Fools rushing in

[Clay Fenlason]

On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 12:17 PM, Daphne Ogle <daphne at media.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>  Is there someplace we can see the current design thinking for assignments2?

I think I'll be steadily working this into Confluence over the course
of the next two weeks, but I can start with some high-level points:

- the design has taken on more of a role-based separation (or, better
put, the families of common tasks associated with certain roles).
- the assignment functionality naturally orbits around 4 gravitational centers:
  1) Assignment authoring (and related management)
  2) Submission handling (and providing feedback/grading)
  3) The "To-Do" list dashboard view for submitters (as well as
returned feedback)
  4) The individual submission itself

* We find that faculty personae tend to be oriented around #1 and #2,
in that order, though a significant fraction of them deal only with #1
* Teaching Assistant/Tutor personae tend to be oriented around #2 and
#4, in that order.
* Student Personae tend to be oriented around #3 and #4, in that order.

The legacy assignments tool tries to do all of this from a basecamp of
more or less a single assignments tabular listing.  I think the new
structure we're pursuing allows us to both do more and do less -
provide more pertinent information across all the contexts, and yet to
limit the amount any particular context throws at you.  It also takes
pains to address a class of user that's really only been an
afterthought with the legacy tool - the submission "reviewer" as
distinct from the assignment author.  In the simplest case these are
the same people, but in many courses (especially the larger ones) they
are entirely different sets of people.  A further resultant benefit is
greater transparency of the submission-feedback workflow, to each
respective audience (or families of tasks).

~Clay