Problem + Background

   Developing and launching an interactive interface is a long and iterative process that requires patience, attention to detail and a lot of research. StrongMind’s Courseware team developed a new Courseware product that could be the primary interactive interface that online teachers and students used for most of their online schooling needs (e.g. discussion boards, submitting/grading assignments, announcements, etc.). SpeedGrader was a new component of Courseware which was initially created to help teachers grade more efficiently, as many were teaching over 100 students in up to three online courses. However, in the Courseware trial run, teachers had indicated that when grading student submissions, their experience felt slower and less intuitive then the original system. The Courseware product owner, Alex Bowen, and his team wanted to get a better understanding of the teachers’ grading processes and workflows to acquire insightful design recommendations for SpeedGrader. 

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Process

   Every teacher has his/her own individualized grading process and workflow depending on various nuances between subjects, assignment types, feedback protocols, and many other factors. Due to these nuances, we needed a way to capture and identify grading processes and workflows that would not limit our understandings to the specifics of grading an English term paper, but would expand and generalize our understanding of the grading process. Informal task analyses and unstructured interviews were conducted because they did not limit the perspective of our understandings towards the tasks nor the questions being asked. 

Objective

• Identify teacher’s workflow for grading student submissions.

• Determine what documents or information is used when grading.

• Identify teacher’s task goals when grading student submissions.

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Outcome

   Overall, the teachers’ grading processes were driven by their daily routine to check ungraded assignments. The teachers logically prioritized their ungraded items based on their personal preferences. For example, while one teacher prioritized ungraded items by date submitted to provide positive feedback/reinforcement to students submitting assignments on time, another teacher prioritized by time required to grade, as projects usually demanded more time and effort to grade. Once they would begin to grade student submissions, the teachers would prepare by opening multiple windows, including rubrics or assignment guidelines, templates with prepared feedback responses and resource links, and class rosters to reference students’ information (accommodations, course progress, assignment attempts, plagiarism, etc.). While grading, their primary goal is to appropriately assess the students’ learning based on the assignment requirements while considering the students’ personal information. Teachers also want to be able to provide students with enough resources for more constructive feedback, as teachers were unable to provide  hyperlinks, pdf or more direct resources in SpeedGraders comments. 

Recommendations

• Add feature to help teacher prioritize ungraded items by their own preferences (e.g. filter ungraded items by date submitted, assignment type, student course progress, etc.). 

• Make additional grading documents (student info, grading rubric, and template feedback) easily accessibly and/or viewable when grading. 

• Give teachers the ability to provide links and hyperlinks in feedback.