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mitodl / micromasters

Portal for learners and course teams to access MITx Micromasters® programs
https://mm.mit.edu
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
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Dashboard: Grading curve widget #764

Open pdpinch opened 7 years ago

pdpinch commented 7 years ago

As a learner, I want to see how I rank compared to other micromasters students.

We have been told my the SCM team that this is a frequent question, particularly from learners interested in applying for the blend masters. They are all too aware that there are thousand of SCM MIcroMasters students but only a few dozen openings in the master program.

The challenge is how best to represent the learner's standing at any given moment, and to which other students they should be compared. A learner may have some final grades and even more than one current "in progress" grade. Other learners may have finished more or fewer courses.

Here is the current design (from MM2 on invision):

image

pdpinch commented 7 years ago

This will need a design update before we work on it.

pdpinch commented 7 years ago

Some thoughts: we can probably get away with a static curve and just adjust the x values in the graph to be accurate.

roberthouse54 commented 7 years ago

Here is a slight update. I think if we can it would be good to allow the user to see either the Overall Program Grade, or the grade in a particular course. Hence the dropdown.

grading_curve_widget_ 2x

pdpinch commented 7 years ago

What are the values in the drop-down, course titles?

roberthouse54 commented 7 years ago

That was the idea, yeah.

roberthouse54 commented 7 years ago

This feature is documented in: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mJ9t5ESdknOlJy7II3gOxwgl-TdSy3AocV-AUqw0qgk/edit

image

We show the student’s current or completed grade for a course, and compare it with the performance of other students in the same course run. The student can select the course from the dropdown, or view their avg. grade in all courses in the program. The chart represents a histogram of all grades for all students in the course.

The challenge is that we can only compare the student’s grades to other students who have signed up for the MicroMasters portal, which is a subset of all students taking the course. For example, if there are 3000 verified students in a course, only 1000 of those might be signed up on the MicroMasters portal. So the “percentile” comparison will not be accurate.

pdpinch commented 7 years ago

I think the key learner value here is knowing where one stands when it comes to applying for the Masters. So if we can get all (or most) of the learners applying for the masters into the portal, I think this will be useful. There's not much value in comparing your score to the scores of auditers.

I suggest that we add the ability to turn this feature on per program. This should work fine for DEDP right now, since you must be in the portal to even pass a MicroMasters courses. For SCM we could leave the switch off until the time when we think most or all of the learners are in the portal. SCM is interested in making the portal a requirement also.

roberthouse54 commented 7 years ago

That sounds good. So maybe we can just turn this on for DEDP for now. But I thought that most of the DEDP learners were auditing?

pdpinch commented 7 years ago

Let me also talk to @giocalitri to get an update on the state of this data and where to find it.

giocalitri commented 7 years ago

Is this for the current grade or the final grade?

Ferdi commented 7 years ago

@giocalitri it's "current" for the current course and "final" for the past courses

giocalitri commented 7 years ago

Didn't we say that we cannot mix up final and current grades? Or did we find a good way to do it?

Ferdi commented 7 years ago

@giocalitri , so based on the UI https://goo.gl/Cn77na, we have 3 different use cases

  1. Learner selects "Average for all courses" It means average of the final grade for the past courses.
  2. Learner selects a course that she has taken in the past This means final grade for that course
  3. Learner selects a course that is currently running That means current grade for that particular course

OK?

giocalitri commented 7 years ago

So, if I understand well, the graph changes based on the selection but we do not mix up final and current. This seems fine to me.

Still I think that "Average for all courses" is misleading.

giocalitri commented 7 years ago

But to answer the question before, the current grade data is already in the edX cached data. The final grades will be in the specific table as soon as we merge my PR.

roberthouse54 commented 7 years ago

Do you think we should just show grades for courses, and not show average for the program? Or do you have another suggestion?

giocalitri commented 7 years ago

maybe just a change of label to be clear about the fact that the current courses are not included

gsidebo commented 7 years ago

A couple stray thoughts:

  1. Let's keep in mind that the current grade isn't really a grade, but a sort of current grade/course progress hybrid. At the very least we should make sure the label for the 'current grade' choice in the dropdown is reflective of that
  2. We may want to experiment with (a) delaying the loading of this widget until the rest of the page has loaded, or (b) making this an 'on demand' widget that only loads when the user clicks on something to explicitly request it. This widget will probably require us to use a library like D3 and perform some logic/rendering that could cause a non-trivial delay in the page load. I personally don't see the need to have this immediately visible upon page load, but I'll defer to Rob/Ferdi/Peter on that.