Milestone 5 > Scenarios > Michelle Jenkins

Michelle's day starts at about 6:30 in the morning when she wakes up the sound of her 2 year old, Marie, saying "Momma, morning. Morning Mama." Her and her husband get ready for their day by feeding Marie breakfast, packing lunches, and deciding who will drop Marie off at the daycare. Today Michelle will be taking Marie to daycare before she is due to be at work at 9:00am.

Upon dropping Marie off at daycare, Michelle tries to recall her objectives for the day. She remembers that she had a meeting a with a student last week, who was having trouble trying to decide which courses she should take for her marketing interests; she remembers that she has another appointment with that student today.

Upon entering the student advising office, Michelle checks in with her secretary to say hi and get any social information that won't be distributed via official channels. Once she enters her office she checks her e-mail and agenda for the day. She has about an hour before her first appointment so she decides to use that time to contribute to the knowledge on the CourseNav website. She has found that this goal can be best accomplished by adding tags to courses and voting up or down comments and tags for courses based on their relevance. Since one of the students with which she is meeting today has questions about marketing courses, Michelle decides to focus her efforts on courses she believes to be related to marketing.

Michelle navigates to the CourseNav website and logs in using her unique name and password. The system recognizes that she is not a student and thus presents her with a different view of CourseNav than a student would see. She begins by searching for courses by Professor McKinsey; she knows that this professor has taught many courses in Marketing so she wants to see what courses he is teaching this semester. A search reveals 3 current courses taught by professor McKinsey. She clicks on the first to see that it has already been tagged as marketing but sees a comment that says "This course sucks." Michelle thinks that this comment would not be helpful to others so she clicks a button that says "vote down." The relevancy score is thus reduced and other viewers will likely not see this comment if its' score is below the viewing threshold.

Michelle continues to go through the courses taught by Professor McKinsey, tags courses with appropriate words either selected from existing tags or newly created. As she is in the midst of going through this process her afternoon appointment walks in the door. She greets the student kindly and invites her to sit down.

The student explains that she is seeking information about classes that will help her with a career in marketing, specifically in international markets. She's talked to some friends and has been considering Marketing 411 "Marketing in the Information Age." Michelle says that she has heard good things about that course and suggests they take a look at the CourseNav website for that course. Since they know the title of the course, they enter the term "Marketing in the Information Age" into the keywords search box on the main page. An exact match is returned and start to view the information about this course, one item is of particular interest: there is 1 prerequisite, and the student has not yet taken it. Initially they student was disappointed that she would not be able to take this course next semester, but then Michelle showed her some of the similar courses generated by CourseNav. She came across the COMM 425: "Global advertising and its' Effects on Living Standards in 3rd World Countries." Neither Michelle, nor the student, had ever heard of this course but the student was immediately interested because this course sounded like it would tie in nicely with her personal interest in social psychology.

The CourseNav website did not list the requirements that this course fulfilled, so the student was grateful that Michelle was right there to tell her about her credit transfer options.

Michelle recommends that the student logon to CourseNav in her spare time and create a profile so that she can get more personalized information and utilize many of the other features of the site to tailor her educational experience.

After the student leaves, Michelle takes the information she learned from the session and uses it to further enhance CourseNav. She thought it'd be helpful if she tagged COMM 425 as "social psychology" so other students with similar interests might be able to find it more easily.