Feature request - add link to "Past Answers" screen to the main instructor menu

[taniwallach]

There is no quick way to get to the "Past Answers" screen (URL ending "/show_answers/"). It seems that it would be good to add a new item to the instructor menu to open this page directly.

https://webwork.maa.org/moodle/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=3962

[pschan-gh]

Dear Nathan,

Does this look right?
f6997ea?w=1

I think it might be good to eventually redesign the overall structure of the display of the answer log.

It would be convenient for instructors to be able to display in a 2-dimensional table a set of selected students against a set of selected problems.

One difficulty I find is that with multiple past answers, along with their associated scores, we run out of dimensions when attempting to display the answer log in any meaningfully structured way. I wonder if it might be worthwhile (perhaps at least for multiple choice questions) to display past answers separated by '|' or what not within each cell, or maybe the instructor can further specify the number of past answers to display (practically speaking the instructor is often, though surely not always, just interested in the last answer the student submits).

[taniwallach]

@pschan-gh Thanks for looking into this. Your change seems to work in the basic sense, and I see the new item in the menu which works fine. Until these changes, the breadcrumb above "Answer Log" is the course itself, and after the change it appears as "instructor tools' - which seems to be an improvement.

If the current answer_log record is changed as you propose, then it would apparently be appropriate to remove answer_log from the kids of set_list. I'm not sure if that really matters or if leaving it or removing it could have any adverse effect.

I'm not sure if any additional changes are needed, as I am not familiar with the manner in which the parent and kids fields in the structure defined in lib/WeBWorK/URLPath.pm are supposed to work (and what really uses them). As notes, these fields seem to be related to the bread-crumbs shown above the main part of the page, just below the MAA logo, but I am not totally certain about that.

I suggest putting the changes it in a feature branch based on develop, and making a PR.

Note: Looking at other parts of lib/WeBWorK/URLPath.pm, another option would be to leave the original answer_log record be left unchanged, add a new instructor_answer_log using the modified version you made with parent set to instructor_tools and add instructor_answer_log to the kids of instructor_tools instead of the "old" answer_log. I doubt there is any real reason to do that, unless there is some adverse effect to removing answer_log from the kids of set_list.

[taniwallach]

I think it might be good to eventually redesign the overall structure of the display of the answer log.

It would be convenient for instructors to be able to display in a 2-dimensional table a set of selected students against a set of selected problems.

One difficulty I find is that with multiple past answers, along with their associated scores, we run out of dimensions when attempting to display the answer log in any meaningfully structured way. I wonder if it might be worthwhile (perhaps at least for multiple choice questions) to display past answers separated by '|' or what not within each cell, or maybe the instructor can further specify the number of past answers to display (practically speaking the instructor is often, though surely not always, just interested in the last answer the student submits).

It is quite likely that many people would benefit from an improved (or parallel) tool to display past answers in a nicer manner. If someone is willing to write the code, and it passes a code-review, the new feature would likely be considered suitable to add to develop.

It might be best to consider developing it as a parallel "module" so that people who like / are used to the current behavior can still use the current code.

[pschan-gh]

Dear Nathan,

Thank you very much for your, as always, detailed and patient explanation and feedback. Based on your suggestion, I have added an instructor_answer_log record to URLPath.pm, with instructor_tools as parent, just to make sure that everything should continue working the same way.

I have also decided against including an answer log button on the side panel. Instead, the pages opened under "Student Progress" (.../instructor/progress/set/..., .../instructor/progress/student/...), and the page showing all the problems of a single set for one student, now all have their own "Show Past Answer" buttons. This makes the interface a little bit more crowded than before, and frankly I am not sure whether this is exactly what people want. But I for one think it can be a handy feature :)

Another thing I notice is that, different modules seem to handle the passing of studentID's and setID's differently. ProblemSet.pm, for example, appears to take an additional step of checking a url/form-provided studentID against the database. I assume this is some sort of security measure? In any event, I can't seem to make this work under the output_past_answer_button routine that I have added to this particular module, and so I just used the form-provided data directly instead.

All of the above modifications are made to the following branch:

https://github.com/pschan-gh/webwork2/tree/develop-answer-log

I would make a PR except the database checking bit mentioned earlier makes me a little uneasy. So, I will let it stew a bit for now, and try to figure out what's going on. Thank you very much!

[pschan-gh]

Ah, never mind, I just figured out why the output from $db->getUser and etc didn't work. (Thank goodness for pretty_print!)

[taniwallach]

I suspect that putting it in the left side menu is more likely to catch users attention than putting it only in student progress.

@dlglin @drgrice1 What do you think?

[drgrice1]

Putting it in the left side menu will definitely make it easier to find, and would be good.
I think having it available on the Student Progress page is good too.

In general, I think there are a lot of places where things could be made for convenient for the instructor to find things. For example, if you are viewing the progress for all students for a particular homework assignment or gateway quiz, it would be nice to have a link for each student that opens the individual student settings for that assignment, and another link for each student that opens that assignment or gateway quiz rather than to the homework sets list. For gateway quizzes there should be one of each of these links for each version.

[pschan-gh]

A report on changes made to https://github.com/pschan-gh/webwork2/tree/develop-answer-log:

By "popular demand" I have added the Answer Log button back to the side panel.

Added a ShowAnswers2.pm (based on ShowAnswers.pm) to keep experimental features as standalone as possible.

The experimental answer log is now enabled/disabled as an optional module under Course Configurations.

An extra button would appear after pressing "Display Past Answers". Clicking on it sends answer log entries to a modal window in the following way:
The user has to first specify which homework set to examine (from personal experience as an instructor user, I can't recall ever having wanted to see students' answers across multiple problem sets, but surely others might have different habits/preferences, so this could be something that people might want to further discuss).

The user has to specify the number of recent attempts (counted from the most recent one) to display. I am using the answerID to track this, assuming that the manner in which mysql updates the answer records is perfectly chronological, but I don't actually know if this is a valid assumption.

The popup modal window then displays the set of selected users against the set of selected problems (selected via the traditional show-past-answers form) in a 2-dimensional table.
Given any positive integer n <= (the number of recent attempts specified), the n-th attempt of each answer of each (sub)-problem is collated into the same n-th row for each user. This is the kind of output that I would find useful, but can't seem to be able to obtain from the traditional show-past-answers output. All this reorganization is done client-side via javascript.
I figure nothing goes back to the server in the context of viewing the answer log.

The user may export the table to a csv file, now in a format which hopefully makes further analysis and manipulation easier. Correct answers are enclosed by "**".

The interface right now is a bit rough, and I wouldn't say everything is well tested. But before I proceed any further perhaps its good to hear other people's opinions.

[dlglin]

Thank you for your work on this. I suggest putting all of this information into a pull request to develop, even if it's not quite complete. That will give it more visibility for people to review.

[pschan-gh]

OK, done, thank you very much!