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Yacapaca
Great teachers spend less time marking and more time teaching
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Today marks something of a milestone as Paperless School is finally getting a long-promised feature; recursive marking. Since the beginning, a teacher has been able to annotate an essay or portfolio assignment and send it back to the student. Now, the student can edit the work and send it back for re-marking. The cycle can continue for as long as the teacher chooses.
From the technical perspective, this has been a difficult feature to achieve. The system was built on the assumption that an assignment would go through a simple linear sequence of being set, opened, worked on, sent to teacher, marked, and returned to the student. Allowing recursive loops within this sequence required some of the deeper code to be rewritten. This in turn led to a debugging phase that took a full two months.
So how come we made the mistake in the first place? My conception was based on my own school experiences a generation ago. Essays were written, then marked. Then we moved on to the next topic. Only when we launched the GCSE Applied Business scheme did I discover that education is now far more of a collaboration between teacher and student than it used to be.
I’ve learned two lessons from this. Firstly, there is no substitute in product development for actually being out there, with a live product that people need to do their jobs.
Secondly, schools are unique. In the same way that school textbooks are a unique publishing format, schools’ publishing platforms will not and should not follow non-school models. Prior to commissioning Paperless School, I evaluated a number of off-the-shelf LCMS (Learning and Content Management System) products with a view to adapting one. Thank heavens I didn’t go that route.
Update: This was originally published in February. I felt it was worth redating it to coincide with the re-release of the recursive marking feature. First time around we were forced to revert to a previous version of Paperless School due to another bug in the same upgrade.
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- The Summary view is now much more useful.
- You can open it from the minute you start entering answers into an assignment.
- It only shows text answers, with teacher’s comments if there are any.
- You can copy the text of an assignment out of it at any time, to put into a word processor.
- If your teacher wants you to have another go at an assignment, he or she can leave it unlocked after marking. That means you can go in and change it, then submit it to be remarked – hopefully at a higher level! Don’t forget to open the Summary window so you can see the teacher’s comments as you work.
- The Summary view is now much more useful.
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We have significantly improved the way that marking works – particularly for essays and portfolio assignments. After you mark an assignment, it will by default stay open for the student to have another go. Just above the ‘save’ button on the markscreen, there is a new dropdown called “Prevent further changes by student?”. This allows you lock the work. Note that the work will also stay locked unless you add either a mark or a comment, as the system will think the assignment is still waiting to be marked.
What the student sees is also different:
- The Summary view is permanently available. It shows the free-text content of each assignment, together with the teacher’s most recent comments in red. These disappear when the student resubmits the work. Multiple-choice answers have been removed from the Summary window, so with pure multiple-choice assignments the window is intentionally blank. The Summary screen now gives students a useful place to copy work out to a word processor, if this is how you like them to work.
- When a portfolio assignment comes back from marking and has been left unlocked, the assignment can be viewed and altered. Free text will look exactly as it did before the work was submitted and can be edited. To see your comments, the student should open the Summary window.
- When a multiple-choice assignment comes back from marking and has been left unlocked, it too can be edited. Students can still see the feedback from their previous attempts, but the maximum permitted number of tries has been restored to each question. This obviously makes it much easier to get a high mark, something that should be born in mind when assessing the student! My understanding from teachers I’ve talked to about this is that in general you will prefer to lock pure multiple-choice assignments after the first attempt.
You can iterate around the mark->edit->mark loop as many times as you like.
Other changes
Along with this update come a round dozen performance enhancements and bug fixes. You are unlikely to notice any of these because, like the man who picks banana skins off pavements, their sole function is to prevent problems that could otherwise be very noticeable indeed as overall usage of the system continues to climb.
Yacapaca 