Paint the Tiger, Carve the Swan

When I try to Assess student work using Scholaris, I come across the following error:

Class: Assessment
Function: GetAssessmentVerbages(ByVal FrameworkID As String, ByVal SchoolID As String) As DataTable

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Current function cannot be executed due to the following reason:

*FrameworkID is empty

Please take a screen shot of this error message and send it to support@solutionsit.com.au

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It then doesn’t display the student work that was submitted, and I can’t mark it, or return it to the student. I get several other functions giving the same error, two on the way in, and three on the way out.

Very annoying, as it means I can’t complete the full cycle of assessment usign this tool, which means I’ve hit the limits of it’s usefulness for now.

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I’ve just finished my first trial of Scholaris with real students.

I have a year 9 Electronics class, who attempted to complete a single activity on Diodes I had created for use in Scholaris.

The kids really enjoyed it, but there were a few technical issues we came across. The first was the general slowness: I think this was because everything needed to be downloaded for each kid, rather than having some caching in place. Once each kid got onto the right stuff, it seemed to be faster the second time around. This would result in a fairly serious amount of data transfer, as a caching proxy is likely to determine that https: data is different for each user - and it probably actually is, considering that it is encrypted!

This resulted in each student using up about 6Mb of their download allowance for one double lesson. And many of them ran out of internet data during that lesson, so only two were able to submit the work for marking.
(more…)

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I had a training afternoon on Friday with Scholaris, and came across a few issues I found hard to work with.

• The first thing I noticed was that in lots of cases there were 2 buttons with the same name (usually Add) in the one window - when you said “click on Add”, I (and others) invariably clicked on the wrong one some of the time. Whilst most of the time this can be fixed, there was at least one instance where all settings could not be changed once this had been done. (Virtual Classrooms, cannot change theme once Add has been clicked). I think that more specific buttons names (”Add User”, “Create Virtual Classroom”) would create less confusion than relying on positional context alone.
• Another issue I came across was that in the Assignment Manager, it’s possible to drag one Target Group ‘into’ another. This results in some weird behaviour, that is difficult to describe. Basically, the top-level target group is then given a name that is a number, and contents are not accessible. You can delete this top level group, and then everything seems to be a bit more back to normal.
• The biggest issues for me were in the Content Editor, specifically to do with Images. When you insert an image, and then resize it, pressing Control-Z deletes the image, rather than un-resizing it. Secondly, I feel that the “Lock Ratio” button images should be reversed - it would make more sense that the image reflected the state of the function (ie, a locked image indicates that the aspect ratio is locked, not that clicking on the button will lock it). Another alternative would be a checkbox with “Lock Aspect Ratio” as the label. (I have written down that this function didn’t work anyway, but I can’t remember for sure).
• I also think that all windows should be resizable - in a couple of cases I had editing windows that only allowed me about 4 lines of text entry - which is generally not enough. Having to scroll all of the time, especially when I have a large monitor and this window takes up a small fraction of the available space, seems silly.
• Finally, I think that all “Preview” windows should have a “Close Preview” button. At times I wasn’t sure whether to click the close box or not: sometimes a new window is created, sometimes one isn’t (in the general context of Scholaris), and it would be much easier to see when in a Preview window if a specific “Close Preview” button/link was in these windows.

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I’m involved in a trial program using Microsoft Scholaris, an online educational management and teaching tool. There are some issues I’ve come across as I work on it, and I’ll keep a bit of a record of them as part of this blog.

• The first, most obvious one is that it doesn’t work correctly on a standards compliant browser. You guessed it, it only works well on Internet Explorer, and only on a PC. IE mac is pretty ordinary anyway, btu Safari and Firefox both have some serious display issues. It’s almost like it’s been deliberately coded to not work properly.
• econdly, I’d like tools to work with tables better. HTML is notoriously hard to work with tables under. Surely a WYSIWYG editor that can do tables acceptably well isn’t that hard to include.
• Third: I don’t want the students to be able to enter styled text unless I deem that it is necessary. I am interested in content, not style.
• Finally, it takes so damn long to set up one assessment task. To do one questions, where the students have to enter five words, and five descriptions (Electrical Safety/First Aid, DRABC), it has taken me about 10 minutes to set up, and it still isn’t looking right. When I choose not to have a line break, don’t keep on inserting one!

I would love some software like this, that makes it easy to set up online tests and the like, but at this stage, Scholaris isn’t easy. I don’t know who Microsoft bought Scholaris from, but I think they should have waited a bit longer before doing so.

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That’s purpose is just to trigger Wordpress to update the Post count of each Category.

I’ll leave it here incase I need to redo this operation. It took me ages to tick each category box…

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