CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2015 E1577 MayYellowRoverJump

Intro

Expertiza is an open-source education and classroom web-tool founded by the National Science Foundation. Built with Ruby on Rails, it is designed to manage complete courses and students’ work within those courses. Each course can have a collection of instructors and students, though the interaction between instructors and students is minimal. The real emphasis of Expertiza is placed on peer-to-peer interactions, fostering a student-driven learning environment. Courses are comprised of assignments which users complete individually or with a team. Assignments usually encourage or require a team to enforce practicing peer-to-peer interaction.

One of the main tenets of Expertiza is its implicit peer-review system. Assignments inherently have a review stage where, rather than having instructors review a team’s work, other students review a team’s submission for that assignment. When completing a review, a student is presented with essentially a rubric for the assignment, and they fill in each category with the score they deem commensurate with the work of the team. Of course, each category has a comments box for the student to qualify the score they doled out. Each member of the submitting team is notified of the review, and the team can then decide as a whole how to rework their submission based on the feedback in the peer reviews.

There do exist issues, however, with respect to viewing one’s team’s reviews, particularly in the realm of usability. Our team has been tasked with revamping and enhancing the review UI to produce a more focused and uniform user experience for students and instructors alike.

Assignment

Description

Currently, in expertiza system, the review pages of students and instructor are different pages, which violates Don’t Repeat Yourself(DRY) principle and makes page UI non-orthogonal. The instructor should be able to see all reviewers’ work. Besides, instructor should be able to access the review report of all reviews, which displays all reviewer’s review to every project. The goal of our project is to (1)develop a uniform way to display both students’ review page and instructor’s review page, (2)provide instructor with a review report page of all reviewers’ reviews to every project.

Purpose

There is no denying that the usability of viewing peer reviews leaves much to be desired. It lacks uniformity across varying roles (student and instructor), and the view itself has no semblance of order or organization. Viewing a single student’s review is a chore for both instructor and student, as there is no clear separation between reviews. Our goal is to take the same data in the current display and present it in a more focused manner that allows a user, in either the instructor or student role, to absorb and process the content in the peer review more efficiently. Accessing, viewing, and understanding a review should be a far more simple task than what it currently is. In addition to the overhaul of the presentation layer, we also strive to drastically increase code reuse in the controller and model layers of the review module, which will in turn create a more uniform experience for both the instructor and student roles.

Scope

The scope of this task is limited to enhancing the usability of viewing peer reviews for both students and instructors. It is within our scope to modify the corresponding views for this functionality, as well as the underlying controllers and models as needed. The modifications to the Ruby classes will either be to accommodate changes to the view or to provide a uniform experience for both the instructor and student. As this is more of a user experience task, e.g, changing the way data is displayed to the user, there will be limited modifications to the base functionality of this module. It is not within our scope to change any element of the actual peer review process, such as selecting a topic to review or completing a review of a topic. As a result, we will not be modifying the results of peer reviews; the same peer review data will be present both before and after our task is completed.

Design

Discussion of Resolution

The goal of this project is to optimize code and UI of review module, to make it more readable and user-friendly. To be more specific, our work focus on the following specific areas:

   1. Refactoring grades_controller.rb and review_mapping_controller.rb, to optimize code organize, making code easier to read.
   2. Modifying UI to be more friendly. Instructor could see user’s name and user-ID, student should see reviews number, like “Reviewer #k” where k is the number of reviews submitted to the project/assignment.      Besides, the round of reviews (version number) and submitted time of reviews could also be saw by both students and instructor.
   3. Modifying UI to make it easier for students/instructor to see reviews of different rounds. Tabs is a good choice, besides drop-down menus are a good alternate. Maybe we also need to modify models to make it adaptive to different rounds of reviews.(Currently, review models will only record the latest version of reviews.)
   4. Providing a new page to display all reviews of one project/assignment as review report. In this page, reviews will be displayed as a format like “Question 1, Reviews 1, Reviews 2 … Reviews n” (reviewer’s name should also be included here). Besides, here we also need to provide different version/round of reviews of different questions. At the top of this page, there should be a matrix to show the summary of questions(as a row) and reviews(as a column).(How can different version be displayed in the matrix? Using different matrix works?)
   5. Providing a way to hide or gray the questions, making students/instructor more focus on reviews.
   6. Providing a search reviews through a specific keyword. And when searching, providing a ‘next’ button to navigate to next keyword place.
   7. Providing a two-dimensional table to show the scores of each question and reviewer’s name who gives the score to the question.

Mock-Ups

We’ll outline our proposed changes starting from the top of the review page and working our way down.

We propose minimal, if any, changes to the stats portion at the top of the view. This section already looks refined and provides a nice summary of the reviews submitted for a particular assignment. The only changes that might be incurred would be to the links to “hide reviews” and “show author feedbacks.” It may not make sense for these actions to remain once the presentation of the review content changes.

The first instance of major change will occur in the table under the stats section. The table will become interactive, dictating which individual review to show at any given point. To increase readability of the table headers, they will either be spaced out more along the top or rotated to display at an angle. The "Average" in "Average score" will be removed, as it is not indicative of the value held in the table. The percentages will contain links to display that particular review in a table below. Clicking that link will automatically scroll the page down to take the user to the displayed review.

The main UI overhaul will occur in displaying the actual reviews. We intend to pull all of that content and place it in a tabbed table, similar to an Excel spreadsheet. Rather than have the confusing options to show or hide a review from a different round, the table will have multiple tabs, one for each version of the review, which will be labeled with the the particular review phase they belong to. Clicking these tabs, the user can toggle between the review they would like to look at. Each review question will have it's own row in the table, with the following columns: Question Number, Question, Score, Reviewer Comments. These columns will be interactive, i.e., clicking a column header will sort the table based on that column. Under each question number, there will be an option to "View Aggregate Scores," which will compile a table consisting of the selected question from every review. In this manner, a user can swiftly compare the scores they received on a single question from every review.

