vodex.net

The (currently un-named) Feedback pilot is an automated student course feedback system developed for The University of Portsmouth’s Business School.

This page is still under construction. In fact, right now it’s mostly a placeholder.

Overview

Obtaining student feedback about courses tends to be a manual, paper-heavy, and intensive process. And the University has something like 18,000 students. Feedback is a university-level system (piloted at Faculty level) to develop a computerised system, as the extant method of, as one staff put it, ‘photocopying a truck load of sheets and getting admin staff to tot the crosses up’ is obviusly increasingly impractical…

Intent

• Automate tedious, error-prone tasks
  • automatic presentation of forms, capturing of data, including partial submission
  • automatic processing, analysis and summarisation of results
  • automatic pre-defined ‘windows of feedback opportunity’ by date, variable by year of study
  • automatic management of course-level ‘add-ons’ for customised assessment
• Reduce paper usage& staff burden
• Enable consistent management of feedback and evaluation processes
• Measure completion rates; Feedback can discern if a student has used the system (but individual data is psuedonomyised)

At the time of writing, the system is to run as a pilot for 2000 students during May-July 2006.

• Re-use of GoalPost codebase, including integrated Portal signon and abstracted access to corporate student records systems
• Developed in object-oriented PHP 5, MySQL 4, accessing corporate Oracle Portal instances
• Userbase of 2000 students, 200 staff
• Role-based permissions system (e.g. only course leaders can see feedback for a given course; department heads can see cross-department summaries)
• Fully W3C compliant, accessible, etc.

Screenshots