Cross-posts: Two blog entries about the UW’s academic calendar web service

Posted on Jun 10, 2010 in Marketing, Web Dev | 5 comments

Knowing your audience is such an important part of writing and marketing. Writing on the same topic for two audiences really highlights this fact. Everything matters: length, voice or tone, word choice and jargon to name just a few. Read both my posts (either at the links above or the full text below) and judge my writing for each of my audiences.

An initial Academic Calendar web service now available via MyUW

An academic calendar web service has been long requested by campus developers who needed ways to populate departmental web pages and incorporate important dates into web apps. With the availability of academic calendar data on MyUW’s calendaring tool, developers now have a method to access the information they need—without resorting to screen-scraping or other jury-rigged techniques.

MyUW’s calendaring tool provides multiple export options for creating data feeds. Supported formats are iCal, webcal, RSS, Atom, XML, and nicely-formatted plain text; each is available for a given date range. In this way, developers can obtain all the academic calendar dates previously only available on a static, table-laden HTML page maintained by the Registrar’s office. (A few academic calendar dates were available through the Student Web Service (SWS) term resource because they existed in the SDB; a quarter’s first- and census days are prime examples.) This in itself is a huge step forward for developers who can easily get at the data, and for students who can now subscribe to the calendar on their iPhones, Google Calendar, or whatever calendaring device/service they prefer.

A few examples of how campus developers might use this web service:

• Integrate campus-wide registration periods and deadlines with important dates specific to their department;
• Display an alert on a web page when an important academic calendar date is nearing;
• Trigger an e-mail, text message, blog entry, etc. based on the UW’s academic calendar; and
• Populate “what’s happening” calendars with religious holidays, which are now part of the Academic Calendar.

But  this approach has drawbacks when compared to a full web service such as the SWS resources UWIT developed. So why didn’t UWIT develop a resource for this information? In a word, bandwidth; or rather, a lack thereof. Reduced budgets and higher-priority projects precluded the option of building  a dedicated SWS resource. Leveraging the existing MyUW tool was the only viable way to open up the data in the short term.

Some issues with this approach include:

• No date ranges – MyUW’s calendaring tool does not support date ranges, so ranges like “Registration Period II” must be entered as two discrete entries: a beginning date and an end date.
• Start and end times – What’s more, these dates are themselves represented as start and end times. Entries that do not include time information (which describes all academic calendar entries) default to an end time of midnight, which pushes the entry’s end date to the following day. It’s an easily-avoided problem: just use the start date for each entry. But it’s something that must be looked out for when using the data in an application.
• No non-date information – Questions like “What quarter is it now?” or “What general catalog was in use Spring quarter 2009?” cannot be answered directly via this tool because it only contains discrete dates. (It is possible to use the SWS’s Term resource and some logic to answer these questions, however.) Developers are limited to retrieving a list of significant events (grades are due, late registration starts, etc.) and their dates; or, querying a specific date to see what events take place on that date.
• XML issues – An early tester of the services noted an issue with how the XML parser deals with certain accented characters, and that the VCALENDAR-based XML format does not lend itself to parsing.

Definitely not an ideal solution, but certainly one that represents a significant step forward. So retire your screen-scraping tools and instead dive directly into that feed to start playing with the data. UWIT and the Registrar’s office would love to hear how you’ll use the academic calendar in your apps, and we’ll gladly listen to ideas on ways to improve this MyUW-based academic calendar web service.

Mark your calendars! Academic dates now available for devices

Ever wonder what day registration begins for Autumn quarter? Or when applications are due for in-state residency? Perhaps you need to know the quarter’s withdrawal deadline? Until recently, the only place to find that information was on the Registrar’s Academic Calendar page. And while that page certainly answers those questions, it’s not the most convenient way to keep up-to-date with the University’s academic calendar.

The Office of the University Registrar is pleased to announce that the UW’s academic calendar is now available through MyUW’s calendar service. And like the other calendars available through MyUW, dates can be easily added to your iPhone, Blackberry, Google Calendar, or any device or service that can read iCal, RSS, XML, or other formats.

The academic calendar on MyUW is organized into sub-calendars to allow students the freedom to view just the information that’s important to them. As with the Academic Calendar page on the Registrar’s site, the MyUW Academic Calendar contains the following sub-calendars:

• Adding/Dropping Courses
• Application Deadlines
• Dates of Instruction
• Grade Deadlines
• Registration Deadlines
• Religious Calendar
• Tuition and Fee Assessment Deadlines

Adding these dates to your device or service is pretty easy:

1. Visit the MyUW calendar export page
2. Choose “Academic Calendar” to subscribe to all dates, or choose a specific sub-calendar if you only want that information
3. Choose the date range you want (probably from Sept. of one year through Aug. of the next)
4. Choose the format for the output (refer to your device or service’s instructions on subscribing to feeds for the format that works best for you)
5. Check the “Subscription URL” box
6. Click “Retrieve Data”
7. Enter the subscription URL that appears into your device or service

That’s it! You’re now subscribed to that calendar and your device or service will reflect any additions or changes to the calendar.

The only problem is you no longer have an excuse if you miss a registration date or other academic deadline!

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