Problem scope and size

The problem is familiar enough:

• There are 220 to 250 students in each year.
• Most students take perhaps 12 modules, chosen from, say, 24.
• Each module typically has 10 to 16 hours of scheduled laboratory per student, with different groups of students scheduled at different times. By laboratory, we mean any form of continuous assessment work (including pen and paper based).
• The scheduled hours of laboratory for a module are divided into timetabled sessions, with compulsory attendance, and some with deadlines.
• The students are divided into groups for each module taken, and different groups have their sessions on different days.
• There are around 30 lecturers and 50 postgraduate students staffing the undergraduate laboratories, each with their own view, or small set of views, of the curriculum.
• There is one year manager for each year. A year manager may thus be required to coordinate and manage around 30,000 hours of student coursework in a year.

In addition to being able to manage this complexity, desirable features of any solution to the problem include:

• Consistency in administration and general organization across the many different laboratory modules. This is mainly to minimize the confusion of (especially) the students.
• The ability to easily monitor the whole progress of individual students, and automatically identify people who are struggling and/or missing. This is difficult if information is not centralized quickly.
• The regular provision of feedback to the students on their overall on-going and predicted performance - particularly to those who are falling behind. This can be very expensive in staff time, unless it is largely automated.
• Encouragement for the students to work consistently throughout the year, in both the scheduled sessions and in their own time, and with a sensible balance of effort between their different modules. Again this can be very expensive in staff time if not automated and/or inherent.
• An even spread of assessment effort over the year for the staff, rather than a huge mountain at a few times. This clearly links with the desire for regular feedback.
• The ability for a year manager to easily monitor the complete progress of individual modules, so that problems (such as an exercise being too hard) may be corrected immediately. This can be so time-consuming that it will not happen, unless the information is readily available in a summary and consistent form.