Cornell CS CMS

Overview

The Course Management System (CMS) was developed by the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University to simplify the management of large courses. CMS is in use by more than 2000 students in over 40 courses in Computer Science, Computing and Information Science, Engineering, and Economics. CMS was implemented using Java on the J2EE framework. Design and development were done by undergraduate and masters students working under faculty supervision. We are always interested in user feedback that can make the system better.

In Spring 2008, CIT started a pilot project based on CMS 3.3. Several courses outside the CS department are now using CMS, with the goal of making CMS available to the whole population of Cornell students, and used by courses across the university.

CMS is still actively under development, and we are always interested in getting talented students to work on making it a better system. A background in web programming, in building UIs more generally, or in databases is helpful. Some current projects are:

Making it possible for multiple CMS sites to present a unified view, so CMS can scale up to very large student populations.
Supporting automatic migration of course data across semesters.
Making CMS blazingly fast. This likely involves rearchitecting some internals.
Other new features for managing assignments.

If you are interested in getting involved with CMS, send mail to Prof. Andrew Myers.

The development of CMS has been funded in part by the Department of Computer Science, the Faculty of Computing and Information Science (CIS), and the College of Engineering.

CMS Software

CMS System Version 2.2 (PHP)
CMS System Version 3.3 (J2EE)

Publications

Supporting Workflow in a Course Management System.
Proc. ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE), February 2005.

Principles

The CMS design is driven by several important principles:

Matching user workflow. CMS was designed with the workflow of staff and students in mind, based on continuous feedback over years. Common operations are easy to find and require few user actions to accomplish.
Portability. CMS is web-based and works on all major web browsers.
Keeping history. Nothing can be permanently deleted in CMS, and every action is logged and can be found later by searching.
Security. CMS users are authenticated using Kerberos. CMS has a fine-grained but usable access control system recognizing the different roles that students and staff play in different contexts. Action logging provides accountability.
Simple, consistent, powerful UI. The system must be easy to learn but must also provide the power that's needed to get work done efficiently. The UI provides relatively few distinct “places” for a user to know about, and a navigation bar always shows where in the system the user is. Displayed pages are information-rich and most information is hyperlinked to enable context-sensitive navigation between different parts of the system. JavaScript is used extensively to provide a rich user interface.
Good defaults. CMS does not aim to be infinitely extensible. Rather, it tries to be a good out-of-the-box solution.
Recognizing exceptions. Policies and rules entered into CMS can be overridden on a case-by-case basis. For example, an instructor can easily override an assignment deadline for a single student.
Integration with other software. CMS aims to integrate smoothly with other software such as Excel, rather than to be a monolithic system that duplicates functionality from tools users are already familiar with.

Developers

CMS has been developed by many people over the years, including undergraduate students and MEng students:

Student developers
Kareem Amin Anjan Bakshi Kevin Barmish Chavdar Botev Hubert Chao Theodore Chao

Yim Cheng Timothy Choi Raymond Doyle Alexander Emmet Sergey Grankin Jonathan Guarino

Saikat Guha David Hattaway Evan Herbst Jong Hwi Lee Pei-Chen Lee Santosh Manoharmal

Adam Papamarcos Caleb Perkins Dan Perry Christopher Re Ilya Rifkin Eric Sang

Panut Sookpranee Roman Stolper Matt Thomas Lucas Waye Eric Wilson Jung Yim

Epong Yu Alexander Yuan Tingyan Yuan Yan Zhang

Development and support staff
Dora Abdullah Kathy Carpenter

Faculty supervisors
Alan Demers David Gries Dexter Kozen

Andrew Myers David Schwartz Jayavel Shanmugasundaram

Bold: Currently active project members

History

Spring 2008	A pilot project based on CMS 3.3 is being run by CIT. Courses outside the CS department will be using CMS.
Fall 2007	CMS version 3.3 adds support for quizzes and surveys.
Spring 2007	CMS version 3.2 based on J2EE is now the standard version of CMS in use, and the PHP system is being phased out.
Fall 2006	CMS version 3.2 add support for scheduling student meetings.
Spring 2006	CMS version 3.1 is in use by more courses. The PHP system continues to be used as 3.1 matures.
Fall 2005	CMS version 3.0 (J2EE version) first released for use by a few courses.
Spring 2004 - Spring 2005	CMS Version 2.2 (PHP version)
Fall 2003	Development of J2EE CMS begins
Fall 2003	CMS Version 2.1 (PHP version) developed by CS 23 CS/CIS Courses, 5 ECE/ORIE/MAE Courses
Spring 2003	CMS Version 2.0 (PHP version) developed by CS 11 CS/CIS courses
Fall 2002	CMS Version 1 (Perl version) developed by CS 6 CS/CIS Courses
Before Fall 2002	Various systems were in use for CS211, CS312, CS417, and other CS courses. A group of students and faculty then identified requirements for an improved CMS.