Client

Melissa Myers
Email: <mm177@cornell.edu>

Student contact

Qixuan (Michael) Li <ql279@cornell.edu>

Background

The ELSO Speaking Groups Program, sponsored by the English Language Support Office (ELSO), offers small, one-hour weekly discussions with international graduate students and scholars at Cornell. Every semester, around 100 international students ranging from undergraduates to PhDs and around 20 faculty and staff participate in the program. The program allows international students to make meaningful relationships with faculties and staff at Cornell while improving their English skills. Read more about the program at https://knight.as.cornell.edu/SGP.

Project Summary

Currently, the scheduling of individual speaking groups is done manually by ELSO staff and the participants of the program. The current scheduling steps are:

1. Students and scholars fill out an application survey via Qualtrics to provide their basic information, interests, and availabilities.
2. ELSO staff create a Google Doc with all the scholar's bio, available times, and number of spots left.
3. Students contact the scholar they want to meet with through emails.
4. Scholars keep track of all students interested in meeting, update the Google Doc with the number of spots left, and use emails to communicate and arrange meetings with students.
5. Scholars fill out an attendance sheet on a separate Google Doc after every meeting.

The current scheduling system is a little bit decentralized and requires manually setting up listservs and a lot of individual emailing among participants. Therefore, our client wants our project team to develop a centralized system that streamlines this scheduling process.