Forum .LRN Q&A: RFC: Evaluation System for .LRN

Vision

Professors and students need a system that lets them upload the tasks and evaluate on line. With the evaluation system the professors can administer the grades on line, the assignments and have access to the grade reports. The students can submit the tasks on line and see their grades at any given time.

These are the basic requirements of the system:

1. Post assignments.
2. Categories for the assignments.
3. Edit the ratios of the categories and assignments.
4. Assignments groups.
5. Evaluate the assignments.
6. Grades reports.
7. Submitting answers.
8. Reports for the student.
9. Tracking changes / Audit.
10. Give each user different privileges.
11. Group creation workflow (extra).

Please review the full specification here:

http://www.galileo.edu/public/files/Evaluation_System_Spec.pdf

We would like to hear your feedback to keep the development going on!

If you are not sure what I'm talking about, take a look at https://openacs.org/projects/openacs/packages/assessment/ (and especially the last part at https://openacs.org/projects/openacs/packages/assessment/rfc/).  An assignment can be seen as a question of type "file".

In any case, you should use grade_id in your evaluation (instead of grade, if you are using grade table). Add a locale to the grade table, to allow multiple grading scales, if this is wanted. But I better stop here, just read the specs ;).

How quickly do you need to start on this, as we already have a couple of interested parties in the whole assessment/grading/assignment area. Sadly the sponsors so far had different priorities, but it would give the opportunity to pool the money (as well as developers/experience) and get the packages working right and beat commercial systems at it.

I had the oportunity to revisit the idea of ePortfolios

(https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=52750)

When someone mentioned they are trying out the open source version of this product.

http://www.rsmart.com/ePortfoliodemo.php

It seems useful and not difficult to implement in OACS. Do you anticipate your evaluation project having portfolio like funtionality?

I realize you aren't trying to create a portfolio system I'm just interested in understanding both portfolio systems and what you are building better.

Portfolios are intersting because there is so much in OACS that is a lot like one yet we don't actually have the functionality.

For instance, in the Homework package a student uploads a document as evidence of having done an assignment.  Then the instructor uploads comments. So far this is very similar to a portfolio system. But in a portfolio system there is a view of all of a student's work not just assignment by assignment and there is addional flexibility to control who has read on both the documents and the comments.

You're system will  have the student centered view of assignemnts right?

Can you view a grade report by student across classes or just for all assignments within a class?

Does the instructor just submit a grade or can he also submit comments?

In your system, does a student submit a file storage document as thier assignment, this is the way the homework package works, or are assignments submitted through a more survey like interface?

I'm not trying to add any requirements, you have already bitten off plenty! Just trying to understand what you are doing and think about different ways the same functionality might be reframmed for marketing purposes.  Maybe, if its somewhat close, the portfolio products might give you some UI ideas.

Thanks
Caroline

<blockquote> In your system, does a student submit a file storage document as thier
assignment, this is the way the homework package works, or are assignments
submitted through a more survey like interface?

</blockquote>

Will work more in the sense of how the homework package does, instead of the survey like, since the experience of running this package for almost 2 years has shown that that interfase is the best. The UI of this package, specially, has been used / tested by several professors, TAs, students, so its quite polished (that doesn't mean that it cannot be improved, but at least we will be for sure that is a good one)

Of course, a cross-reporting class functionality will be really useful and not difficult to make. Actually the reporting area of the tool is one that has been taken a big amount of the work, so better wait to see it or try it online, and then give us feedback to improve it.

You're system will  have the student centered view of assignemnts right?

-Yes, and it will support group assignments too (parties) for the assignments thar are in groups.

Can you view a grade report by student across classes or just for all assignments within a class?

-Currently we only have thought about reports for the professors for all assignments within a class, but an administrator can see the reports of the students across classes.

Does the instructor just submit a grade or can he also submit comments?

-He can also submit comments and decide whether the student can see the grade or not.

regards, jopez

Also, I have now a better understanding of your evaluation system aswell. First I thought of something like an extended survey tool that serves as an assessment tool.

One important thought I had on your evaluation system was the possibility to assign tasks to groups rather than single students. Thus a bunch of students can form a group that works on the tasks given by the professor.

Why this feature you may ask:

When a professor simply wants to improve the interaction between him and the students on the one hand and his own course on the other without thinking of grading in first hand he could offer a kind of a competition between groups of his students who participate. The is a deadline for submission the students have to stick with. The professor will score the replies and students can see the ranking of their group for this competition. This has a great fun and motivation factor.

We have something similar here at the university written in php and the course where this tool is used is one of the best visited because students identify themselves more with the subject and there exists a play element in the course.

The professor can use the replies of the groups to improve his course by focusing on those subjects the groups had most problem with.

Greetings,
Nima

greetings, jopez

I've tested out the evaluation package from head (actually a few weeks ago now).  That's a very slick package!

May I offer some help and suggest a feature?

Offer to help:
- The en_US translations maybe need a little bit of work.  I was confused a few places by the terminology used.

Feature suggestion:
- It would be very useful to be able to insert scores into the gradebook from outside the evaluation package (for instance, as the result of a survey/assessment/whatever, but I couldn't find any public tcl API for doing so.  I hacked in a work-around for some code that assumes it is being called from within the evaluation package.  (Find the evaluation package within the dotlrn class rather than relying on [ad_conn package_id] to return the evaluation package_id.)  However, then I got stuck on trying to insert a grade, probably because the CR makes my head spin.