Sheridan College (Ontario)
IN-26: Innovation C

With the collaboration of its IT department, Sheridan’s Office for Sustainability has designed and built its own custom Sustainability Dashboard. The Dashboard, which pulls data from various sources, displays Sheridan’s sustainability data and metrics on energy and water use, waste production, and paper printing on a public website.

Three individual co-op students were engaged in building the website over the course of 6 semesters to create and manage the project, with guidance from Sustainability and IT staff. Revisions were made based on Sheridan and broader community feedback.

Building the Sustainability Dashboard in-house from scratch enables Sheridan to not only save ongoing license fee costs and provide the hands-on applied learning opportunities for its students, but also allows for the creation of a flexible Dashboard that incorporates any data source that can be extracted using Application Programming Interface (API) and display it in various formats and infographics. The custom nature of the project also lends itself to institutional branding. Sheridan’s Dashboard uses the Office for Sustainability brand and colours, found it its Mission Zero logo.

Finally, the Dashboard can be changed and updated over time as new data sources come in or new ideas for how to present the data arise. The project team plans to add a download feature into the website that would enable users to perform detailed analysis on the data as part of class or applied research projects.

On the technical aspects, the project is built using Node.js and Express (a framework of Node.js). The back-end work is done by Node.js, and it allows the programmer to choose from the different render engines for the front-end view, including ejs, jade, hbs, etc. (Sheridan’s project is using ejs). The jQuery is the JavaScript library and Bootstrap is the front-end framework that can be used to create better layouts of the web pages, such as creating and modifying flexible widgets, panels, bars, color themes, and so on. The charts are built using Google Charts templates. Sheridan’s IT database, Splunk, pulls data from the various sources, using APIs in most cases. Instead of querying live data each time the website is loaded or refreshed, the website uses local files to speed up load time and the local files are updated daily with new data.