Monday, January 03, 2005

IERI Utility

Had a meeting with KM about some problems that needed to be addressed with the IERI utility. A quick run-down:

1 - Teacher analysts could previously add new analysts to an enacted activity sequence. This level of capability was something KM did not want these users to have. This was corrected.

2 - Until now, when a user capable of creating/editing enacted activity sequences visited this section of the utility they were presented with the full list of the available sequences. It didn't seem like a desirable (or even usable) feature and I suggested that maybe we only allow them to edit sequences they were assigned to analyze. KM agreed. Teacher analyst now only see enacted activity sequences to which they are assigned when they go to the "Create/Edit enacted analysis" page. This doesn't address the overall usability problem of this page, but it's a start.

3 - Some users had marked as complete their analysis of activities. No reporting or summary feature is currently available within the utility, so it was not possible to review their work. I undid the "mark complete" action on all affected enacted activity sequence analyses. I also temporarily disabled the "mark complete" functionality (though the link is still present). I'm working on setting up summary pages for the literal and enacted analysis. I'll re-enable the "mark complete" functionality once the summary reports are available.

4 - The ability to check/uncheck a movie from the timecoding screen in order to allow/disallow analysis seemed to be broken. Previously this functionality was contingent on users having not started analyzing the activity sequence at all. If any analysis had been done it would not be possible to uncheck a movie, even if the particular movie attempting to be unchecked had not been touched. Now the utility looks to see if users have started working on the specific movie being unchecked to determine if that movie can be unchecked.

5 - There was an error in the code that added a new activity to an enacted activity sequence. While the utility was adding the activity information to the sequence itself, it was not adding the appropriate information to the analyst assignments table if the analyst was assigned to the sequence prior to creation of the new activity. This problem affected any sequence where a new activity was added after analysts had already been assigned. Future activity additions will show up in the list of activities for analysis. (I noticed that the problem also affected duplicated activities, which has been fixed as well.) For any assignments that have already been made I'll have to go and manually add the missing activities.

6 - I found two problems relating to the list of enacted activities available for analysis. One, activities were showing up for analysis even if there was no timecoding done on those activities. Two, activities were showing up if there was a movie assigned to them even if that movie was not yet released. I believe these problems arose because I initially designed the utility such that all movies had to be timecoded and released prior to the enacted activity sequence being analyzed. I modified the code so that activities that are not ready for analysis are no longer presented to the analyst in the list of activities related to a sequence. This may not be the best method of dealing with this issue because the user is given no clue as to how many activities will ultimately need to be analyzed. A better solution would be to list all the activities related to a sequence, but remove the ability to analyze those not yet available.

7 - Edited the text of the "save" buttons for the enacted analysis pages to be consistent. They now all read "Save Analysis Data"