Date Oct 11, 2006 8:37 PM EDT From Marc Brierley <brierley@stanford.edu> Subject Re: Changing template type for assessment Body I think there was some confusion about which Assessment Type (aka templates) is being addressed. There is a 'Quiz' assessment type and a 'Timed Test' assessment type. It is true that the Quiz type does not have Timed Assessment turned on and probably should. One of our language instructors here at Stanford has given us the same feedback. We changed the name of Templates to 'Assessment Types' into SAMigo starting with version 2.2 to help jump-start their usage and understanding. We did this because we found that many people, including those who deploy SAMigo, didn't understand what Assessment Types were for or how to use them. Assessment Types are comprised of a set of default values and sub-seclection of the assessment settings for a particular kind of assessment. They do not contain pre-authored content. Assessment types are to meant to standardize and simplify the configuration of an assessment for instructors, not necessarily by instructors. Assessment types are best configured by an instructional designer or a savvy admin who pays close attention to the needs of his/her constituency. All of the selections for these settings are summarized here: http://issues.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/9T8 Given that we've only had these pre-defined types in for one version, we are expecting that they will need to be tweaked for their most general usage. However, we expect and hope that savvy institutions will take the opportunity to configure Assessment Types to their needs and make instructors' lives more simple. A language class quiz will probably be different from a chemistry quiz and an institution should feel free to construct their own tailored assessment types. We will watch these OOTB Assessment Types, however, among the other usability issues that we've heard about: http://issues.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/fGw As to why instructors can't change the Assessment Type from which their assessment was created...once an assessment gets created from a type, those settings and defaults are a copy from the original. We didn't want subsequent changes to Assessment Types to change already existing assessments. I do see the problem this creates if an assessment has already been created and additional functionality is desired. I'm open to suggestions for how this problem might be solved. Hope this helps, -mARC |