2. Design
We finished a functional design. FEEL will have following major functions:
• User account management
FEEL supports two kinds of users: instructor and student. The instructor account is set up when the system is installed. The instructor manages student users by creating/updating/deleting student accounts. User accounts are protected by password.
• Multiple choice questions (instructor-initiated)
An instructor posts a multiple-choice question and then every student enters an answer. Instructors enter questions into FEEL either before the class or during the class. They can control when to make questions available to students and when to freeze questions. A student can choose to be anonymous when entering the answer. Under the anonymous mode, the answer given by a student won’t be shown in the public user interface but will still be recorded in the database. FEEL shows the distribution of various student answers.
• Student simple feedback
FEEL allows students, at any time during the class, provide instant simple feedback about how the class is going, e.g. “too slow”, “too fast”, “interesting”, “boring”, “difficult to understand”, etc. The collective feedback from all students is visualized according to a certain time granularity set by the instructor. This information helps instructor adjust the teaching in a timely fashion. Feedback information, e.g. who gives what feedback and when, is recorded in the database.
• Student inquiries
During the class, a student can post an inquiry to the instructor or add one more vote to an existing inquiry. All inquiries are visible to both instructors and students. A new inquiry is put on the “wait-to-be-answered” queue and is later moved to an “answered” queue when marked by “answered” by the instructor. Inquiries in the “wait-to-be-answered” queue are ordered first by the number of votes on them and second by when they are posted.
• System customization and extension
FEEL pre-define a set of simple feedback options, including “too slow”, “too fast”, “interesting”, “boring”, and “difficult to understand”. An instructor can choose a subset of feedback options to use. An instructor can also define new feedback options. Among various reports provided by FEEL, an instructor can choose which one to use for what.
• Permanent data management
Data are stored in the database. This allows us to add future functions to FEEL.

3. Implementation
We’ve laid out all of the groundwork for the FEEL web service. We have developed a solid database schema and an abstraction layer within the application for manipulating the database. We have developed a login system for instructor and student as well as some of the functionality for multiple choice questions and simple feedback. Instructors can log in, add and view a multiple choice question as well as add a simple feedback option. Students can log in and submit simple feedback.

Finishing this thing off will be fairly simple now that the database abstraction layer is in place. It is just a matter of adding the functionality. The abstraction layer may have to be extended if we need to make some complex queries on the database that we did not foresee. We added all of the general queries, though, for listing, retrieving, adding, updating and deleting, but more custom queries may be required.

Form validation and beautification will be added later as we are focusing on getting the core functionality working for the prototype. Beautification may have to be limited anyway because we want the application to be fast as it will need to support a high volume of traffic if it is to be used in the classroom. We are currently on schedule.