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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