorized users and projects with access to student records, class information, bulk communications, and more.
The OAT database and access to it is overseen by the OAT Management Board, a committee struck by the dean of Mathematics and composed of representatives from across campus.
Purpose
To enable faculty and staff to be more efficient in executing administrative and academic tasks by provisioning helpful tools and allowing development of such tools across the University community.
OAT is sponsored by the dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and the School of Computer Science.
Existing tools based on OAT
- Advisor Student Information System (ASIS) - an interactive tool designed for academic advisors and other relevant staff to quickly access a student record and record notes on their interactions with students
-
Canned
Queries
-
recurring
routine
academic
queries
on
demand.
Examples:
- "List of all students in each faculty plan over time"
- "List of students with standing X in plan Y"
- "Enrolment, caps, and room capacity"
- Bulk Mail – sending customized email to students selected with a database query
- Forms – collecting data from authenticated students so we can avoid asking things we already know and have stored in the database
- Photo class lists
- A scheduling visualization tool
- Virtual queues to see advisors
In addition, OAT supplies the data to other tools such as Evaluate.
Rules for access
Access to OAT differs for users of applications and the applications themselves.
Potential users should be in touch with their closest relevant manager. Analysts and application developers should be in touch with the chair of the OAT Management Board (currently Marek Stasna) or OAT’s primary developer, Byron Weber Becker.
Example OAT Access Projects
Some examples of projects that will or do use the OAT database:
- Student account provisioning – Academic IT personnel can use information from OAT to create and allocate computing resources according to the classes they are taking.
- Evaluate – A tool for evaluating courses offered at UW that derives the required student data from OAT, supplementing that with data it collects and maintains in its own database.
- EngAdvisor – An advising tool to determine progress within Engineering plans. It accesses just-in-time student data from OAT via web services.
- Math Faculty Data Analysis – The Math Faculty has had a data scientist on staff that accesses data in OAT using ad hoc queries to help make data-informed policy decisions.
- Exam Management System – A Math-developed system to manage examinations. It is a system independent of OAT but built on the same database.