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Student feedback

Another crucial part of the system is the provision of automatic feedback to the students through email messages. Essentially, this involves the student being informed of all the `irregularities' in their laboratory data: absences, lack of needed extensions, missed extensions, excused missed extensions (together with expiry date if appropriate), and so on. One of the most effective pieces of feedback is the inclusion of failure predictions for those students whose predicted mark is less than the pass level in some module. The feedback can also complain about the failure of the student to archive their work (e.g. for plagiarism detection) where appropriate.

The purpose of these messages is two-fold: to check that the student agrees with the data (it may be that the student has tried to give an excuse but it has not been recorded properly, for example), and/or to give the student the necessary prod to get their act together! The email messages are copied to the student's personal tutor to enable him or her to be made aware of the students difficulties.

An example message can be found in figure 2.

  figure49
Figure 2: Example student feedback email message

In previous runnings of the system, the feedback messages were sent to all students who had any irregularities, approximately once a week. However, in future they will be sent nightly to all those students whose list of irregularities has altered since it was last sent: this is more timely if, for example, a student has just given an excuse for absence, etc..

In addition, future runnings of the system will provide the laboratory staff with a printed copy of the irregularities pertaining to students in a particular laboratory group. This will appear next to the data sheet for the next laboratory session, so that the laboratory staff can easily see what problems each student is having in their laboratory.


next up previous
Next: Management aspects Up: Managing Coursework: Wringing the Previous: Extrapolation of performance

John T. Latham
Fri Oct 17 04:53:02 BST 1997