Development of ARCADE is on-going, and there is still much to do. The author currently has a list of some 150 enhancements planned for the future, varying from trivial to very complex. Some of these, in no particular order, are listed below.
There is currently no special software for editing the configuration file describing the structure of the laboratories! This is stored in a text file and carefully altered with a standard text editor.
Perhaps the most complex intended extension is a provision for running unit-based laboratory courses. The idea here is that there would be a number of equally weighted units, or `milestones' making up the total work for one module. In order to fit in with a deadline structure, the number of units would be a whole multiple of the number of laboratory sessions. Each deadline would require a student to hand-in at least some number of units, and at most some greater number of units. For example, a module might have 10 sessions, with 20 units. The minimum hand-in for each session would be one unit, the maximum would be two. The problem with this scheme is the management of which units correspond to which deadlines: this would be different for each student depending on his or her previous pattern of work!
It is certainly intended to tie-up ARCADE more closely with plagiarism detection software (currently it can be made to complain that a student has failed to proffer a piece of work for such detection as part of his or her feedback). Future plans include managing the process of negotiation with `accused' students, and even automatically emailing them about suspicious work before a human has looked at it!
Similarly, it would be very easy to integrate the system with automatic assessment software, and this is planned for the near future.
Much consideration has been given to the effect on the student body when the late penalty system exposes that the work is too hard, but nothing is done to reduce it. This is manifested when large numbers of students miss extended deadlines. In the discussion on deadlines and late flags above, we said that an original axiom of ARCADE is that, in general, laziness should be the only reason for a student getting a late flag. When this is not true, the effect on student morale can be very negative, even more so if they cannot skip out some deadlines in order to meet later ones. Unless one deals with this very carefully, the students tend to give up realising they have nothing to gain by trying hard, once they have enough marks to pass. Of course, the real solution is to make the work more realistic. However, when this does not seem to be possible, an alternative kind of late penalty may help: that of `graduated lateness'. This means that the amount a piece of work is flagged late grows the later it gets, rather than all of it being late immediately. The penalty would still not be expressed by deducting marks on individual exercises, like in many schemes, as one still does not want a student to fail overall merely through being late.
Another intended enhancement is to give the students more `ownership' of their data, by providing a mechanism to allow them look at it whenever they choose, rather than to wait until the laboratory manager emails it to them, or to have to ask for it. To this end, a recent development has been a client and server to allow a wider access to ARCADE, but the work is not yet finished. As this will be provided to non-expert users, a nice GUI is required. This client will also provide students with a structured way to respond to irregularities which they believe are erroneous. Currently, they either email the laboratory manager and typically give insufficient information, or they speak to the laboratory staff who may fail to solicit the exact information. Instead, the client program will ask them the right questions as appropriate to the irregularity concerned. A similar client-server is planned for staff use, so they can directly access information on their modules, or their tutees, etc..
As was stated earlier, the current strategy of sending irregularities once per week only to those students for which they are different from the week before, seems to be the best of the approaches tried. However, there is a feeling that even this can be improved on, and a future version will split the feedback into sections, one each for new irregularities since last sending, ones that were there last time but have changed, ones that are unchanged since last time, and those which have gone. This is based on an impression that many students do not keep a record of the feedback they are getting, so can find it hard to see in what way their irregularities have improved or got worse.
Related to the above is an idea to allow a student to confirm that he or she is aware of a particular irregularity, and thus for it no longer to be included in the automatic feedback. This is motivated by the odd student in the past who has been irritated by being told of a piece of work missed that he has known about and cannot do anything about now. However, the need for this may be somewhat undermined by the above plan to split the feedback into sections.
Much of the interaction between the laboratory manager and individual students is done through email, and ARCADE already provides several email sending tools. A future version will provide dedicated email management and storage facilities to make the process of receiving email less time consuming for the manager.