Scaling Reassessments, Yet Again (Part 3)
I’ve been quietly complaining recently to myself about how the reassessment sign-up and quiz distribution tool I created (for myself) isn’t meeting my needs. Desmos, Peardeck, and the other online tools I use have a pretty impressive responsiveness when it comes to requests for features or queries about bugs, and that’s at least partly because they have teams of expert programmers ready to go at any given moment. When you are an ed-tech company of one, there’s nobody else to blame.
This is the last week when reassessment is permitted, so the size of the groups I’ve had for reassessments has been pretty large. Knowing this, I worked hard this past Sunday to update the site’s inner workings to be organized for efficiency.
Now I know what my day looks like in terms of which reassessments students have signed up for, what their current grade is, and when they plan to see me during the day:
With one or two reassessments at a time, I got along just fine with a small HTML select box with names that were roughly sorted. Clicking those one at a time and then assigning a given question does not scale well at all. I can now see all of the students that have signed up for a reassessment, and then easily assign a given question to groups of them at a time:
The past two days have broken the reassessment records that I wrote about at the end of the first quarter – today, for example, there are over sixty five students taking quizzes. In the scrambling of getting everyone their quizzes in the past, I’ve made concessions by giving simpler questions that may not honestly assess students at either end of my 5 – 10 learning standard scale.
With the user experience more smooth now, I have been able to focus this week on making sure that the questions I assign truly assess what students know. I could not do this without the computer helping me out. It feels great to know things are working at this higher scale, and I’m looking forward to having this in place when we get going again in January.