Authoring

Authoring

What's authoring?

In addition to providing instructors with the ability to build assessments of the six built-in types: Formative Assessment, Problem Set, Quiz, Survey, Test, and Timed Test, the authoring tool also allows for these types themselves to be customized, and for new assessment types to be created. Of course, there is still plenty of functionality that could be added – and most of the effort out there in the community seems to be either fixing bugs with the existing functionality or adding new functionality to this authoring tool (in place of considering other methods of authoring assessments or allowing instructors to upload simple text files, as has been suggested in several JIRA tickets).

Currently, the instructor can control, among other things, how many times an assessment can be submitted, whether late submissions will be accepted, whether to provide the user with feedback after an answer is submitted, and even whether the program should accept submissions only from specific IP addresses. It's also possible to break up an assessment into discrete sections and to control how questions are presented to the user – i.e. one per page or in batches.

Unfortunately, the user interface itself is neither intuitive nor streamlined. For example, in order to 'publish' an assessment – a necessary step if you want anyone to be able to use it – it's necessary to click on 'Settings' before you can find or select the 'Publish' button. This, and other counterintuitive design choices, introduce what I consider to be significant pressure to formally train instructors on the authoring tool before any kind of a large-scale release. Maybe even more importantly, the effort to allow users to include rich text and images in their questions has produced a very ugly user interface, where text editor windows are scattered across a very large scrolling browser page, posing an intimidating series of undocumented actions for even the most basic user of the tool to take.

As a result of this design decision, the process of creating an assessment also requires each question to be entered one-at-a-time and on its own screen. This means that there's no easy way for an instructor to simply copy and paste a list of questions that she's written up in a word processor. This strikes me as the biggest hurdle on the authoring side, since the awkwardness of this current method pushes it closer to the 'power-user' side of things and makes the hurdle bigger for non-technical instructors who simply want to put their existing paper assessments online. The choice in designing Samigo has obviously been to sacrifice ease-of-use for comprehensiveness of functionality, and I think this will ultimately limit the number of instructors who are willing to use the tool.

Tasks/Feature Requests

• There's some interest in sharing assessment types so they could be modified on a departmental basis, for example SAK-5199 and SAK-3526
• Request for more flexibility to accommodate students with special needs - allow instructor to adjust time available on a student-by-student basis SAK-3427

Limitations

• Big thing is adding new question types – adding calculated/algorithmic questions
• Currently, to share question pools between users requires import/export - can't do it staying within the authoring tool itself
• Copying question pools doesn't actually copy questions, it creates links SAK-3526
• During authoring the list of question-types available is not context-sensitive SAK-1379 – this could be a feature or a limitation depending on POV.
• Performance problems when clicking on 'Add Part' SAK-5323

Continue to Delivery >