Customized Solution

I have always been confused what the idea: Make a Product and Deliver a Solution means. I have considered products; as moodle for example, a product. It is available for download, easy to install, customizable, and open source. What a product !! Every time I hear the word: Product, I connect it to an the moodle, and say "Well! I do not think I can provide a product like that, may be not now; I need time :) " But, when Prof. Dr.Alaa talked to Dr.Ahmed Hassan about passing the product the latter uses to asses Students in the Faculty, the latter mentioned something about purchasing the product after trial and stuff like that. I rethought about the concepts I am misunderstanding. I do not need to provide a product that contains all moodle customization features to be good. We started this simple Assessment Management System; internally, hoping it will lead us some where. I think about it as a Customized Solution. This Customized Solution can be further customized based on the situation you will use it for, and it is available. Right, it will need work from guys who made it in the first place, it will need their presence, their help with the installation, but come on; when you need it, you will get it. I am not saying it because I am selling this thing, it is just I wanted to send a message to everyone all over the world. I have been waiting a lot for illusions, many years I have not started achieving a real working system because I believed it has to be like moodle; till I figured out it does not have to be. Take my advice; and if you are a programmer, you shall start thinking about real system to implement, real life scenario/situation to automate. You will feel ultimate happiness.

I am thinking about Customization all the way through this experience. I might not provide it from the early beginning, but I believe there are customization that Assessment Management Systems shall provide; like:

• You can manage how many assessments you want for each course, provide dates, periods of times, times for each assessment, question types, and difficulty level.
• Assessment Management System shall be able to differentiate between different Assessment levels. Assessments shall not be too easy or too hard. Assessment Management System shall include a predefined number of different questions' classes.
• More than one question formats are available for online assessments. Assessment Management Systems provide Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) and True/False ones because they are so simple to mark, can be fully automated. I prefer thinking about Match Questions, Fill in the Blanks, as available for Assessment Management Systems. Essay questions are important, Assessment Management Systems can provide this option, tools and techniques to help instructor marks those questions, but to automate essay questions, I do not believe in that.
  
• MCQs need to be customized. Not all MCQs utilize four choices only, you can use five or more. You can set this up also.
• A Service Layer shall be provided over the database and the application, so Assessment Management System can be integrated with other systems.
• Mobile Assessment is one of the options that Assessment Management Systems shall provide. And that takes us; again to the difference between assessment and exam. Students can take assessments via mobiles, but not exams. I prefer adding the required two services over the application; so the solution is available for mobile plug-in upon request.
  

If you came out to more customization ideas, please do not hesitate to drop a comment, or mail me directly. I am really interested in this topic.

The Start

The whole thing came up with the sentence: "We want to provide an online Exam System for our Faculty, I want to have a simple Web page that generates random number of questions, marks them immediately, so we do not have to collect papers and go through the effort of ordinary exams." I replied "Great, I think we can do such a thing", but I had many things to say:

• I refused the idea of having students take Mid-Term exams from homes. I accept their taking of Assessments, but Exams NO Way. Any student can giver her/his ID and Password to her/his college, making her/him get the task done. Besides, we still face situations where you can find students without the internet access [i]. I need to have the student at my sight, knowing that s/he is whom s/he claims to be. Besides, need o know that s/he does not use all the available resources her/his hands can reach. This is not an Open Book Exam. I suggested we will have this exam at our laboratories, so we can manage the whole process.
  
• I refused the idea of pushing a students with a timer in the web page. I preferred to leave the time control matter to us; Exam Supervisors, to provide more flexibility of this process. We might face a situation where students find their KeyBoard or Mouse not working, we might face the situation where the PC stops responding, and stuff like that [ii].
• I did not mind giving the student the capability to submit the entire form as: Empty. Do you really mind? Do you think I have to force the student answering the Assessment; even when s/he does not want to ?? Actually, I do not think so. S/he has the right to submit an empty form, so what ;)
• I put in mind the situation I will face so soon; where almost all my teachers will ask me to provide the same experience, so I tried my best to manage that.
• The Assessment format was agreed upon in advance, to be: A Single Web page that displays Five MCQs and Five True/False questions. So, the total number of questions will be (Ten) with one mark for each question; that makes the final mark out of 10. I refused the idea of generating controls and assessment pages dynamically. I prepared templates to be filled dynamically with the suitable questions, based on the Assessment ID. Assessment ID is based on Courses [iii].
• The main decision was: This experience is a start. I hope it will work well, so we can proceed developing, enhancing this system, and think seriously about presenting similar solutions to enhance our Faculty life.
  

Thank You

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[i] Though it does not make any sense to any of us to hear the sentence "I do not have the PC here with me, I have it home" OR "I can not access the internet"; this is not acceptable due to the enormous amount of Technology Centers provided by the Ministry of Communications; those are free by the way, and the uncountable number of Cyber Cafes, but what I shall do when I hear this. Actually, nothing.

[ii] In normal situations, we shall not worry about events like that, unfortunately this is not the case at our Faculty, so, I decided to leave the timing open.

[iii] Database details are available under Database Label

Introduction

Welcome to

Assessment Management System: Mans-FCI Experience

Blog

This blog starts two days after the Beta unleash of : http://www.m-assessment.info. This site has a story. In the graduation Projects of Mansoura-FCI Year 2006/2007, I was supervising one of the graduation projects. I suggested the topic: Mobile Learning, and it was highly welcomed by the group members. They suggested the Mobile Assessment, because it is an important topic that affects Learning Process, and assessment is one of the learning activities that can be achieved via mobile devices. I liked the idea, and we started working the project. I was about to sign a contract with SMS service provider company in Egypt, when they told me that I have to have a dedicated IP address, so they can push SMS I receive to that server. I reserved the Domain Name: M-Assessment; stands for: Mobile Assessment, and we started building the required application.

Unfortunatly, we faced a programmatical situation where we had to handle via programmatic solution that does not meet Web servers security level. Without mentioning lots of details, we were not able to run the application in real life scenario due to technical difficulties. I still have M-Assessment, without activiating it. I even thought about dropping the domain, and letting this dream goes; just like any dream I let go before.

But, I found out the Faculty need for a system that provides assessments for students; those assessments can advance to be mid-term exams. This system will help the faculty overcome many limitations, and help Teaching Assistants, and Doctors greatly too.

Then, it was the idea to turn M-Assessment from Mobile Assessment TO Mansoura Assessment. It turned to be: Mansoura Faculty of Computers and Information Systems Assessment Experience. I am not telling lies or unbelivable stories in this blog, but I thought about documenting the unleash, establishment, and system details, so it might be used later to develop the system. It took me 25 hours to build the first two pages of the system, and this is only the start. Our Assessment Management System is still an infant, that needs lots of efforts to fit our requirements, and I promise you: We will not stop. I needed the chance to give this Faculty a worth product, and Thanks to God, I have found the Chance.

This site will not include Coding Details; not because Codes are secrets; I love to share code, but becuase I focus on Analysis, Design, Algorithms, and Features.

Again, this blog tends to provide our experience, activities, and system details in a way that can not be available on the Web site.

Thank You