Re: UU & Grading

[Anatoly Volynets <av@total-knowledge.com>]

On 04/06/2011 05:14 PM, Ilya A. Volynets-Evenbakh wrote:
> On 04/06/11 15:09, Anatoly Volynets wrote:
>> On 04/05/2011 02:06 PM, Ilya A. Volynets-Evenbakh wrote:
>>> There are very few conditions, under which same UMO can be studied more
>>> then once. Otherwise it turns into a copy-paste job. For those special
>>> cases,
>>> we'll need some sort of special handling.
>> Looks like it's a matter of taste now. In my view, "copy-paste" isn't
>> something illegal in this case. If a student solves a problem for the
>> second time then he does it easier. I don't see it as smth. bad. Anyway,
>> it's for the teacher of the class to worry.
> No, it's for us to take care of. We either provide tools for tracking
> student's
> progress in course or we don't.

But you never know how this student made it! Neither in classroom
setting, nor on-line. Probably his father just explained him this very
problem the day before, who knows! Suppose we provide tracking and
tracking will show the student did well--that's it--he did well. I still
don't see any issue here.

>>>
>>> Hmm... So, suppose we let whole grading thing be completely tied to class
>>> (as opposed to course or UMO link). What kind of tools (ways to grade)
>>> do you
>>> envision?
>> In programming or functional terms? I just understand that a teacher,
>> while setting up a class for this course, has to assign grades to the
>> UMOs contained, if he so wishes. The teacher must understand the
>> assignment works within the class only. This rises questions then:
>>
>> 1) A course may contain hundreds if not thousands UMOs, so itseems
>> reasonable to provide a capability to group UMOs within a course and
>> assign grades by groups.
>> 2) A teacher may set up different classes based on the same course. He
>> may want to use the same grading, so we need to provide a capability to
>> save grades.
> I was kind of hoping to avoid having teacher assign grade weights
> for that precise reason. I guess it's unavoidable though :(
> 
> On the other hand, since we allow classes to be signed up for more
> then one course, it might provide a tool for "overall" grade, not bound
> to specific UMO tree at all... That might be useful. In fact, that might be
> the only possible way to handle this.
> 
> This may also simplify design of "competition" objects and the like -
> they just become a special case of course with some tests, a class
> assigned to it, and no sub-topics.
> 
> As for assigning grades.. Perhaps the best way to handle it is to
> provide a way to set some algorithms for grading? Dunno. We need
> better ways then just saying "this, this, and this get you 10 points each".
> Or maybe we don't. Dunno.

Neither me. Let's do what's doable.

>>>
>>> Well - that's exactly what I'm asking. What kind of statistics do we
>>> provide?
>> There were some suggestions in specs. Say, popularity of a course
>> (class) -- among students, employers, professors, expert evaluation,
>> known outcome, sign up/drop off ratio, etc. We need to set up a flexible
>> mechanism for ourselves to add/remove such categories.
> What work flow do you see here? Who, when, and how gives such feedback?
> How is this feedback limited to avoid skewing?

I don't know. Wikipedia like?

>>> Where do we put and expose feedback?
>> My first pick--for visitors
> That's not an answer. Everybody is a visitor :)

That's what I meant. People visit there and make decisions based on what
they see.

>>> Who do we allow to leave feedback?
>> UU students, UU authors, UU teachers, maybe UU experts if they exist.
> Again - not specific enough.

I have no more specifics at the moment.

>>> It's not about access to grade - that is obvious. The problem is
>>> access to
>>> correct answers. If I want to get 100% in a course, I recreate the course
>>> as an author, using same UMOs (at least problems and tests), then go in
>>> and look at answers and use them when taking tests for course/class I study.
>>>
>> No idea. What if a current student is not allowed authoring?
> First of all, that's too limiting. At least that's too limiting, if we
> really expect university-grade
> diversity in courses. In reality I hope we'll have higher then that. And
> in the end it means
> there will be many people who have both something to learn and something
> to teach
> at the same time.
> 

Then we need to do something really special for classes engaged in
official grading, diplomas, etc. This do not fit into "all open model"

This problem is ubiquitous today. Teachers do not know where student's
essays came from: maybe where just copied from the web. Wireless
communication devices make cheating as easy as plain talking, and so
forth. We build educational environment for those who wants to teach and
study. For those who seek and give official grades the discussed
problems have no solution today.

Actually, if a student takes a class with grading he may be restricted
to use the same course as an author. The restriction is not necessary in
all other cases.