COVID CV: A System for Creating Holistic Academic CVs during a Global Pandemic

Abstract

The effects of the Covid pandemic have been, similar to the population at-large, unequal on academicians – some groups have been more susceptible than others. Traditional CVs are inadequate to highlight these imbalances. CovidCV is a framework for academicians that allows them to document their life in a holistic way during the pandemic. It creates a color-coded CV from the user’s data entries documenting the work and home life and categorizing corresponding events as good or bad. It, thus, provides a visual representation of an academician’s life during the current pandemic. The user can mark any event as major or minor indicating the impact of the event on their life. The CovidCV prototypical system is developed using a three tier architecture. The first tier, the front-end, is a user interface layer that is a web application. This prototype has a back-end layer consisting of two tiers which are responsible for handling the business logic and the data management respectively. The CovidCV system design is described in this paper. A preliminary experimentation with the prototype highlights the usefulness of CovidCV.