School of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering
Crawley, Western Australia, 6009
Telephone: +61 8 6488 2537
Facsimile: +61 8 6488 1065
Email:
Stacey Fox, CATL M401.
4th November 2009
Dear ISL Committee
I would like to express my sincere gratitude for the grant I received in 2009 to implement my project ‘Development of On-Line Laboratory Report Assistant”. All funds granted, plus a little extra from my research account were spent in paying the developers of this project. I consulted with Dr Cheryl Lange before starting this project, and while we had a pleasant exchange of ideas, she informed me that this project was quite beyond anything she had envisaged.
The main objectives of this project were
- to enable students to overtly learn how to present technical data in an appropriate form,
- to provide meaningful marker feedback by using marking time more effectively
- to establish a template suitable for other laboratory reports required in science/engineering. set-up.
On the whole, these objectives were fulfilled..
Implementation:
The online system took around 100+ hours to develop and was written in PHP using Zend Framework. It currently uses SQLite for the database (but can be changed to any major DB). All data is stored in the database which is stored on the server. The system runs off the standard EE server. All personal data is stored in a single database file. The file can be backed up and archived, then simply deleted and a new "empty" database file can be created for the next semester.
Students currently have access to their marks and comments instantly. The developer is working on a second version to allow the release marks at the lecturer’s choosing. The developer is working on this second version for no payment.
How the system worked: Students logged in via the front page using their email and student number. They were then able to type directly into a page with text boxes for the AIM, RESULTS, CONCLUSIONS, DISCUSSION and then upload files for the results processing in Excel and another file upload for any equations not able to be input into Excel. A document was prepared for students which was a “help file” which was also available to them in the on-line system – this contained examples of “good” and “poor” report and was well-received. Students were sent a Microsoft Word template to type up their reports and then copy and paste into the online page. I had this as a backup in case the online lab system crashed and student work might then be lost, as students were not able to “save” their work as they went along. I also had students hand in a hard copy of their reports, in case the system crashed before I marked reports. Once a student was satisfied with their report, they “submitted” and a confirmation email was sent to the student email address supplied.
Marking: Marking online was great, typing in comments was much quicker than handwriting them, and I also had a standard set of comments that could be using by selecting from a drop down menu. Probably the biggest timesaver was rating each section out of 4, and which then the programme was able to automatically calculate the mark for that section. Rather than having to allocate a mark out of 1 for the AIM, out of 6 for the RESULTS, etc, I simply gave each section a rating and then the programme calculated accordingly. This enabled me to be much more consistent with marking. In some case I inadvertently marked some reports twice (over the period of about 2 weeks) and still ended up with the virtually the same total mark.
Problems:
Considering the scope of the project and the potential problems, the exercise went smoothly thanks largely to the thoroughness of the developers, and the goodwill of the students.
The main problem was that the confirmation email was delayed, and some students did not receive this email for some hours after they submitted the assignment causing them some anxiety. This appears to be an issue relating to the EE server.
Changes for 2010:
- Some of the instruction text needs to be changed for easier understanding.
- Some of the aspects relating to marking may be changed, for example, when the marks are downloaded, the scores for each section are recorder, not just the final mark out of 15.
- As it turned out the wording of the text and the help files were general enough, that some people used the system (mistakenly!) for a different laboratory in the unit. It all appeared to be quite suitable and straightforward for the students! The format of the submission cannot be changed but any text surrounding the sections, such as description or hints, weightings etc could be made to be customisable between units.
I have attached some of the comments given back to me from students in the Appendix. Overall the system was well-received but there are a few refinements mostly in the area of my instructions to students, which could be improved.
Also, an ABSTRACT for a paper to present the results of this project has been submitted to the Teaching and Learning Forum 2010.
Yours faithfully,
Dr Jasmine Henry
School Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering, M018
FECM
Appendix:
Student Feedback
Here are a selection of student comments I received:
1 - Did you like using the online lab system?
I didn’t like having to write the report online simply because it was a bit frustratingnot being able to type everything directly to the online system. Apart from this detail, I reallyliked how thesystem was quite useful at outlining how you expected us to write the report (or at least how I hope you expected to write the report).
The lab system was fine however it assumed a lot of word excel savvy which may have unfairly discriminated between students. This sort of know-how is generally not required for most in-class labs.
It was pretty easy to use so yes
i think its a great concept and would really help with report habits. I think that the discussion and results section are a little more intwined than the layout suggested in lab1 though. Overall it was much better than a plain old report exercise
Making it necessary to upload and equation document seemed redundant when the Excel sheet was uploaded. Also the limited number of supported document formats was annoying, support for .odt and .ods formats would be better.
i found the online lab submissionfine to use
The system brings a pleasant change to the normal lab submissions.
2 - Was the word template useful for writing your report?
It was useful because we had to submit a hardcopy of the report, but in the future if you stop requiring that from students I don’t think it will be necessary.
yes, it made it clear as to what was expected
The word template was definately useful as there was no way to do the whole document in one sitting. The word document allowed to fill out the details as necessary then to 'copy and paste' into online submission.
3 - Were the “help” sections useful?not really?
Yes, this was the best thing about the online system. Particularly liked how itnot only told us what was needed to write in each section, but also gave us some examples.
I would have perfered a paper report because it took a long time to type everything into excel.
the help was nice and thourough, and it was so much better than having to handwrite one
Well yes, but actually the thing I found most useful was the appendix. It was clear from there what was required of each section (except for a little confusion over talking about errors, I think I mentioned that in the other comments). That being said, I do think the Word Template is a nice way of telling us how a lab report should be structured without shoving it into our faces, metaphorically speaking.
he help sections were very useful, i refered to them quite frequently. It also good as it clarified on what information to present in each sections (as i dont think it was ever specifically taught in any units - at least that i remember).
4 - Was the online system better than writing a normal "paper" report?
Not considering the problem mentioned in question one, I would it was.
Definite yes. As previously mentioned, I much preferred doing this compared to writing the 3-phase report on paper. That being said though, I would imagine that some things would be nigh impossible to do online (the 3-phase lab question about proving power wasindependentof time comes to mind... can't imagine having to do that on a computer)
think that being able to present your results in different formats presents a better understanding of 'the real world'. Although i am a bit hesitant in the reliability etc of anything digital as i like to confirm 100% that my assignment is 'handed in'.
Overall I liked the system, especially the help sections. They helped me to understand how to write a meaningful aim and conclusion instead of just copying one out from the text or lab manual.
I would prefer to do online lab submissions like this instead of 3 hour labs with paper reports.
5 - Areas for improvement:
Since typing equations, graphs and tables directly into the online lab report are outside the scope of the system, the only thing I can think of is allowing the student to submit the report without having to submit an equation sheet. This is only because I had pasted my equations into the excel spreadsheet and was “forced” to attach something I didn’t actually use. (But if there’s only one weird student doing that, no point on changing anything).
It would be helpful if you could view your submission once it has been sent
my only criticsism is that the i found it hard to structure all of my reports, like i think it would be helpful if at the back of the report there was the structure, like at the front but under each heading there are x number questions just to help us a little
With the word document, i had some issues with the 'text area' for each section being in a 'table' (black square) with formatting etc. Especially going between Word 2003 &2007 - it would result in paragraphs running off the edge of the page etc.
2. Word limits on each section - it was hard to gauge the necessary information that should of been presented - maybe a approx word count for each section would help in this(as well as in marking).