CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2019 - E1985. Let course staff and students do reviews

Problem Statement

Peer review is a great way for students to learn about how well they have developed their application. However there are some problems with this:

• Sometimes, the peer reviews may not be thorough and the team/person's work reviewed might not reflect the actual status of the development.
• The reviewer might not know how well they are reviewing the peers work. They might not entirely know what tone to use or what suggestion to make.

By letting course staff perform reviews as well, the reviewer and the reviewee both benefit, improving the overall learning experience.

Current Scenario and Proposed Implementations

Issue: Allow TA / Instructor to perform review of student assignments

Current Scenario: Instructors and TA's can not perform reviews. Previous attempts were made but they either complicated the code or did not pass the Travis CI. For this particular task, the following screenshot describes how the current scenario looks. The page below is the “View Submissions” page when logged in as an instructor.

Requirement: This functionality is needed so that the instructors can easily perform submission reviews which can also be viewed by the students. Also for future purposes, other student reviews can be bench marked against an instructor review.

Proposed Implementation: The following things need to be improved/changed with respect to the above screenshot.
The second column consists of the title name with the link to “Assign Grade.” This is the part which we will have to modify. The link under the project title should be as follows :

1. “Perform Review,” until the deadline for the assignment hasn’t been reached. If he/she has already started the review, the link will be modified to “Edit Review,” until they don’t submit it.
2. “Assign Grade,” after the deadline of the assignment passes.
When clicked on “Perform Review”/”Edit Review,” it should direct to the review page seen by the students, and be able to perform the review. Thus it will direct the page to the response#new page or response#edit page respectively.

For the above-mentioned flow, the following file will be edited:
app/views/assignments/list_submissions.html.erb: This view file refers to the page in the above screenshot. This file will be edited to check whether the deadline for the current assignment has been passed, and accordingly it will display either of the two options denoted above.

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Issue: Allow TA/Instructor to add himself as a participant

Current scenario : Instructors and TA's can add themselves as participants.
Requirement : The teaching staff reviewing a previous project thought this might be a bad idea. Here's what they said about it in our project description. "It adds instructor to the assignment as a participant. This is probably not a good idea, because the instructor can review everyone, independent of what reviewer-assignment mechanism was in use."

Proposed Implementation : We need to find out how doing a review works. I'm guessing by adding the instructor as a participant makes it easy to do a review. If we don't tell let the instructor add themselves as a participant then we may need to add code in the part for setting up reviews. We will need a link in the list_submissions_.html.erb for "perform review".

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Issue : Method to check if the user is instructor / TA for the selected course

Current scenario : There is no method which checks if the user is an instructor / TA for the selected course (namely a course staff member)
Requirement : This method is required for redirection of pages which is dependent on the user role. Also, it is required to identify if the review is performed by the course staff.
Proposed implementation : A new helper file named course_staff_helper.rb will be created in expertiza/helpers/ which will consist a method which checks if the user is a course staff member.

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Issue : Show students that her/his assignment has been reviewed by the instructor

Currently Scenario: There is no way for the student to know which review was by the instructor.
Requirement: This helps the student to identify the review made by the instructor from the other reviews.
Proposed Implementation: An icon will be added in the file app/assets/stylesheets/grades.scss to make an instructor performed review look different from other reviews.

Activity Diagram of the Proposed Implementation