In early February Patrick announced he would be returning to New Zealand, giving about 4 weeks of handover time before he departed. The LSIS project was now moving rapidly as we tried to create a prototype that would be fit for the initial testing. Martin Hawskey (our mentor) came to the college to run the final training session for staff, which was a combination of recapping, consolidating and discussing the various different ways in which things could be done.
Something that has become apparent as part of this project, is trying to factor in the very varied ways in which people operate, and trying to create a solution that meets everyones needs has been the main challenge of this topic. There was a period of a few weeks where it looked like what we were setting out to do wasn’t going to be possible, but with much perseverence, conversations with various people, and the hard work of Martin, we seem to be able to find a solution to each of the problems that was being presented.
For example:
When it comes to recording grades, we have identified there are 2 different ways that people like to work –
- Some like to record the grades into a grid for the whole class, then push these grades to the individual marking sheets for each learner, where further feedback is added.
- Other tutors prefer to enter the grades for each student into the feedback sheet for that student, and for these grades to then feed back into the central recording grid.
To overcome the above issue, the basic way that the mechanism will work is to enter the grades into a central grid which will then push the grades into the indivudal feedback sheets – which will suit the indivuduals that like option 1 (and is more sensible way to work this technically). However for the tutors that like option 2 above, there will be an option they can select to enter the grades in a form that looks like a feedback sheet, but is actually putting the relevant data into the grid as per the first method.
Regardless of which method of entry has been used to enter the grades, these will then be pushed to the individual feedback sheets where the textual feedback will be added.
Another issue that arose, is the different ways that people like to format their descriptive feedback. The original idea was that all of the information within the feedback sheets, would be housed within a spreadsheet – making it possible to extract information so for example a progress tutor could get a summary of all the feedback for all the assignments one of their learners is doing. The problem with this, is that the information will have to be stored within cells within the spreadsheet – and it isn’t possible to apply formatting within a cell, so if you wanted to give textual feedback that is nicely laid out with line breaks, and some points emphasised and other bulleted etc. (and maybe some containing hyperlinks to additional information for them). It was agreed that it would be wrong to force lecturers to use the spredsheet option at the expense of them not being able to format the output, so we have created a model where they will enter the descriptive feedback into the individual feedback sheets (applying the desired formatting as they go), but we have had to sacrifice the option of having this information held centrally.
So…This project has felt a bit like running up a downward escaltor, you make a few steps progress, but that reveals another issue which puts you a few steps back, you then move forward a few steps, then go back a few, this has impacted heavily on the timescale for the project, as the first testable version is still being developed, and will now have to be tested after Easter – which in itself is awkward as there won’t be many weeks of assessments coming in before the course finishes, so we may only be able to run 1 iteration of the test, but we are proving that this idea had potential, and rather than rushing and getting it wrong, we are holding back as we try to get it right.
Dave Foord
Image by Grey cells