The Co-op Database Project Who It's For At Northeastern University cooperative education is an integral part of the education experience. There is a continuous need to supervise hundreds of students searching through thousands of jobs each and every school quarter. We present a modern computerized Web-based Cooperative Education Database System that connects employers, students and faculty. Employers post and maintain their up to date job offerings. Students search for these jobs and maintain their own personal job selections and information. All of this interaction is supervised and coordinated by the Co-op Faculty. What's Included Rather than creating a completed product, our goal was to generate a working model of the system that could be used as a prototype for a future full scale system. The project included a detailed requirement analysis and specifications for the system, a database schema design and simulations of possible usage scenarios of the data flow, and the implementation of the model database and its main graphical user interface with Microsoft Access. A partial web interface for students was also implemented with Active Server Pages on IIS web server. How We Did It The work was done on a small-scale Co-op database in the College of Computer Science. A working model of the system was created as part of a practical training directed study course. What We Learned Since this project was begun, Northeastern University has decided to implement a Web-based commercial Co-op database product which includes many feature similar to those in this project. Who We Are Ran Bester Undergraduate Student College of Computer Science Northeastern University Mark Erickson Co-op/Advising Coordinator Dept. of Cooperative Education College of Computer Science Northeastern University David H. Lorenz Assistant Professor College of Computer Science Northeastern University

The same database serves all the users of the system, but each group has a separate interface to interact with it. Stage 1: Analysis The first stage of the project was requirement analysis. Before the database schema was designed, before the interface was laid out, and before any code was written, the requirements had to be thoroughly defined and understood. Since the same database serves different user groups with different expectations and needs, the requirements report was broken into three main sections with the details of the specifications of each of the user groups. The User Groups There are three main user groups for the CO-OP dB system: Faculty:3 Co-op faculty members, and 1-2 work-study students. Students:600 active CCS undergraduate and graduate students. Employers:1200 employers (530 active) mostly from Massachusetts, but also from other states in the U.S. Faculty

Stage 2: Design The second stage of the project was to design a system that would satisfy the specifications. A well thought database schema was created. The database was designed to answer both present and future expectations from the system. Basically there are three main entities in the database: Student: Student relevant info. Employer:Info. about companies, their contacts and locations. Job:Job info. All the rest of the data revolves around these three entities and the various relationships between them. The Database Schema For the purpose of creating the working model Microsoft Access was sufficient. Access can be relatively easily upgraded to a higher level relational database management system when implementing a final production level system.

Stage 3: Implementation Sample Screens From the Co-op Faculty Interface Sample Screens From the Students Web Interface The final stage of the project was the actual implementation which included creating the graphical user interface, writing code, testing it and debugging it. The Co-op faculty interface was fully implemented with Microsoft Access, and the student’s Web interface was implemented with Microsoft Active Server Pages on Internet Information Services web server.