Workshop 8: Ruby on Rails Workshops Report and Evaluation

Topic objectives

Upon the completion of this workshop, developers or managers should be able to:

· Identify and evaluate the Ruby on Rails workshop series
· Think critically and analytically about what you knew before and after the experiences
· Share and post your Report and Evaluation with peers via the subject forum.

Evaluation and Report

Please answer each question in this evaluation section. In your answer, please consider content/topics presented and the technologies and teaching strategies used during the Ruby on Rails Workshops. Results will be collated and used to modify the workshop series.
This form is just a format guide to you evaluation and report. Thank you for your time to complete workshop 8.

1. List what you consider to be the three strengths of Ruby on Rails workshop series

I consider the 3 strengths to be:
i.) The course material is up-to-date and using technology which is industrial standard. This is very helpful to our career.
ii.) The workshops are in step-by-step format which is easy to follow like laboratory session especially good for overseas students always need to study and work alone.
iii.) The open source environment of ROR and my mySQL makes easy for students to setup their development platform at home without any cost.


2. List what you consider to be the three weaknesses of Ruby on Rails workshop series:

I consider the 3 weaknesses to be:
i.) The workload for this program may be too harsh and task oriented. Students may not have enough time to study thoroughly what they are doing and participate more on the discussing with the group.
ii.) The resource link may not be updated and some of the update on the source code may not be consistent which needs extra time for students to troubleshoot the problem in order to finish the workshop.
iii.) Difficult for RED team to interact with BLUE team especially for overseas students. Not much collaborative effort could be done within the team to speed up the learning.


3. List what aspects of Ruby on Rails workshop series that you found to be most difficult.

The most difficult aspects were getting the OTBS system working. As it includes implementing the infrastructure environment which already takes quite a long time before the environment is ready for development. There are also compatible issues between different versions of ROR application and different versions of mySQL library as it is not mentioned in the workshop. One of the most difficult parts should be getting the Ruby environment ready and successfully connected to the database. Writing and verifying the code is another difficult and time consuming task as I do not have any code composer and debugger for ROR. All troubleshooting requires me to have throughout knowledge and break down my work to small pieces in order to get problems isolated and fixed one by one.


4. List what improvements could be made to the Ruby on Rails workshop series:

Improvements I would make includes work more closely with my RED team members and makes our learning more collaborative which could speed up the process and to know more ways to accomplish our tasks. Also I would read more and explore more including more background studies if I could have extra time during the workshop.


Free response and reflective questions:

5. Reflect on your experiences with the other Web framework used in this subject: Was it effective? How can it be improved? Should other Web frameworks be used as well or instead of Ruby on Rails?

I found Ruby-on-Rails is a packaged framework, although not very user-friendly but it is not difficult to setup with proper guidelines as there are always new versions and there exists compatible issues with other applications. The application version we are required to use in order to finish the workshop should be recommended by the tutor or in the guidelines. As I do not have any programming experience in my career (except some scripting) and so I could not give any comparison for any other Web framework with ROR. Hope some programmers would give more valuable comment here.


6. Did the Developer’s or IT managers Team that you joined after workshop 4 have a preference towards using other tools to facilitate collaboration? Comment on the differences between these use of the sub-forum or Interact wiki tools from your experiences in this subject.


7. Further comments to add?

Would really appreciate if the instructions in the workshops are more accurate which would save students more time for study or explore something outside the topic. Reduce number of tasks or change some tasks into which must be accomplished by a team of 2 would greatly enhance collaborative learning.