[edutex] Report/Thoughts on the 08/14/09 with Frank

[story at uakron.edu]

Frank and I met together for about two hours, the following are some
points made in the meeting.

1.  I went into the meeting thinking that exerquiz was to be used in
    this new system. After Frank described what he want to do, I've
    decided that exerquiz will not be used, other components of AeB
    such as insdljs and eforms will be used; however, a new package
    needs to be written to implement Frank's syntax. The form fields
    will be essentially dumb fields, so its a simple matter of
    defining some commands, consistent with his syntax to receive
    the student's input.

    A separate PDF is generated with the typeset solutions to the
    generated test. A link, possible a button, will allow the
    student to jump to the solutions. For non-credit, no evaluation
    of the responses are required, it is up to the student to
    compare his input with the solutions. The button will remain
    hidden until the student is finished and presses the submit
    button, one of the functions of the submit button is to freeze
    the students' responses, make them readonly so they cannot be
    changed.

2.  A MAJOR PROBLEM. Frank says that the state requires that the
    tests to be saved. For PDF viewed in the Adobe Reader this is a
    major problem.  I suggested two possible solutions:

        a.  When the user submits (credit or non-credit), the form
            field data is merged with the particular PDF the student
            is using; there are application for performing a
            server-side merge of form data with the PDF. This
            populated PDF is saved by the application, passed on,
            and moved to the designated area on the server. It might
            be nice to flatten this copy of the students work to
            definitely freeze everything.  I'll have to do some
            research on the web for such applications, the cost may
            not be too prohibitive.

        b.  Here is the potentially very expensive solution. You can
            buy from Adobe a large scale application to add extended
            reader rights to a PDF document. Such an application can
            give the PDF save rights and rights to make comments.
            (Frank also said he wanted a way for the students to
            markup their own practice tests. (See item 3)

3.  Commenting. Frank wants the students to be able to write sticky
    notes, or at least comment, on their own efforts at solving
    problems.  One solution is to have a dumb text fields after each
    problem (multiline). If solution 2(a) is used, any text entered
    into these boxes are submitted to the merging application on the
    server side, and they would be saved along with the student's
    responses.  For solution 2(b), the student can use sticky notes
    and save the document with save rights.

Some things Not Discussed, and other Thoughts.

4.  Frank said that for a given test (practice or for credit), they
    create 10,000 instances of the test, apparently using Mathematica.
    Frank will write some additional routines for taking the output and
    creating two LaTeX files, one for the test questions, and one with
    the solutions.

    a.  Filesize: Using the number 10,000. Two PDFs are created
        (questions and solutions). These will be small PDFs, so lets
        assume each file is about 100K. So 20,000 x 100KB is
        2,000,000KB; that's 2 GB of storage space per test. I don't
        know, but there may be a large number of practice tests over
        a smaller amount of material. This space using quickly adds
        up.

    b.  PDF Creation Time. Frank said that he can generate 10,000
        tests in just a matter of minutes. That will change now.
        Let's assume each PDF takes 10 seconds to build. How long
        will it take to build 20,000 PDFs (tests and solutions);
        that's 20,000 x 10s = 200,000 s = 333.3 m =  55 h. So it
        would take more than two days to build the 10,000 PDFs.
        If we use Adobe extended rights application, 10,000 PDFs
        would have to go through this application taking an
        unknown number of minutes per PDF.

        Probably 10,000 (x 2) is too many to be practical for PDF.

5.  The form data of a PDF document is lost (in recent versions of
    Reader) if the user navigates to another page (using a browser)
    then returns. Therefore, any external link one the test page
    that references resource material on the Internet needs to open
    another browser window. One way go guarantee this is to use the
    JavaScript method app.launchURL("url", true). This function came
    into existence with version 7.0.

Comments welcome.

Don


--
Dr. D. P. Story / Dept. of Theoretical and Applied Mathematics / The University of Akron /
Akron, OH 44325 / dpstory at uakron.edu /
Personal URL: http://www.math.uakron.edu/~dpstory/
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