Developing an App to Support Ungrading: Making Non-Traditional Grading Easier with a Standalone Web Application
Zoom; Feb. 28-Mar. 1
Facilitation Team:
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 |
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|---|---|---|
| Michelle Cowan | Elizabeth Matthews | Joe Schicke |
Abstract: Instructors who use non-traditional grading are often limited by institutional learning management systems and forced to engineer complex workarounds. The goal of this collaboration is to design a standalone web application to support assignment submission, feedback exchange, and final grade calculation according to grading schemes customized by the instructor.
By the end of the conference, our group will deliver app specifications, preliminary wireframes, and a justification statement which we will later expand into a co-authored publication. After the conference, we intend to pursue app development, starting with a proof of concept. As a group, we will decide how far we want to take the app and how to distribute it.
We seek collaborators with entrepreneurial spirit, obsessions with assessment, and experience programming or coding. Those who want more experience with user-interface design or ungrading are encouraged to apply along with those who already have deep knowledge in these areas.
What Draft Deliverable will be Presented at the Conference Showcase? By the end of the conference, we will present a set of specifications describing the functionality we need and a set of wireframes depicting the design we are envisioning. We also plan to write a justification statement explaining the purpose of the design, citing significant scholarship to back up our design decisions. The statement will later be expanded into a co-authored publication. The wireframes and a verbal explanation of our specifications will be the main things we share at the final presentation.
Who Should Apply to Participate? We are looking for a mixture of experience levels. We definitely need people with experience using non-traditional assessment methods such as ungrading, contract grading, and specifications grading, because your feedback is essential for this design. In addition, we invite individuals with design, user experience, or coding experience.
That said, this collaboration is also a learning opportunity for individuals interested in ungrading, user-interface design, and coding but who have less experience. You will be a participant-researcher, in a sense, during the usability activities we will take on together and will learn usability and design processes along the way.
What Do Participants Need to Prepare? [Note: The facilitation team will email all materials and instructions once all participants have been selected]
- Please download LaTex prior to the conference. We will use it as our collaborative writing/word processing tool.
- We will provide a sample grading spreadsheet, an example rubric, a sample grading scheme, and a list of recommended readings prior to the conference. We will also ask participants to share their own spreadsheets, rubrics, contracts, and assessment methods if they have developed them so we can see how our approaches align prior to the conference.
What Happens After the Conference? Participants who continue with the project to create a proof of concept will decide as a group how to proceed with the development of the application itself—which may be stopping with a proof of concept, creating an open-source application, promoting a paid resource, or pitching our design to existing learning management system companies.