Surviving the semester: Assessments - Returning to Students

In a previous posts (see Surviving the semester: Assessments - Writing the Questions and Surviving the semester: Assessments - Writing the Questions - Coding) I looked at generating online student assessment. In this post I am going to look at the final part of the assessment process, which is marking and returning the marks and the feedback to the students.

Ideally the marking and feedback process should be done as painlessly and quickly as possible, and all it should involve is a simple click of a button in the virtual learning environment - Chalkboard. However, this is not the case, particularly if you want to deliver personalised feedback to the students (which you know they have received) as opposed to telling the students that they have to log back in to Chalkboard and to then click and dig around to find their feedback (see my earlier post - Push, don't pull your eLearners - removing barriers to learning).

To get around the limitations of Chalkboard, and to email out individualised marks and feedback (and also 'how the class did as a group' feedback) I had to come up with my own system, and do some scripting.

My solution was to use two files exported files from Chalkboard, a file of student answers of what they got right and what they got wrong and a file that contained the assessment questions and feedback, and run them through a script that generated a PDF file of marks and feedback for each student, and a PDF of class performance.

The above was fairly easy to do using php (see Do you speak my language: P is for PHP, POP, Program, Perl, Phishing, Python, Proxy), and because I am using a Mac the generation of the PDF documents, which although not as easy as I would have liked, was fairly straight forward and relatively painless once solved.

The final part of the puzzle was to send the files (individual marks and feedback, and a class performance file) to the students. Again, this was achieved using php and a php framework called PHPMailer.

The way I got this to work was by having all the feedback I wished to return to the students in a folder, with each file named with a unique identifier for the student. Using a script I then go through the folder containing the feedback files, identify the student through the unique identifier and pull their email address from the School database. The script sends the files out one by one to the students, and the net result is each student gets a personalised email containing a PDF of their work with personalised feedback, and a file commenting on class performance. Plus, it means I can 'mark' the work of around 350 students, and return all the work, in a matter of a few minutes.

Now, the question is, why can't Chalkboard do this? Why is Chalkboard using 'pull' when it should be using 'push'? (For more information on 'Push and Pull' see my earlier post - Push, don't pull your eLearners - removing barriers to learning).

0 Comment