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CourseWeb Seven

Group Members

  • Victor Costan
  • Yafim Landa
  • Ye Wang
  • TA: (TA's name)

Problem Statement

Our goal is to make a website that will automate and simplify the process of collecting and grading homework for classes. We will use Victor’s submission website as a starting point, so that we can focus all our engineering power on usability.

The two popular systems for submitting homework at MIT are paper-based submission, and Stellar. Paper-based submissions are unbeatable in terms of initial setup cost, but make it hard to keep track of psets, and require an out-of-band system for recording grades. We conjecture that we can do better than Stellar on usability.

GR1 - Task analysis

User analysis

We have two user classes:

  1. Student: MIT student, general experience with Internet sites, most of them have used Facebook
    • Age: 17~24 
    • Gender: any
    • Culture: college students, specifically, MIT students
    •  Language: English
    • Education: college
    • Physical limitation: not considered in this design
    • Computer experience: vast
    • Motivation: motivated, as the student registered for the course
    • Attitude: mixed; some students are really excited about the class, most just want to get the homework over with
    • Domain experience: ~12 years of experience writing and submitting homework, >=1 year of experiencing using online homework submission system
    • Application experience: generally familiar with web applications and the concept of uploading files, many have not used online submission systems
    • Work environment and other social contexts: college environment
    • Relationships and communication patterns: college environment, mostly communicate digitally

   2. Teaching Assistant: MIT grad student, OK to have a training session, learnability somewhat less important than efficiency (Optionally separate TAs and graders)

          o Age: 21+

          o Gender: any

          o Culture: graduate students, specifically, MIT graduates

          o Language: English

          o Education: college graduate

          o Physical limitation: no

          o Computer experience: moderate

          o Motivation: motivated, as the site promises to make the TA job easier

          o Attitude: generally positive, as an instructor who wants to TA for the course

          o Domain Experience: vast experience submitting homework, many have not TAed before

          o Application Experience: generally familiar with web applications, may not have used an online submission system

          o Work environment and other social contexts: college environment

          o Relationships and communication patterns: college environment, mostly communicate digitally 

Task analysis

The current submission website has been used for 6 terms (4 times in 6.006, 1 time in 6.857, 1 time in 6.470), and Victor responded to support requests from the teaching assistants and students. Based on this experience, we have distilled the following core tasks.

  1. Account Creation## Goal: Create and configure an account to get access to the user-specific features of the website## Precondition: have email address, the course number of the class to join, (optionally MIT email / MIT ID number)## Subtasks:### Fill basic information form, including email address, password, (optionally MIT email / MIT ID number)### Validate the account by clicking on a link in an email### Register for the class or be marked as an instructor by an administrator### Optionally provide details for the public profile (nickname...)
    1. Frequency of use: first time of use
    2. Exceptions: enter wrong email address, wrong class number, wrong name
  2. Submitting homework, answering surveys (how many hours, etc.), and checking your grades## Goal: Have your problem set be evaluated by the TAs## Precondition:### The user must have an account### Homework should have been assigned by an instructor## Subtasks:### Upload your problem set as a PDF file### Optionally answer a survey### Check your problem set and quiz grades## Frequency of use: weekly
    1. Exceptions: submit the homework not on time, wrong format of documents, forgot to attach documents before submitting. 
  3. Creating/Editing problem sets## Goal: Defining the files that students must upload for a problem set, and the grading structure.## Precondition:### The user must have registered as a TA### A designed problem set.## Subtasks:### Creating a new problem set or editing an old one### Defining files to be submitted for the problem set### Defining what gets graded and the grading scale### Marking the problem set available for submission and set a deadline
      1. Optionally: decide late policy, enable extension
    2. Frequency of use: weekly
    3. Exceptions: creating a wrong pset
  4. Grading problem sets## Goal: Having a grade for each of the students’ submissions## Precondition:### The instructor needs to have a problem set prepared### Students must have submitted solutions## Subtasks:### Printing out student solutions for grading### Grading### Inputting the problem set grades for distribution to the students## Frequency of use: weekly
    1. Exceptions: entering a wrong grade, missing grades

Domain analysis

 

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