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

          o Age: 17~24 

          o Gender: any

          o Culture: college students, specifically, MIT students

          o Language: English

          o Education: college

          o Physical limitation: no

          o Computer experience: vast

          o Motivation: motivated, as the student registered for the course

          o Attitude: mixed; some students are really excited about the class, most just want to get the homework over with

          o Domain experience: ~12 years of experience writing and submitting homework

          o Application experience: generally familiar with web applications and the concept of uploading files, many have not used online submission systems

          o Work environment and other social contexts: college environment

          o 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
   1. Precondition: have email address, the course number of the class to join, (optionally MIT email / MIT ID number)
   2. Subtasks:### Fill basic information form, including email address, password, (optionally MIT email / MIT ID number)
      1. Validate the account by clicking on a link in an email
      2. Register for the class or be marked as an instructor by an administrator
      3. Optionally provide details for the public profile (nickname...)
   3. Frequency of use: first time of use
   4. 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
   1. Precondition:### The user must have an account
      1. Homework should have been assigned by an instructor
   2. Subtasks:### Upload your problem set as a PDF file
      1. Optionally answer a survey
      2. Check your problem set and quiz grades
   3. Frequency of use: weekly
   4. 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.
   1. Precondition:### The user must have registered as a TA
      1. A designed problem set.
   2. Subtasks:### Creating a new problem set or editing an old one
      1. Defining files to be submitted for the problem set
      2. Defining what gets graded and the grading scale
      3. Marking the problem set available for submission and set a deadline
      4. Optionally: decide late policy, enable extension
   3. Frequency of use: weekly
   4. Exceptions: creating a wrong pset
4. Grading problem sets## Goal: Having a grade for each of the students’ submissions
   1. Precondition:### The instructor needs to have a problem set prepared
      1. Students must have submitted solutions
   2. Subtasks:### Printing out student solutions for grading
      1. Grading
      2. Inputting the problem set grades for distribution to the students
   3. Frequency of use: weekly
   4. Exceptions: entering a wrong grade, missing grades

Domain analysis