Note that the specific interaction schemes outlined thus far, including the screenshots, have applied to the student role. The instructor role will also receive interaction updates using the same underling display structures, but the content differ slightly from that of the student. Instead of a 2 x N table like the student role has holding the scores from each review, the instructor will have a M x N table, where M is the number of students in the course and N is the number of assignments for that course. The column headers will become the assignment names, and the rows will have the names of students. The i, j entry will contain the score that Student i gave for Assignment j. This value will be interactive, controlling which review is displayed below the table. The columns will be sortable just as they are in the student view. Clicking a score will display that particular review below the master table in a tabbed tabular view, just as it is for the student's view. We will be able to reuse the structure in the student's view for this purpose.

Design Patterns

• FlyWeight Design Pattern: using flyweight design pattern, we can use sharing data/gui to support large numbers of fine-grained objects efficiently. For instance, in expertiza system, students’ review pages and instructor review pages. We can use one page to display in both students’ ‘version’ of review page and instructor’s ‘version’ of review page.

• Strategy Design Pattern: using strategy design pattern, we can display one page into different ‘version’ of page according to different role. For instance, in students’ review page, he will see reviewer’s id, and in instructor’s review page, he will see reviewer’s fullname. In here, student and instructor are different strategy.

• Front Controller Design Pattern: with front controller design pattern, we will display different views based on the URL and currently user’s role.

• Module Design Pattern: by module design pattern, source code can be organized into components that accomplish a particular function or contain everything necessary to accomplish a particular task. In JavaScript files, we use anonymous functions for responsiveness on client side via javascript and jquery.

• Iterator Design Pattern: iterator design pattern is used to iterate through data structures in Ruby actions and when rendering the view. For instance, we need to display all reviewer’s reviews to one round, so we need the collection of all reviewer’s reviews and then iterator to display.

• Facade Design Pattern: facade design pattern provides a unified and higher-level interface to a set of interfaces in a subsystem, which makes the subsystem easier to use. For instance, in students’ review page, grades, commands and feedbacks are from three controller, and they are combined in review controller and display in one review page.

Use Cases

• View Review Page as Student : General use case, capturing a student viewing his or her own reviews with corresponding user account.
• View Review Page as Instructor : General use case, an instructor associated with the course in which to review's assignment is included, viewing reviews for a student participating in that assignment.
• Expand All Reviews : Reviews may be initially condensed in the UI by default. This use case covers the ability for a viewing user to expand expand all reviews in the UI at once, with one click of the mouse.
• Condense each Review : The ability to expand and condense each review of the scores page.
• View Review Detail: (As Student) : The ability to see review detail (questions, scores answers), of each review, as student.
• View Review Detail: (As Instructor) : The ability to see review detail (questions, scores answers), of each review, as instructor.
• View Reviews, with Versions in a comparable manner : The ability to see different versions or rounds of each review, either side by side, or or tab from one to the other.
• View Reviews, Grouped by Review :
• View Reviews, Grouped by Question :

Proposed Tests

• UI Testing:
• Controller Testing: view person with no reviews, view person with reviews but no scores nor comments, view reviews with scores --,0,1,2,3,4,5. view reviews with comments with length 10,20,30,40,50,60,70,80,90,100,110,120,130,140,150,160,170 characters.

Implementation

Target files: app/models/response.rb, app/views/grades/_reviews.html.erb and app/views/popup/team_users_popup.html.erb

Key tables: questionnaires, questions, responses, response_maps, answers.

Task 1: Compact the review display and colorize the background.

The code for displaying review is implemented in a action call 'display_as_html' in app/models/response.rb. The action basically links html code then return it as a string. To eliminate the blank line between items, some 'BR' tags in the display_as_html need to be delete. To use different color in the background for different review, we plan to insert id for reviews in _reviews.html.erb, then write css for colorization in the app/assets/stylesheets/ folder.

Task 2: Show basic information about each review for both instructor and student.

To extract the data that need to be displayed, the models involve and their relationships to each other need to be analyzed. For students, _reviews.html.erb should be edited. The code to display those data should be insert after 'Review #' and before 'display_as_html' as following:

    <% if controller.action_name != "view_my_scores" %>
        <a name="<%=prefix+"_"+review.map.reviewer.name%>"></a><%= review.display_as_html(prefix) %>
    <% else %>

            <h2>Review <%= count %></h2>
            <!--insert basic information--!><BR/><BR/>
            <%= review.display_as_html(nil,0, nil) %><BR/><BR/>

For instructors, team_users_popup.html.erb should be edited. The information such as reviewers's id, name, review's round number and updated time can be added after the 'else' division:

<%if @scores == nil%>

  <tr> <td align = "center">No review done yet.</td> </tr>
  <br/>
  <tr>
    <th align = "left"> Reviewer score </th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td align = "center">--</td>
  </tr>
  <br/>
<%else%>

Task 3 and 4: Use tab to change reviews according to round, version and questions.

Using the 'round' attribute in the 'response' table to differentiate reviews in distinct rounds, for students the code inside following for-loop located in the _reviews.html.erb wil be rewritten and tab UI in JQuery will be used.

<% for review in rscore[:assessments] %>
.
.
.
<% end %>

For instructors, in the team_users_popup.html.erb file, the code inside 'else' block should be rewritten to adapt tab UI.

<%if @scores == nil%>
.
.
.
<%else%>
.
.
.
<%end%>

Suggestions for Future Improvements

-make the instructor and student view for reviewing scores and grades orthogonal (e.g. use the same code.)