CSC/ECE 517 Spring 2020 / E2023 Track the Time Students Look at Other Submissions

Problem Statement

Understanding how much time a student spends reviewing another's work is beneficial in order to better estimate the quality of said review. Given that fact it is important that Expertiza is able to track and display the given amount of time a student spends on a review.

The time spent on each review is a summation of multiple sources:

• Time spent of the Expertiza review itself
• Time spent looking at external links
• Time spent looking at downloadable files

However, overall the amount of time directly spent on the review itself is most important. One can track the amount of time spent on the review itself quite easily by simply tracking the amount of time from when the page is opened till when the review is saved/submitted. Therefore, being able to track the time from once a link is opened till when the review is saved/submitted will provide a reasonable estimate of the amount of time spent on each resource. This has the benefit of only needing to track information interacted with on the Expertiza review page, as opposed to other external files and links.

Current Implementation

Thus far, Expertiza does not have the aforementioned feature, however previous work was undertaken by other teams. The prior work of other teams was not merged into the Expertiza code base do to the following issues.

1. E1705 identified how to track the active time of windows opened from the submitted links. (Wiki)
2. E1791 provided detailed insights on how they planned to track time taken by a student in viewing a submission and possible edge cases. Further, they also implemented popups and figured out a way to open downloadable files. However, the details are rendered in a not-so-friendly manner and hence it was not merged. (Wiki)
3. E1872 tried to solve this by incorporating the statistics in the review reports page, but their UI made the page cluttered and not friendly. Further, it was hard to identify which statistic belonged to which review, and there were almost no tests. (Wiki)
4. E1989 tried to solve this by building off of E1791. The team took the base code and attempted to implement the ability to track time spent on the review page, as well as other external links, however the code was not merged due to a large amount of white-space, as well as difficulty in distinguishing actual code changes.

Proposed Solution

In review of previous iterations of this project, it was found that project E1791 would prove to be a good starting point for completion of this project's requirements. This build has already implemented systems that help track time spent viewing external pages as well as time spent viewing certain types of downloadable files. To achieve our goals outlined in the Problem Statement, the following changes need to be made:

The time spent on the Expertiza assignment review page needs to be tracked.

• Due to Expertiza generating report text boxes with HTML iFrames, we will track whether or not the document hasFocus() to determine when a student is on the page or not.
• To prevent the user from cheating the system by just keeping the review page open without doing work, a timeout feature will be implemented. After 5 minutes of mouse/keyboard inactivity, a popup will be displayed asking if the user is still working. At that point, the time contributed towards the total by the Expertiza page will stop being tracked until the user interacts with the popup to indicate they are still working. This is already implemented in project E1791.

The time spent viewing the external links and downloadable files will need to be made more accurate.

• Currently, if a student has an external link open as well as the Expertiza page, time is being tracked for both. Changes will be made so that when the student is working on the Expertiza assignment review page time is not tracked for the external links or downloadable files.

The overall time spent on the review needs to be displayed in a "user friendly manner" on the "Review Report" page.

• Due to complaints on a tabular method, citing the review report table becoming too cluttered, we intend to create a pop-up window that will display the results in a table. The entries in "Team Reviewed" will be clickable. When clicked, they will display a popup that contains detailed information on where the time for the review was spent. For example, if a student spent a total of 22 minutes on the review, it will show that the student spent 5 minutes on the Expertiza review page, 10 minutes looking at external links, and 7 minutes looking at downloadable files. It will display these details in text format as well as graphically using a pie chart. The purpose of choosing this design is two-fold:

1. It will not require the instructor to have to go to a different page every time they want more details on a particular review. Given that the review report page takes a substantial time to load, this is a necessity.
2. It will prevent the table on the review report page from being cluttered by figures and too much data.