ILIAS open source Forums

Dear ILIAS team,

I have some suggestions how to increase the user acceptance of the exercise module. I'm pretty sure that many (potential) ILIAS tutors want to use such functionalities.

1. Exact End Time:
Please append one 'end time' value to the 'end date' of the exercise.
The default end time should be 24:00.

2. Invidual Feedback and Annotation:
Please add a 'Send Mail' item in the ComboBox of the Exercise Member Listing. Via this item it should be possible to send individual feedback to the members. By executing this item, the members marked should be assigned in the CC field of a new mail with a default topic regarding the current exercise. In the Email body, the advisor can write her feedback to the members. Also, annotations (e.g. a PDF document) should be attachable. It would be fine if the feedback given could be stored in the member listing.


3. Statistics for tutors' exercise management:
In technical disciplines like computer science, each exercise can have several tasks with different possible amount of points. The tutor evaluates each exercise and assigns the points gained by the member. ILIAS should archive the points assigned by the tutor.

Several exercises can result in an overall test result. Members have to gain a special amount of points to receive an exercise certification.

ILIAS should provide one student view and one tutor view of the exercise results.
1) Students want to know how much points they got in each exercise up to now. Also, they want to know how much points they still have to gain to fullfill the overall requirements of the course.
2) The tutor wants to know the overall result of each (course/exercise)member. In such a listing, the matriculation number is indispensable. It would be fine if ILIAS could generate automatically one Email with all the details to the course tutor.

Feel free to send comments, complaints, suggestions, or feedback of any kind.

Thomas van Reimersdahl

Thank you very much for these suggestions. I think they will improve the use of the feature! I am looking forward the reactions from the community!

Also we of the Instiut Erziehungswissenschaft of the University Bern use the exercise tool. We hope this tool will be developed further. In the moment it is difficult to let to know the student wether he has pass the exercise. The tutor has to send now all students individually a mail. This is a big amount of work.

[quote="vanReimersdahl"]
>1. Exact End Time:
>Please append one 'end time' value to the 'end date' of the exercise.
>The default end time should be 24:00.

this would be very useful

>2. Invidual Feedback and Annotation:
>Please add a 'Send Mail' item in the ComboBox of the Exercise Member
>Listing. Via this item it should be possible to send individual feedback to
>the members. By executing this item, the members marked should be
>assigned in the CC field of a new mail with a default topic regarding the
>current exercise. In the Email body, the advisor can write her feedback
>to the members. Also, annotations (e.g. a PDF document) should be
>attachable. It would be fine if the feedback given could be stored in the
>member listing.

this would be great


>3. Statistics for tutors' exercise management:
>In technical disciplines like computer science, each exercise can have
>several tasks with different possible amount of points. The tutor
>evaluates each exercise and assigns the points gained by the member.
>ILIAS should archive the points assigned by the tutor.

Also this would be nice. But in our disciplines not so important.


>ILIAS should provide one student view and one tutor view of the exercise
>results.
>1) Students want to know how much points they got in each exercise up
>to now. Also, they want to know how much points they still have to gain
>to fullfill the overall requirements of the course.
>2) The tutor wants to know the overall result of each
>(course/exercise)member. In such a listing, the matriculation number is
>indispensable. It would be fine if ILIAS could generate automatically one
>Email with all the details to the course tutor.

A view for students would already be sufficient for us. They should be able to see the comments of the tutor. But if it would be possible to program the suggestion of Thomas, it would be still better.

Cheers
Martin

I understand that it is possible to specify a final date to submit the answers to an exercise and thus limit submissions. However, it would be nice if more information could be added to the Exercise interface for the person correcting the exercises.

In our case, many times we have teachers who are correcting students' exercises, and the students are then re-submitting updated exercises based on teachers' comments.

With that in mind:
1. In either the "Returned files" or "Returned" columns, show the latest date & time of submission.
2. In the "Solved" column, show the date & time the submitted work was marked as "solved".
3. Maybe highlight the "Returned" date if it is greater than the "solved" date. This would emphasize which exercises have been updated and need to be revised again.
Another possibility might be to show the actual difference in days/hours and allow that to be sorted upon? Thus the oldest, newly submitted exercises could be easily detected and dealt with accordingly.

At the very least having these two dates (with one highlighted or not) would greatly aid in detecting submissions that are still in progress.


Another improvement that would be nice to have...

Since a teacher is correcting an Exercise, they could find it useful to be able to send an email to a student, letting him know everything is ok, or that some more work needs to be done.

So why not turn the student's username into a link so it is possible to click on the student's username and jump straight to the e-mail page with that student's username already preloaded into the "To:" field, then the teacher can just type their message, send it and go back to the previous exercise screen.

Hopefully these suggestions can be incorporated soon ?

Cheers,
Christopher Vrooman.

Hi,

I'm doing some modifications in 3.7 so that this tool can be used easily by students and, hopefully, tutors.

I added a "remaining working time" for users, so that when the end time for the exercise has not been reached, a box is displayed at the right side of the "view exercise" screen. In that box, we can see the remaining working time as a string (i.e. "2 months, 2 days, 5 hours", or "5 hours, 3 minutes, 22 seconds").

