Delivery

Before you begin...

If you haven't ever seen Samigo in action, it may be helpful to take a look at the Delivery Workflow to get a visual sense of how assessments are delivered in Samigo Tests & Quizzes.

In comparison to the authoring process, the delivery process is quite straightforward. Obviously there are different ways that the different types of questions can be presented to the test taker, and there are complexities involved in randomizing multiple choice answers, or when to provide feedback, but most of the work that remains to be done with delivery is probably in ensuring that (a) there is almost nothing a student can do to either cheat or cause the test to malfunction, and that (b) the delivery itself allows every student to access the assessment without delay and submit at the proper time.

An additional hurdle is to provide the instructors with enough flexibility to modify tests at the last moment to handle unforeseen events – accidental early submissions, students with special needs, etc.

From the JIRA tickets out there I've formed the the impression that, aside from fixing bugs in this space, the Samigo Community seems to be focusing mostly on expanding the media aspects of the delivery process – primarily in adding the ability to include audio files in questions. Based on what's come up in the Faculty-Mentoring-Faculty meetings, it sounds like this would be interesting for Foreign Language, ESL, and Music instructors at Davis, at the least.

Briefly, then

Performance is the most fundamental issue here, both in terms of speed and reliability
- Most likely we will need some kind of load testing procedure in place to ensure that we don't repeat the problems of MyUCDavis, currently it doesn't seem like anybody is developing this
The ability to administer high-stakes quizzes through Samigo is not yet supported in a realistic way (see Limitations below)

Limitations

When session times out, student may find him/herself unable to submit a quiz SAK-2242
Students are accidentally submitting tests early SAK-3942
Unexpected behavior when quiz time runs out in Netscape SAK-4279
File upload questions don't work when the servers are clustered SAK-2297
Timing of feedback may need to become more flexible SAK-4005
Changing of feedback settings may also need to be more flexible
SAK-3943
Help pages are not yet context sensitive SAK-4103
Need a high-stakes question type SAK-1749
- Some clarification is needed about the distinction between a linear assessment and a high-stakes quiz SAK-3211
- There are various security issues that may be prerequisites to high-stakes quizzes SAK-1905
Generally, it doesn't seem like the test-taking is bulletproof enough yet, clicking too fast on buttons can cause problems, etc. SAK-6553 and SAK-6692
Apparently it's not yet possible for test-takers to attach binary content to questions SAK-3612
More information is needed about available assessments in the student view SAK-1906
Links in questions need to direct to outside the browser frame SAK-3641

For a more extensive listing of issues...

Check out Prominent bugs and tasks in the Foundation and UCDavis JIRAs

Continue to Importing, Exporting >

Glossary of Terms

authoring: the category of actions involved in creating assessments
assessment: in Samigo, a generic term for test, quiz, survey, etc.
assessment type: a grouping of characteristics that can then be applied to an assessment, so that each assessment is initially created with a particular assessment type, for example, a timed quiz, which has the characteristic that
delivery: the category of actions involved in administering an assessment to a group of students or other users
importing, exporting: the category of actions involved in loading external assessments into SmartSite, or outputing them from SmartSite in some format that external systems will be able to use
reporting: the category of actions involved in collecting statistics on assessments that have been delivered