The MarkUs Dashboard has been left empty for a while now. So as part of my UI/UX role this term, I’ve came up with a new design for it! Here it is:

MarkUs: Dashboard Prototype

Feedback:

• Karen: Instructors often like to know the assignment average as a fraction in addition to the percentage.
  New Format: “Assignment Average: 70/100 (70%)” — for example

Please visit our MarkUs project blog here if you have any questions/comments/concerns, and leave a comment!

Short update on the MarkUs UI/UX design work

After finishing the prototypes for the grader assignment view, I moved on to re-designing the group formation tab.  Here are some prototypes:

Group Formation: Adding a student to a group

Group Formation: Removing a student from an existing group

Group Formation: Filtering -- Only show valid group formations

Group Formation: Filtering -- Only show invalid group formations

They can also be found on the MarkUs project blog here.  These prototypes will be used in a simple usability session this week, and I will be reworking these prototypes according to the usability feedback we get from the session.  More updates to come! :D

Last week, a small group of MarkUs team members spent a good hour in the #markus IRC channel going through my first batch of prototypes.  We also took this opportunity to hammer out some of the usability issues in the current release of MarkUs.  So instead of putting together meeting minutes for this UI/UX meeting, I decided to put together a usability design report that laid out the issues discussed, what our next steps are, and what the rationale is behind these design decisions.

Professor Karen Reid and I just went through this design plan, and it is now posted on the MarkUs project blog.  Please check it out here.

Thinking back on all the things that happened in 2009 — all the projects I’ve worked on at school in the past year, all the events the DCS ambassadors helped out at, all the people I met, and having started my PEY internship at IBM this past May — I’d say year 2009 was definitely an opportunity rich year for me!

I know it’s only 5 days into 2010, but I’ve got good news already!  This term, I’ll be working on MarkUs, an open source online grading tool, under the supervision of Professor Karen Reid.  Huge thanks also goes to Professor Greg Wilson for giving me this opportunity to be part of the 49X project team this term!

What is MarkUs?

Here’s a brief overview of what the project is about:

MarkUs (pronounced “mark us”) is an open-source tool which recreates the ease and flexibility of grading assignments with pen on paper, within a web application. It also allows students and instructors to form groups, and collaborate on assignments. It’s predecessor OLM (Online Marking) was originally written in Python on top of the TurboGears framework.

The MarkUs project is a re-implementation of the Online Marking system using Ruby on Rails. The goal of this project is to take what we learned from OLM and our forays into Web-CAT, and build a web-based marking tool that includes an early submission and testing system in support of test driven development.

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