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Student Information
System

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation needed a better platform for almost 1000 educators to handle over 35,000 students in dozens of different educational

programs across 31 different institutions throughout the state.

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Our team used a standard PrimeVue front-end component library to build out the application. Tanzu Labs also pair programs and teaches internal devs, PMs, desigers & stakeholders how to design, build, & manage software as we go.

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Project Overview
Education helps inmates more than anything else, but teachers spend most their time doing admin work instead of teaching.
My Role
Lead UX Design
PM Mentor
2024 - 2026

Big focus on leadership alignment, collaboration with DRP stakeholders.
Unique Challenge
Roles and standard operating procedure could be different per each institution.
Outcome
Overall admin and data entry time spent lowered by over 90% & teachers spending 8x more time with students

Timeline

This project is the largest piece of software CDCR has ever built. It is also the first to integrate into the SOMS Offender Management system. The project is on-going but my part lasted almost 2 years.

Framing & Discovery

- Research / Initial sketches / Design Studio
- Big focus on creating / populating classes & assignments. Impacted by tech issues
- Start with college, most complex of 8 different types of education programs
- Ambiguous feasibility with legacy systems
- Problem defenition and policy discussions

The Middle

- Example of a previously complex user flow for the Highschool Equivilancy program
- Additional prototype testing & iteration
- College pilot and release
- New stakeholder & new direction to build 1 application for all other programs
- College program change management

Ongoing

- All data captured in College Classes & Activity, dashboard cooming soon
‍- "All Program" prototype testing & iteration
- Task focused pilots like attendance, certificates, gradebook, EPR, milestones
- Syllabus creator & editor testing
-  Internal policy debates led to several large scale changes in direction

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Big Problems

A solution for recidivism

The more educated an incarcerated person is, the less likely they are to be repeat offenders. The state has made it so inmates are rewarded with time off their sentence for doing well in school.

Teachers overworked

Teachers are required to do tons of data entry and admin work in a system that focuses on security and control for custody officers.

Data Informed Education

Previous systems did not make data accessible to decision makers. Nobody knew what helped or hindered different groups of incarcerated persons.

Specific Problems

Create/populate classes

Individually based and required a ton of steps. Classes had to tie back into custody system "Assignments" which carried other challenges.

Record attendance

Attendnace done on an individual basis.

Grade Entry specifics

Grades had to be entered in in multiple places for different types of programs

Report Card every 90 days

Filling out a report card was like jumping through hoops and took forever

Certs, Merits & Milestones

Forms meant time off in inmates sentence, but reqirements were not clear and took forever to check.

Syllabus creation & editing

Syllabus edits took dozens of people and hundreds of dev hours.

Solutions

Starting the term

Classes & Assignments can be linked cutting down hours of data entry and students can be added before or after linking offering flexibility across over 30 institutions with varying procedures snd roles. All student information and data entry is in one spot, and attendance can be done in bulk.

Classes & Assignments
Student Details/History
Attendance

Linking allows for SIS & SOMS to share data and bulk assign students

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Student information is nowe editable in one location

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Users can batch time attendance, then make any changes or add comments if needed

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Ending the term

Syllabi are structured with dozens of Components and hundreds of modules & standards. These can be created and customized by Program Leads. In the gradebook, a teacher can only see 1 component at a time due to their size. Merit & Milestone credits can only be entered when criteria is met.

Grades
Merit & Milestone
Syllabus

Grades are flexible enough for each program and different types of syllabuses.

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Milestone & Merit Credits = time off sentence. The most important thing to students. For obvious reasons, this is highly regulated.

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Creating or editing a syllabus used to take teams of people weeks, now it takes 1 person a couple hours

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Impact

6

main flows are now bulk based  

8x

more time spent with students

90%

reduction in admin activitiy time

User Quotes

We are used to doing things by individuals, not by classes. This is amazing!

College Coordinator
Mule Creek

I can enter grades and milestones for a whole class, all at once. Oh my god, this is mind blowing!

College Coordinator
Folsom

This is on the right trac. It’s so much easier to move around and manipulate than SOMS, it is saving me hours every day.

ABE Teacher
Pelican Bay

I think this is wonderful, for my Assistant Principals who are going to be approving these and for College Coordinators.

Principal
CSP Sacramento

Lessons Learned

This application had roughly a dozen different types of users carrying out tasks for 8 different types of educational programs. Additionally, not every institution did things in the same way or has the same roles. SIS was also the first application to write information back to the SOMS custody app and the technical hurdles here had a big impact on the design. All these were still problems that I had the tools to solve, it was just a more complex problemt. The real challenges are highlighted below.

Major Challenges

  1. Stakeholder Alignment
  2. Stakeholder turnover
  3. Organization Change Management

Working within a large government organization such as CDCR means that several groups and people are involved in every decision. If what you are building goes against a persons or groups internal political objectives than things can become difficult. This project had tons of churn from stakeholders, including a new stakeholder completely changing the direction of the application. Change Management is key for any large enterprise product and should start as soon as it can so the change is expected. CDCR's initial ideas around this were more waterfall based, but we were able to pull them closer toward testing, pilot programs and incremental releases. Of all these issues I think I probabaly ended up sinking the most time into stakeholder alignment,

Good design is about making things easy to use and nice to look at.