Penn State's 'Lab Manager'

Name: Kathy Mayberry & Joe Leluga

Institution: The Pennsylvania State University

E-mail Address: kmm@psu.edu & jml129@psu.edu

Format: Paper presentation

Suggested Audience: Those responsible for supervising lab consultants

Presentation Outcome:

1. Have a resource for managing lab consultants

Presentation Content:

Penn State offers student consulting services in most of the student computing labs. Almost 100 students are needed as consultants to adequately cover the shifts. Managing this many students working in remote locations can be a challenge for the supervisor. The speakers will discuss and demo a UNIX based server with telnet and Windows clients, developed to help ease the administrative hassle of managing the lab consultants. The application provides a chat line, timecard records with authentication, a scheduler, a consultant database with a WWW-based database manager and reporting function.

Outline:

• Description of the Penn State lab environment
  • Stats
  • Services offered
• Problems of Managing the Lab Consultants
  • Supporting the lab consultants on duty
  • Verifying that the lab consultants are in the labs
  • Scheduling shifts, subbing, etc
  • Maintaining records of how many students were helped and on what topics
• How the 'Lab Manager' Solves the Problems
  • Consultant Database
  • Chat Line
  • Time card function
  • Scheduler
  • Reporting tools
• Demo