My online coursework system
To try the coursework, click the following link and use the following username and password at the login prompt:
Username: anonymous
Password: anonymous
Link to demo: computer architecture
coursework
You can try out the questions, as much as you like.
Links to document sections:
Question
generation and random elements
Data
Storage and other technical details
There is a much more
detailed, partially complete technical
manual
I developed this system as part of my drive to more fully
understand web technologies such as JSP and Tomcat, and deepen my knowledge of
JAVA. I also don’t like marking. However, I also don’t like questionnaire based
courseworks, partcularly in my area of teaching, Computer Architecture and
hardware, and I haven’t been able to find a similar system to this: admittedly
I haven’t tried hard. Thus, I developed this coursework system where each
question is generated from a combination of a JSP program that handles the user
interface, and a Java object, that generates the question and answer. The
system currently generates pure HTML so that the system should not be dependent
on the client-side browser: the desire to make the system like this was based
on my earlier experience of trying to use client-side applets in a coursework
system.
Question generation and random elements:
The nature of the program generation is that it is particularly
easy to generate questions based on some mathematical equation, and an
automated question generation system is available to take a text based question
description and generate the necessary JSP and Java file. One of the nice
things about Java has been that it allows these files to be added to the
coursework in a particularly easy way and without recourse to modifying the
rest of the coursework system.
Questions can have elements, which are generated on some random
basis. In particular, numbers for questions can currently be random within a
preset range and interval, (e.g. 200 to 1200 with an interval of 4), randomly
selected from a set ( 12, 10, 36, 48 …..888). This allows a much wider range of
questions to be generated than questionnaire based system, and allows students
to have multiple attempts at a question to improve their performance and allows
correct answers to be given to wrong answers as the same question is unlikely
to appear very soon. Questions are automatically checked and marks are added to
a database. Users are given login names and passwords, and currently connect is
made via an SSL link, as SSL is used to manage the user’s session.
Mor complex questions can be developed, but this requires a Java
program to be written, which is much more time consuming. There are several
instances of this on the demo where assembler programming and processor
architecture understanding is tested.
A help page can be associated with each question: currently this
should be in Html.
Besides the coursework presentation interface, there is a
management interface for setting up and testing the question set, managing
login names, passwords and their distribution, marks analysis and output. There
is also a mechanism for generating questions from a text file (XML-based):
questions can be manually produced in JSP and Java code.
Question sets, individual and aggregated marks, and username and
password details can be input and output to files in a form suitable for inport
by Microsoft Excel and other spreadsheets.
Data Storage and other technical details:
Data storage in the system is through a Mysql database. It should
be straight-forward to change this to some other database, but this will need a
small amount of Java programming to develop this. The Mysql database holds
marks, username, passwords, and question sets.
The system is based on Tomcat and JSP, and there is no client-side
code: just pure HTML.
However, there is no reason that client-side scripts cannot be
inserted in the JSP file that manages a questions display.
The SSL session system requires a cookie to be stored on the client
side.