IT Center Blog

Source: Freepik

The application “Submission of Final final Theses” (DivA) is a project of the PDSL department (Process Suppport and Digitization of Studies and Teaching) of the IT Center in cooperation with the Central University Administration. The application is being developed with the aim of providing students, examiners, and not least the Central Examination Office (ZPA) with an accessible and intuitive way to facilitate the submission of theses.

What are the key features?

The “Submission of Final Theses” (DivA) application provides an accessible and intuitive way to facilitate the submission of theses. After registration with the Central Examination Office (ZPA), students see another tile on their desktop where they can not only view all the details of their thesis such as title, supervisor, submission deadline but also begin uploading files. Students can

Source: RWTH Aachen

upload their thesis as many times as they want. The last uploaded version becomes the “valid” version, while previous versions remain as a “backup”. Once satisfied with the uploaded version, students can click on “Submit” which closes the upload option and signals to the ZPA that the thesis is “finished”. Students can also upload additional relevant files along with their thesis, so no need to worry about forgetting any attachments. DivA also tracks the status of the thesis. After submission, the application displays statuses such as “being formally reviewed”, “approved for review”, “reviewed”, and “completed”.

Source: Own illustration

Current Status

After a relatively short development time of less than a year, the pilot operation of the DivA application as an MVP (minimum viable product) started in Q3 2022 with a manageable number of test study programs. The “core product” was constantly tested over the following months by the IT Center, the participating departments, and the student body. We opted for an agile development approach here to be able to respond to new requirements in a timely manner. Many versions and some bugs later (currently v 1.1.8), we then started a small satisfaction survey among the users. This turned out to be so positive that we feel confirmed in our decision for agile development. Both the student body, who rated the application on average with a total grade of 1.75, and the participating administrators at the ZPA showed us that we are on the right track.

What’s next?

The next major update (v 1.2) is already in the pipeline and our first priority is to address the most pressing demand: notifications. We plan to send notifications to all involved parties at every step of the process, from registration to submission to final review. This should eliminate the biggest criticism of v.1.1.8 and ensure that everyone involved receives direct information about the status of their respective theses at all times.

For future releases, we are planning features such as “upload of evaluations”, “access for examination boards”, “delegation for examiners”, and, most importantly, the automation of archiving completed theses in the RWTH document management system.

We do not expect to release the application for everyone before the start of the winter semester 2023/24.

Responsible for the content of this article are Stefan Krieger and Arlinda Ujkani.

Kategorie: Announcements, IT-Managers, Employees, Support, Services & Updates, Students, Studies & Teaching
Schlagworte: Abgabe, Abschluss, Abschlussarbeit, Digitale Abgabe von Abschlussarbeiten, DivA, RWTHonline, Thesis
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