CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2016 E1708: Improvements to staggered-deadline assignments

Introduction

Expertiza is a web based application which can be used by instructors to assign tasks to students. Expertiza also allows students to form teams among each other, perform peer reviews on assignments and projects. It gives flexibility to instructor to allow students to see other student's work with intended limitations and impose required restrictions on student access. Expertiza has been developed as an Open Source Software (OSS) on Ruby on Rails framework.

Motivation

Expertiza open source development program has fetched many contributions from faculties and students of different universities and thus, it incorporates a wide variety of Ruby coding styles, and this has been a reason why Expertiza project is kept as CSC/ECE 517 final project. The students have been given guidelines on Ruby coding styles and many problem statement includes tasks like refactoring and writing tests which can improve uniformity in coding style. The opportunity to work on an open source project like Expertiza is also expected to provide student an introductory experience of understanding larger programs and making required contributions to them. The writing assignment along with programming assignment is expected to provide project documentation experience to students.

Description of Project

The project numbered E1708 and titled ‘Improvements to staggered-deadline assignments’ is intended to make contributors or students understand the implementation of assignments and due dates models and tables, so that they can improve on the methodology which is used to assign the due dates to assignments and topics. A staggered-deadline assignment is an assignment in which different topics have different deadlines. It can be pretty useful if different topics within an assignment can have different deadlines for submission as well as reviews. The project has been divided into three problem statements and each of them is addressing an individual functional requirement related to the staggered deadline. The statements and the proposed approaches to meet the requirements are explained below as implementation.

Project Requirements

The following issues can arise with a staggered-deadline assignment.

Multiple deadline topic available for selection past deadline

For a topic with multiple slots that is posted, if it is not selected in the first round, it is still available for selection in a later round. The team that selects the topic then is unable to submit their work as it is past deadline. A solution to this is to prohibit anyone from signing up for a topic whose submission deadline has passed.

Manual submission and review deadline entry required for all topics

Currently system requires instructor to enter submission and review deadlines for all topics. A probable solution to this is to allow the instructor to apply one deadline entry to a set of topics and also let the system calculate subsequent dates for subsequent project phases like review and resubmission, based on an initial deadline entry.

New submissions not identifiable among pool of already graded entries

Currently there is not way to identify new submissions among list of entries for which grading has already been done. There should some marker or way to distinguish new entries.