This is already in CVS.

I would like to make the modifications of bug #1671.

I would like to rename "Returned" to "Submitted", "Returned Files" to "Submitted Files" and "Sent" to "Notified by e-mail", because it usually confuse the user, and they don't know what these fields mean.

Do you agree with these changes?

Cheers,

Arturo.

Arturo,

Your changes to the titles certainly makes their meaning much clearer to me. You've got my thumbs up!

Now, maybe you can tell me if the following two things are bugs or not.

Here is the situation:
We have 120 students, i.e. 12 pages of submitted exercises.
We click on the checkbox for "Solved", click the checkbox beside that user's name, and then choose "Save" -> Execute.

Now we go to the next page of submitted exercises.
If we go right back to that first page, the checkboxes are still selected.
However, if we select and save the status of any exercises on a different page, then two things happen:
A. We are always returned to the first page, instead of staying on the same page of exercises we are dealing with. (a bug I think)
B. The first page of exercises that were checked before no longer are displayed as such. Thus, it is impossible to know what exercises were corrected. (another bug I think).

Marking the exercises on the first page again will cause the 2nd page not to display which exercises were recently marked as corrected, and so on.

Am I missing something in the methodology of correcting exercises that dictates that the pages should operate in this way?

One other thing... I did some digging and I found in "class.ilObjExerciseGUI.php" that there is a ...->setLimit(10); statement to set the number of results displayed per page.

I have overridden that with setLimit(1000); to show all the exercises and thus temporarily avoid the loss of status when marking some exercises on various pages; however, shouldn't that setLimit statement take the same argument of the number of results per page ("Hits/page in tables") found in the Personal Profile?

Cheers/saludos,
Christopher

This has been implemented.


I'm thinking of changing the column solved to be an icon (like "returned" field is right now), and then the tutor would have to select from the action list "Mark as solved", so that we have one checkbox less.



Yes, that could be done...


I don't like displaying the difference date... opinions?



I'm thinking about adding a new icon to identify the updates, what do you think?



What about automatically send e-mail with the content of "Notice" field? What is "notice" field intended for?

Ok. Just show the last submission date, and perhaps allow it to be sortable?





That works for me. I'm just looking for some visual indicator that the Excercise has been re-submitted and needs to be looked at again.





Personally, I think just helping the teacher to send an email by providing a link, pre-loading that user's e-mail, and giving an easy way to get back to the same Exercise page would be sufficient. Right now we're using the Notice field as a sort of Note/comment about the exercise. (Which might not be suitable to email back to the student).

Cheers,
Christopher.

Well, almost all commented above is now implemented.

I only have to add the e-mail notification thing, like it is in the course members table. Easy though.

Anyway, I would like to move the "notice" input form to somewhere else, let's say "Learning Progress" tab. I think that this kind of comments about the exercise is always (or almost) related to the personal learning progress of that user on that exercise, and the table is growing too much horizontally, so that would be a nice place to have the comments on.

So:

1. Do you agree with that change?
2. Stefan (Meyer), do you think you could add that input form to exercise learning progress somehow? Something like "further comments" below the info screen will be nice.

Cheers,

Arturo.

Arturo, so what you're suggesting is something like this:
1. A thread of comments related to each submitted Exercise?
2. Would the comments only be visible for each particular student and the Professor?
3. Comments would be entirely 1-way. From the professor to the student?
4. So, if a professor doesn't want to bother with internal e-mail, he can just tell his students to check their "Learning Progress" often for each exercise to see how well they did or if they need to submit more work?



Sounds good to me.

How tied to 3.7.x are your modifications? Do I need to upgrade to 3.7.x as well as pull the latest files from the CVS or will the CVS files work with Ilias 3.5.3? If it is a short list, can you tell me what files were updated?

Thanks for your quick response!!

- Uhm, I don't really think that these changes could be easily applied to 3.5.3, there were a lot of changes in 3.6 and 3.7, but in fact I'm not the best one to answer this... perhaps someone from the cologne team? If you want to try, get the cvs HEAD and just compare the classes *Exc* and templates *exc* ... in case you are a developer, of course.



You guess it . And you finally give me an idea that could be helpful!. What about adding the "private notes" feature (introduced in 3.6) to this?

If a teacher want to add a PUBLIC note to the learning progress, the student who is watching that learning progress screen should be able to see the notes too (and only that student, not the whole group!)

If a teacher want to add a PRIVATE note, then he is the only one who knows about that note.

I definitely think that this should be added to exercises interface. It would be a great advance.

Please Killing and Meyer, could you help on this? Do you think it is feasible?

- Other ideas to this thread: add a "Mark Schema" Tab like the ones found in ¿Tests? so that we can add a selectable list to the members table (or learning progress) where the tutor grade the exercise. I think that would be great.
[/quote]

hi,

we have several institutes which like to have a functionaliy like Thomas van Reimersdahl described in the first post at 3. Statistics for tutors' exercise management. Tehy also like to have an Excel or CSV-export of all students and their task results and the complete excercise result of each student.
Is there anything planned?

greetings,

Nadine