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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