EduComp Inc. plans to launch a social networking website (EduConnect) aimed at providing a collaborative forum for students currently studying at universities within the United States. The proposed website would provide students with access to educational materials for a wide variety of topics ranging across multiple academic disciplines. The users of EduConnect would be restricted to individuals who are current students in any US based university. Students would be able to register with the site as long as they have a valid email address in the .edu domain. A new student user would have to complete the registration process to be able to use the services provided by EduConnect. Registration would typically involve filling up of a short electronic form where the user would be expect to furnish personal details including name, address, university, degree program and payment detail. Once the student has completed registering, they would be provided with a selection of study groups based on universities, degree programs as well as course topic. Once the student includes the groups according to his/her preference, they would be able to download course materials posted within that group, rate such course materials and also be able to contribute materials to that group. The back end processing related to registration of student users would be entirely handled by the customer service department employees of EduComp.

The access to EduConnect is free, but the students would be charged for course materials they download. Each course material posted in any group would be associated with a brief summary about its content and topic coverage, as well as user ratings about its quality and usefulness (as rated by other users of the group). The users would also be able to preview a portion of the content of the course material but will have complete access only if they choose to download it. Each student user would be sent an electronic invoice of the charges incurred by them on at the beginning of every month effective from the day of registration. The maintenance, display and the download management of the electronic content for EduConnect would be managed by the IT operations team.

The contributors of educational materials to EduConnect would be of two kinds. EduComp will allow users to register as academic contributors. Such contributors would typically be academics who wish to contribute education materials for the site and would go through a different registration process from the student users. This registration process would be handled internally by the academic governance department of EduComp. Academic contributors would need to complete an electronic application, furnishing valid academic credentials and details about their area of expertise during the registration process. All applications from potential academic contributors would evaluated by EduComp’s Academic Board (the academic board would be constituted by EduComp before EduConnect is launched and would comprise of respected senior academics and educators from universities across United States. Such academics would be invited to join the board and receive an honorarium the service they provide to the organization. Academic Board would act in advisory capacity in helping maintain academic quality and may be considered independent of EdcuComp’s internal Organization). Each application for an academic contributor would be sent to the members of the Academic board, who would review their application and send in their evaluation report. The final decision about the applicant would be taken based on the majority recommendation as stated in the evaluation reports. If the application is approved, the applicant will be send the email informing of their acceptance as an academic contributor and would be given privileges to post academic material to groups related to his/her area of expertise. In case the application is rejected, the applicant would be electronically informed of the same. In addition to academic contributors, student users would also be allowed to post material to the group they belong to.

The contributions that would be considered acceptable for upload would include study notes and topical illustrative examples/problems and their solutions. Specific materials such as examination scripts or course assignments used in Universities for particular courses would be considered as unacceptable. All contributions (from academic contributors and student users) would go through a quality review process before they are posted. This review would include inspection of copyright infringement, plagiarism etc. It is expected that most contributions would go through a process of revision based on the comments provided by the employees within the Academic governance department before they are approved and posted. All contributors would receive payment based on the number of downloads of the materials posted by them. These payments would be generated on a monthly basis and paid out to the contributors along with an account statement. The student user contributors would have an option of developing credit in their account profile instead of taking actual payments. Such credits would be applied to downloads made by them during the course of the period. For student users the account statement for their contribution would be incorporated with their monthly billing invoice.

Please answer the following questions

1. Identify the Information Gaps with the case and also develop a set of assumptions that you are making based on those. You could also have assumptions that you make that is independent of the information gaps

-Information Gaps

-Assumptions

2. Identify and list the Adjacent Systems from the case. Provide a short justification for each

3. Draw the work context Diagram