Category: Office of LD

Peer Evaluation of Group Work Options

Qualtrics Peer Evaluation

Qualtrics is a great option for delivering a lightweight option for peer evaluations of group work performance.

At Penn State, faculty and staff are able to request a license to use Qualtrics. This is required for this approach. Please contact your IT department for more details.

Once you have a license make a copy of this project into your list of projects. This is also required because you will be managing the setup, delivery, and analysis of the data.

Click to view/take sample evaluation

To setup your project to use in your course, please follow these directions:

Step 1. Make a copy of the peer evaluation into your Qualtrics account

Step 2. Export your Canvas Grades

Step 3. Download this CSV template

Step 4. Copy-and-paste the first column, all of your student’s names, into the CSV file in the first column replacing the sample data. You can ignore all of the other empty cells under the other columns. Save your changes.

Step 5. Import your CSV roster to your Qualtrics project (see “Importing Reusable Choices” section)

To deliver the peer evaluation in your course, please follow these directions:

  1. Copy the distribution link
  2. Paste the link into your Canvas Course or share via a Canvas Announcement or a class email

To view the results after the evaluation has closed, please follow these directions:

  1. Open the evaluation in Qualtrics
  2. Switch to view the reports

Other Evaluation Approaches Tested

The following tests all fail for the same basic reason: the approaches are not viable because different evaluations are stored in the same position and would require a manual process to separate the results for each student being evaluated. Each test does explore different ways of inputting data and piping text in from previous questions along with using display logic algorithms.

  • Test 1: Depending on how many teammates an evaluator chooses, they are provided just enough fields to enter the names of their teammates. Based on the names they have entered, the evaluator is provided with a matrix of selections for each teammate.
  • Test 2: The owner of the survey copies-and-pastes the names of the students into a list of potential choices for the evaluator to chose from to indicate who is on their team. Based on the names selected, the evaluator is provided with a separate slider-matrix of evaluation rankings.
  • Test 3: Evaluators are provided form entry fields to enter the names of each of their teammates and those names are automatically populated on separate rows of a slider-matrix where the evaluator ranks their teammates contributions to the group work.

Earlier Efforts

  • I tested a similar evaluation process using a different approach that would be used for evaluations of IA/LA/TAs at the end of a semester. I did not feel this was an approach that would realistically work because of the amount of back-end data manipulation required to make sense of the results. This approach asks evaluators to group selections together to indicate who was in the evaluator’s class sections. Then evaluators would provide rankings for each assistant based on their performance.
  • In 2018, I worked with Christian Vinten-Johansen <v23@psu.edu> with the Penn State Accessibility Team to create an accessible alternative to a CATME Peer Evaluation. At the time, CATME was not accessible.
  • I found earlier attempts as well that I’ll eventually document here.

Replacement Plan in Smartsheet

Our leadership is looking at better documentation around Replacement Planning and while we have a lot of the data in existing Smartsheets, I need to work with others to better communicate that data.

Ultimately, we want to share who’s working on what project and who others can go to for “leadership” and “project” backups in the event that the principle is unavailable. In this time of COVID-19, we have determined that it may be necessary to document up to three backup tiers for each project.

Initially, the difference between a “leadership” and “project” backup needed to be defined. Someone identified to provide leadership backup would be expected to know how to get answers related to a specific project but they themselves may be unable to complete the work or task. The person identified as a project backup would be able to accomplish the work that would yield answers to those questions.

The next big hurdle was to determine how to combine information from at least three different Smartsheets and using the Dashboard feature, we will be able to combine that information. We’re starting off with one sheet as the master that will establish the basic style (column names and widths) for the data. A second sheet was edited by changing some of the existing column names and adding new ones. A third sheet is going to prove more difficult. We need to preserve the original column names and will not be able to add more columns to that existing sheet as we had done in the second sheet.

I have decided to create a secondary sheet that pulls in that information using index and match functions and then other formulae to remap that data into columns that we are using in the other two sheets.

Troubles with O365 Permissions and OneNote

Jon was having issues with not being able to edit pages in our team’s OneNote notebook. He reminded me that we dealt with something similar when he first started working here and that I was able to fix that issue pretty quickly, but something must have changed since then because those pages are a subset of the larger notebook that we’re now having issues with.

We believe we have a working solution: SharePoint > Site Contents > Site Assets > Options > Share > Who would you like this link to work for? Specific People > Apply > [add email address] > Send.

This appeared to work for his laptop and iPad when accessing OneNote using the web interface, not the native apps. Hopefully this is the solution we’re looking for. We’ll know in our upcoming Weekly Office Meeting.

I tried a slightly different approach that worked temporarily, but didn’t lead to a permanent fix: SharePoint > Site Contents > Site Assets > Options > Manage access > adjust permissions to “Can edit.”

Smartsheet: Index, Match, @Row

I am trying to build out a new process using Smartsheet and was just recommended by Laura Adams to consider using Index & Match instead of VLookup because it requires less resources, makes it easier to reproduce, and is more secure.

index, match vs. vlookup

How to build an Index-Match formula

Example

Let’s say you had a simple sheet that listed the faculty contact for any given course. In another sheet, you would like to pull that information in and you can as long as you have a cell with the same course information. This allows you to have a number of smaller source sheets that contain useful information that needs to be referenced in a number of other sheets.

You would set up your index-match function by:

  1. identifying (referencing) the column in the source sheet with the names of the faculty
  2. identifying the column in the destination sheet that contains the course information for each of the faculty
  3. identifying the column in the source sheet that contains the course information you are matching to

I’ve created some public sheets which anyone should be able to view to see this very simple example of index-match at work:

It is easy to get confused what gets referenced where in the formula.

Laura’s example above includes an IFERROR function that helps to turn “#NO MATCH” errors into either blanks or some other more useful, human-friendly message.

Some additional resources:

Good luck Ravi!

As some of you may have heard, a long time friend and colleague, Ravi Patel, has accepted a position to work at the College of Health and Human Development. Functionally, he is heading up their Learning Design group. His last day here was this past Friday, the 1st.

I started off this post with the title “Goodbye Ravi” and realized that after writing part of my first sentence, “As some of you may have heard, a long time friend and colleague, Ravi Patel,” that this post might sound like someone has died. Of course that is not the case. I for one am very happy for Ravi and supported his decision from the start.

I’ve known Ravi since I started working at World Campus Learning Design back around 2009. I started in 2008 as an instructional designer, but was assigned to a different collection of units in Outreach. Eventually I was welcomed to the Blue Team being led by the Awesome El Lehman. Ravi was on the Red Team. At that time, Ravi was supporting the IST and Homeland Security programs. Ravi left WCLD around 2010 to work at the College of IST along side Amy Garbrick and her team. I left WCLD in 2011 to join them and have continued in my role ever since.

Since 2009, I’ve been lucky to have shared many meetings, challenges, lunches, laughs and personal moments with Ravi. While I am very happy for Ravi, I know I am going to miss him here. I’ve already felt the distance between other good friends (Linas, Brian, and Dom) that I no longer work with since having left WCLD and am preparing for a similar loss now.

I hope to post a future update on how I’ve over come the distance with all my friends. Best of luck Ravi! I’ll miss you here.

Office of LD Website Updates

I was working on the office website and recorded a screencast on the changes I made:

  1. Turned on breadcrumbs for navigation
  2. Added the Page Navigation plugin
  3. Fix: staff bio page navigation – remove hard coded links
  4. Reorganized content related to our “For Instructors” website (original content)
  5. Fixed: problem with “What’s New” page – turned out to be a hard coded link
  6. Investigate: dynamic menus in WP