Here are the user stories for the first iteration of work on
SchoolTool's gradebook. This step is a lot easier in one way than all
the other development we've done, because Stephan Richter has a lot of
experience using Blackboard's online gradebook, so the developer has a
lot of first hand experience with the this kind of application for a
change.
This is just the first of several iterations of the gradebook, so
there are a lot of things these stories don't cover (like weighting,
for example). As always, your feedback is appreciated.
Stephan's User Stories:
Gradebook for SchoolTool
========================
This document describes the initial implementation of the SchoolTool
gradebook. Since I have used online gradebooks before and know exactly what I
would want, I am sort of acting here as the initial client.
In one sense, the gradebook is a fairly straightforward affair. You define the
activities for a section and then assign grades to the students. There are
two design cosntraints. First, due to partner school requirements, various
actions need to be limitable to certain regions of the application. Second, we
will reuse the requirements framework that was developed in cooperation with
Cando.
Managing Activities
-------------------
Before we can grade anything we have to define activities, i.e. homework,
tests, papers, etc. Activities can be declared for courses and sections. All
activities for the course are inherited by all sections. This way the school
can mandate certain tasks for a given course, like a term paper in English 11.
For this story to be complete, one must be able to create activities for
courses and sections, whereby the activities from the course are inherited in
the section. A activity has the following fields:
* title -- Short title of the activity to be displayed in the column
headers. I usually use "HW 1", "Exam 1", "Paper", etc.
* description -- A longer description of the activity. I commonly use
"Homework 1", "Mid Term Exam", "Yearly Term Paper", etc.
* score system -- The instance of a score system for the activity.
* (due) date -- The at which the activity was due or taken.
* category -- The category of the activity. The category will be later
used to weigh activities. Examples are "Homework", "Journal",
"Lab", "Paper", "Problem Set", "Mid-Term Exam", "Final Exam", ...
For the above fields to work correctly, we need to develop a set of grading
systems that can be used in the activities. The interesting part about this
task is that some score systems, like the letter based one, can be
instantiated without user input, while others, like point-based score
systems must be configured by establishing the maximum score.
Categories vary widely from school to school. Thus it is important to provide
a way to configure them. I have previously solved this problem by implementing
a managable vocabulary (for the bugtracker package), which worked really well.
What about extra credit? After talking to Tom about the issue, he declared it
"punted for now".
The time estimate below includes collaboration time with the CanDo project.
Time Estimate: 9 days
Entering Grades via the Web UI
------------------------------
Providing an efficient way to enter grades and keeping the possibility of
error very low is of uttermost importance for an online grading UI. I think
Blackboard solved this problem nicely. Blackboard *never* provides you with a
complete grid of activity columns and the students. They do this, I
assume, so that you cannot easily mess up previously entered grades. Instead,
they provide two methods of entering grades, both of which I have found useful
over time. One is that you can click on any cell, which provides you with a
screen to enter the grade. The other is to click on the column, which opens a
page where you can enter a grade for only one activity. I would like to
recreate this functionality in SchoolTool.
Further, for many teachers it is important to see statistics of the
grades. Common statistical measures include the point average, the percent
average, the score mean, the score standard deviation and the percent standard
deviation. Since not all teachers are interested all the elements, those
should be configurable.
Another important point for some people is the ability to sort by column. This
feature allows you to get a quick overview of the top and bottom students. I
have not used it much, but this is mainly because I do all my data analysis
with a real spreadsheet application, like MS Excel or OO Calc. For low-tech
users this option seems very useful though.
Time Estimate: 5 days
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