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Improving Remote Office Hours Queue and Canvas Course Manager

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This summer, I worked on the ITS Teaching and Learning team. For Remote Office Hours Queue (ROHQ), I added dynamic page titles to improve accessibility and navigation, wrote frontend tests with Jest to ensure component reliability, enhanced Zoom and Twilio features for hosts and attendees, and began implementing an announcement feature to notify attendees in case of instructor emergencies. For Canvas Course Manager (CCM), I optimized Canvas API usage, standardized API route formatting, and integrated Google Analytics with a consent banner to enable usage tracking while meeting privacy requirements.

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Pravesh Kunwar

ITS Teaching and Learning

Problem

Both ROHQ and CCM had issues to fix and new features to build. I worked on resolving problems, adding features, and helping get both tools ready for release.

Methods

Results

  • An ROHQ website with improved accessibility, frontend tests for component reliability, removal of unnecessary Zoom meeting passcode prompts for attendees, Twilio SMS updates to clearly identify messages from ROHQ, and an attendee system currently in development.
  • Less issues other developers had to work on before a new release.
  • Growth as a developer by better understanding the development lifecycle, and as a team member by improving how I communicate issues with other developers.
  • Understanding the development cycle: Worked in different parts of the development cycle, including:
    • Development: coding to fix the issues and add new features
    • Review: testing other developers solutions to other issues in the project, verifying I get the same result
    • Planning: outlining how an issue or feature will be fixed or implemented
  • Utilizing resources: Learned how to maximize utilization of modern developer resources, like Google and AI
    • UM-GPT, GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude
  • Communication: Improved how I communicate technical issues
    • For example, when I was stuck on an issue created by another developer, I reached out to them or others on the team to better understand the root cause and find a solution.

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New announcement feature (currently not in production)

In line with U-M privacy policies, this banner lets users choose whether to allow usage tracking via Google Analytics, helping improve CCM based on real user behavior.

Current ROHQ Website Latest ROHQ Release Notes

Learn more about CCM

Problem