[Contrib: Evaluation System] Section awareness

Brian Jones bjones86 at uwo.ca
Thu Feb 7 09:24:59 PST 2013


Hi,

I just wanted to gauge the list on the current state of the evalsys with
regards to section awareness. Here at Western, we use the evaluation system
but not quite in the typical use case for which it was designed.

We make use of the evalproviders and the hierarchy projects such that we
have 4 'users':
	1) Admins (only responsible for creating templates)
	1) Eval Managers (those who create evaluations and release them to
sites within their assigned hierarchy)
	2) Evaluators (students)
	3) Evaluatees (instructors/assistants)

With the help of Nicola at Longsight, we've managed to setup everything so
that this process works. However, I've been tasked with taking things a bit
further. Our new requirement is to make the system 'section aware', in that
students are only able to evaluate instructors/assistants from their
official section/roster within a site.

For instance, Site A has two sections/rosters; section 1 and section 2. Both
sections in the site have multiple instructors as well as students. What we
need is to make it so that students in section 1 only evaluate instructors
in section 1 (and therefore do not see questions related to
instructors/assistants in section 2).

My initial roadmap (at a very high level) is as follows:

	- modify the UI such that the system gets the current user taking
the evaluation and checks whether or not instructors/assistants are in the
same section as that user; if not just skip over that iteration so they only
see questions for evaluatees in their section (this part will probably be
removed once the last two items are completed)
	
	- add a 'section awareness' toggle setting in the evaluation
settings UI; add necessary db field to house this setting, add code to
models etc to support this setting
	
	- extend the 'section awareness' to the selection UI, whereby
instead of seeing sites that fall under their 'heirarchy' node(s), they see
sections under their hierarchy node(s), or they see both (sites then
sections as children), so they can make selections based on sections rather
than sites
	
	- modify the logic behind who receives an evaluation; rather than
sending it to everyone in the site, send it to everyone in the section(s)
selected
	
	- modify the reporting logic so it's clear what section the evaluate
belongs to in the various reports

The above is just a proposed roadmap; I'm open to suggestions and comments.
Please let me know what you think, or if there is work already being done in
this area. I've already completed some preliminary work on this (mainly the
first two tasks); but then I found the following two Jira's:

https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/EVALSYS-902 
https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/EVALSYS-1075 

I'm wondering if there has already been work done on this? If so, where can
I find/use it? If not, are there any helpful suggestions/pointers/ideas that
might help me on my path of 'section awareness'. I'd also like to know if
there is any community interest in these features; I'm willing to put in the
dev time and supply patches.

Thanks,

Brian Jones
Applications Development
Information Technology Services
Support Services Building, Room 4326
Western University
(519) 661-2111 x86969
bjones86 at uwo.ca




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