Peer Evaluation Module

Overview:

To develop an evaluation module to allow people to evaluation other people by a variety of criteria. Support creating groups & import users by CSV file, and report export.

Description:

Peer evaluation (or students evaluation) is a very common practice in universities. For example, instructor may ask you to evaluation your group members on their performance on group project. Traditionally, it is a very time consuming work for instructors. The purpose of this module is to facilitate this type of work.

It works in this way:

1) Instructors create students (users) by importing CSV (or add one by one)
2) Instructors create student groups by importing CSV (or add one by one)
3) Instructors set evaluation questions. Here, I plan to support three types of questions:

a) Simple question: Question with single criteria. Each student give comments and grade to other group mates based on this criteria.
b) Rubric question (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubric_(academic) )
c) Short Comment: Not associated with group mates; for course only.

(Support any type of these three questions and a combination of one or more type of questions)

4) Instructors export reports that contain student grades, evaluations received and given.

Benefits for Drupal:

It will help Drupal win more academic users since peer evaluation is such a daily practice in universities. Given the fact that peer evaluation (or assessment, in formal language) is widely used in almost every industry, it will not only useful in academic market.

Why Me?

I have worked for an open source project that offers this feature for years (www.sf.net/projects/ipeer). I feel strongly that all features provided by that application should be migrated to Drupal by making it a Drupal module since Drupal comes with excellent user management, permission control, and Single Sign-On integration.

About Me:

Graduating student major in Computer Science at University of British Columbia, Canada
Resume is available online at http://76.74.239.151/resume.pdf
I have 3+ years experience in PHP/MySQL development.

Mentor:

I need a mentor!

Difficulty:

Medium to Difficult

Timeline

Week 22 (May 23 – May30)

Requirement Analysis & Interface Design.

Other than written requirement analysis, most requirements will come in a “visual way” by simulating what users will see (interfaces) when using the module. Those interfaces include administration interface, front-end interface. Much of the work will be done during Community Bonding Period.

Deliverable:

Visual illustrations (by Microsoft Visio, for example) of all involved interfaces and work flows. Written requirement analysis.

Week 23-24 (May 31 – June 13)

Database Design.

This module will have a complex database structure. For example, we will have at least three types of evaluations (simple, rubric, mixed evaluation); for each evaluation, we can have multiple questions; for each question, we can have multiple criteria; each criteria come with different weight, etc. We also need to consider other possible question types, etc.

Some work will be done during Community Bonding Period. If everything goes extremely well, one week may be enough for database design.

Deliverable:

Database ER Diagram

Week 25 – Week 27 (June 14 – July 4)

Programming

Deliverable:

A working module that enables at least two types of evaluations, simple evaluation and rubric evaluation

Week 28 – Week 31 (July 5 – August 1)

Programming

Deliverable:

A working version that provides all functionality mentioned in requirement analysis.

Week 32 – The End

Testing & Bug Fix & Interface improvement

No new function will be added. But I will keep doing testing and bug fix. May also take some time to improve the interface by adding some fancy AJAX effects.