[Contrib: Evaluation System] UCT customizations that you may want in trunk

Tue May 18 13:49:16 PDT 2010

Lovemore

Here at Maryland, we have just completed our 12th production evaluation period and will be starting our 4th year of course evaluations via EVALSYS.  Overall, I have some concerns about the timing of this request.  When Michigan proposed merging their branch changes into trunk, there were several conference calls around each item they proposed to merge and discussions around what it really meant and what the implications were.  I think it is important that we all understand the implications of adding something that may be specific to an individual institution and its own workflow that may not "map" to other institutions in general.  So, I am a bit wary of having this request come at this time asking for a merge to occur by July 27 with no phone calls scheduled to discuss each item below in detail.  This is a bad time for us to check these out because we just finished our course evaluation process for this semester and are busy pulling reporting together.

There is one specific concern in regards to item 6 below.  It is my understanding that back in February our developer contacted you about this issue along with a concern that your implementation not only stops the available email messages from being sent, but it also prevents reminders and due jobs from being scheduled.  This, of course, for us means that this function has been "broken" as we need that capability.  It is nice to have the feature to stop the available email, yet we need the other functionality that goes with that job to continue to function.  We had created EVALSYS-886 to address this issue but had not committed code yet because we are in the final stages of testing.  I think it is best to follow up on this particular item to be sure reminders and due jobs are being scheduled as required.

I think we've discussed this in the past and probably discussed this at our BOF we had last summer at the Sakai conference, but I think we may need to discuss an overall process to follow now that we seem to have more development activity happening at multiple institutions.  It is important that all changes, no matter how small, be put out there for discussion - one example is the change in template edit view where the term "blocks" was changed to "groups" for terminology. I didn't really discover this until I was doing a demo and realized I was telling them "blocks" and they were asking about "groups".  "Groups" is already a term used for "assigning groups" in an eval so this is confusing.  Can we change that back to "blocks"?

My general concern is whether we need to put a little more structure on this process.  I am aware we all have much on our own plates, but I think we need some discussion on how we move forward to help this product mature in a fashion that is effective for all of us.

Ellen

On May 12, 2010, at 6:29 AM, Lovemore Nalube wrote:

> Dear Everyone
>  
> In the past year, UCT has worked on features for evals that have settled in the branch. We now look to either update our branch with trunk or merge to trunk and run our production build on trunk. We rather prefer the latter so that we take advantage of improvements and fixes in trunk. As such we would like to here from you if the following updates can be merged into trunk. Of course we can place global switches to these features to have them switched off by default.
>  
> Unique changes in UCT branch are (EVALSYS-914): 
> 
> 1. Changes to the Assign Eval to Group view EVALSYS-762: 
> a. (r61084) Move the current site to the top of the assignment list. In the Assign Eval to Group view, the current site that a user is in is brought to the top of that list. Making it easier for a user to select current presence. 
> b. (61086, 61139, 61140, 61143. 61152) only show assignable sites that are like the current site eg: if user is in a 2009 course site, the assignment list must show only 2009 course sites. This helps reduce the list and keep it focused. Fixes the problem of users who have a huge site listing (eg 50). reduces time wasted looking up site info on a large scale. 
> c. (63781) EVALSYS-823 Prevent site assignment if site does not have eval takers. TODO: this must not happen to an anonymous eval (see EVALSYS-915). 
> 
> 2. Changes to the Preview Evaluation/Template view: 
> - (6189) Add text in explaining that sample Lecturer/TA names will be replaced with real names when the evaluation is created. See screenshot.
> 
> 3. Changes to the Template Editing view: 
> a.  (61892, 61893) truncate the names of scales when adding/editing a Rating Scale so that the lightbox popup width/frame stays intact. This also helps to avoid horizontal scrolling when the scale names are too long. Truncation is to 90 chars. 
> b. (66259) EVALSYS-860 Ability to copy (duplicate) template items/questions. For discussion see: http://collab.sakaiproject.org/pipermail/evaluation/2010-February/000290.html 
> 
> 4. Changes to the Lecturer/TA selections: 
> - Through various updates, the selections panel has been moved to be site specific, user specific (ability to choose which people get presented to the takers) and UI is in a lightbox popup. 
> 
> 5. Alert user if site/evalgroup is unpublished: 
> - in UI show an alert message/icon wherever a site is unpublished ie: these views; assignments, take eval, control evaluations. 
> 
> 6. Ability to stop the initial email notification when a an evaluation opens. 
> - Very useful in cases where eval is released to a large class but the lecturer/user intends on notifying students through other means.
>  
> We are looking to make this move to trunk by the beginning of our second semester on 27 July.
>  
> Thanks
>  
>  
> --
> Lovemore Nalube
> OLE Developer (Vula)
> University of Cape Town
> http://www.cet.uct.ac.za/LovemoreN
> 
> 
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---
Ellen Yu Borkowski
Director, Academic Support
Office of Information Technology
University of Maryland
College Park, MD  20742-2411
301.405.2922 (o)
301.830.0196 (c)
301.405.0720 (f)
Email: eyb at umd.edu
http://www.oit.umd.edu/as/staff/Ellen.html

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