B
Basic Tortoise
In the Teachers’ Portal, there is the ability to enter Grades as an Activity such that the grade appears on the student’s Activity Timeline.
There is a material omission in the system in that there is no ability for teachers to view their grades on a class-wide basis, and there is no ability to download those grades to be able to do quantitative analysis on the grades. These grades do not appear in the Roster report when a teacher runs the report. The only thing that appears is the fact that the Activity is reported that a grade was entered.
When this was reported to support as a “bug,” the response was as follows.
“ . . .Rosters report is intended to display completed activities only, and does not include any information entered in the activity form fields. It is primarily used to show attendance, similar to a traditional roster.
To access reports with more detailed activity information, you will need to use the activity report [in the Admin area of the system]. Please note that only Admin users have access to these reports at the moment, and unfortunately, we are unable to make any changes to this at this time.”
This is a highly unsatisfactory response to a true deficit in the system.
  1. For a teacher to be able to input grades, but not be able to use the data makes no sense.
  2. Because the teacher has no efficient access to the data, they cannot do any type of analysis on the grades and thus on the performance of the class.
  3. For the teacher to have to request a Grades Activity Report to be run by a system Admin person is highly inefficient in two regards.
a. It is inefficient for the Admin person. As well, should the request come from multiple teachers the inefficiency for the Admin person becomes exponential. For example, in our program we have 31 teachers, and the system Admin may very well receive 31 requests.
b. It is inefficient for the teacher to have to take this step when they should be able to run a report without having to go to someone else to run it for them.
The system should either (1) display the grades on the Roster Report in the Teachers’ Portal, and this should also appear when downloaded as a report, or (2) the Activity Report should be installed in the Teacher’s Portal since the grade information does display in this report, thereby giving teachers access to this information.
While it is understandable that in the original system design, it was not intended for this information to be displayed on this report, a system exists to make the lives and workflows of its users, and therefore its customers, more efficient and more meaningful. To ignore the users’ needs in this regard is problematic.