User Scenarios

There are several types of administrative users and end-users for the Assessment package which drive the functional requirements. Here is a brief synopsis of their responsibilities in this package.

Package-level Administrator

Editor

Has permissions to create, edit, delete and organize in repositories Assessments, Sections and Items. This includes defining Item formats, configuring data validation and data integrity checks, configuring scoring mechanisms, defining sequencing/navigation parameters, etc.

Editors could thus be teachers in schools, principal investigators or biostatisticians in clinical trials, creative designers in advertising firms -- or OpenACS developers incorporating a bit of data collection machinery into another package.

Scheduler

Has permissions to assign, schedule or otherwise map a given Assessment or set of Assessments to a specific set of subjects, students or other data entry personnel. These actions potentially will involve interfacing with other Workflow management tools (e.g. an "Enrollment" package that would handle creation of new Parties (aka clinical trial subjects) in the database.

Schedulers could also be teachers, curriculum designers, site coordinators in clinical trials, etc.

Analyst

Has permissions to search, sort, review and download data collected via Assessments.

Analysts could be teachers, principals, principal investigators, biostatisticians, auditors, etc.

Subject

Has permissions to complete an Assessment providing her own responses or information. This would be a Student, for instance, completing a test in an educational setting, or a Patient completing a health-related quality-of-life instrument to track her health status. Subjects need appropriate UIs depending on Item formats and technological prowess of the Subject -- kiosk "one-question-at-a-time" formats, for example. May or may not get immediate feedback about data submitted.

Subjects could be students, consumers, or patients.

Data Entry Staff

Has permissions to create, edit and delete data for or about the "real" Subject. Needs UIs to speed the actions of this trained individual and support "save and resume" operations. Data entry procedures used by Staff must capture the identity if both the "real" subject and the Staff person entering the data -- for audit trails and other data security and authentication functions. Data entry staff need robust data validation and integrity checks with optional, immediate data verification steps and electronic signatures at final submission. (Many of the tight-sphinctered requirements for FDA submissions center around mechanisms encountered here: to prove exactly who created any datum, when, whether it is a correct value, whether anyone has looked at it or edited it and when, etc etc...)

Staff could be site coordinators in clinical trials, insurance adjustors, accountants, tax preparation staff, etc.