[WWdevel] page contents/organization/versioned sets

[P Gavin LaRose]

Hi all,

(Is that a vague enough subject line?)

I'm starting to get geared up for more work on support for versioned sets
and gateway tests in WeBWorK, and have a couple of things that I'd welcome
others' comments on.

 - When viewing students' progress by set, I think there is more
   information than is necessarily useful in most cases.  In particular,
   I think it would be useful to be able to suppress columns, not unlike
   the filter that now exists for the Instructor Tools page, et al.  For
   gateway tests, I'd like the ability to suppress everything after the
   "OutOf" column.  Any thoughts?  Do other people find columns like
   "Ind" or "LoginName" essential (or even useful)?

 - Along the same lines, if one is only interested in the total score on
   an assignment, it becomes possible to display multiple assignments in a
   single table.  Actually, this is probably possible no matter what,
   though it's easier to see if we leave out the per problem information.
   For example,
                        Set1         Set2
      Name          Score OutOf  Score OutOf   Section  Recitation
      Gavin LaRose    8     8      10   10       000       000
      etc.

   This does require a way of selecting multiple sets for viewing, though.
   The ability to do this is desirable for gateway tests, where we
   routinely have two assignments, one for practicing the test and one for
   taking it.  Does anyone else think this would be useful?

 - More generally, I think it would be useful to have a "professor of a
   specific section" authorization level.  I'm thinking of the case of a
   multi-section course, where we want a "professor" (the course
   coordinator) to see everything, but generally want other professors to
   only see and work with students in their section.  I think Mark may
   have done something like this somewhere along the line.  This would
   require a bunch of new permission levels, however, viz.,

        become_student_in_section      => $sectionprofessor,
        send_mail_to_section           => $sectionprofessor,
        assign_problem_sets_in_section => $sectionprofessor,
        modify_problem_sets_in_section => $sectionprofessor,
        modify_student_data_in_section => $sectionprofessor,
        etc.,

   and then would require that authorization checks verify
        has_auth( 'become_student' ) ||
        ( has_auth( 'become_student_in_section' ) && (in_same_section) )
   Display of students in various pages (e.g., student progress) would
   also want to be limited to those students in the correct section.  It
   also becomes more complicated if an instructor is teaching two sections
   of a course.

   Thoughts?

 - For gateway tests, I'm going to rearrange the preview/check output.
   Currently, previewing gives the following display:
           -----------------------------------------------------------
           | parsed input    |  formatted input     |  answer result |
           -----------------------------------------------------------
       1. text of problem
           input box: [ student input ]

   I think I like the following output better
       1. text of problem
           input box: [ student input ]
          answer result
           input read as: parsed input
           input preview: formatted input

   (This is at least partly because for gateway tests we're putting
   multiple problems on one page.)  Is there any reason that I'm missing
   that argues that the current arrangement is a better interface?  (When
   problems are presented one-by-one it brings the results to the fore,
   which is nice, but it still seems a little odd to me that it's coming
   before the problem that's being considered.)

Thanks,
Gavin

-- 
P. Gavin LaRose, Ph.D.  Program Manager (Instructional Tech.)
Math Dept., University of Michigan
glarose at umich.edu                         "It's snowing still.  And freezing.
734.764.6454                              However,  we  haven't had an earth-
http://www.math.lsa.umich.edu/~glarose/	  quake lately."         - A.A. Milne