Due dates for GitHub Classroom

[mozzadrella]

Overview

6 respondents
3 teachers who are Classroom users
1 teacher who does not use Classroom
2 testers from usertesting.com

tl;dr

• surface the SHA + state at the deadline (and make clear that’s what it is, that it’s the SHA at deadline, not submission)
• also surface the latest SHA, even after the deadline, most instructors want to see that
• the most important number is if there are zero commits (especially for group work)
• teachers are concerned about the amount of time from when student first accepts to due date (and activity during that time)

How do you use due dates for your assignments?

Respondent A: Doesn’t open all assignments at once—does it one at a time. Expects students to accept it when it’s announced, but wants more insight into activity after they accept it.

Respondent B: Gives assignments with multiple parts—students who are on the ball can finish the assignment and move on to part 2. I’ve had to ask students “which is your part 1 submission?”

Respondent C: I put them in Canvas. However, students know they can submit a link to their repo in Canvas and keep working on it.

Respondent F: Has a google calendar with “soft deadlines.” Has scripts that check for the last push. Student loses 10% each day after the deadline.

What do you absolutely need to know when you check due dates? (Prioritization of info)

Respondent A:

• In teams: wants to see in teams how many commits (zero is the important number here)
• Individual: activity beyond submission—>accepted when/last worked on it when

Respondent B:

• 3 pieces of data:
  • Who got it in
  • who got it in, but late and
  • who hasn’t finished
• Students will submit after the deadline, he will want to see commits after the deadline
• Insight into consistent effort: tick marks from the time of submission to deadline, wants to see students working semi-regularly

Respondent C: I want to know which work was submitted before the due date, and what was submitted after. Currently I give full credit for work submitted after the due date. However, I’m considering changing this to a cap (max score of 4 out of 5) next year.

What should deadlines absolutely do? (Functionality)

Respondent B: Would want to be able to change the deadline, extension is either class-wide or individual
Respondent C: Would want to see the state of the project at the deadline, but would also assess work after.
Respondent F: The last push is all I care about. I also want to know if they’ve done any work at all.

Interface observations

Make due date:

• Respondents B and C blew right past the field—should we move the calendar from a modal into the flow?
• Setting a due date was smooth and fast.

Check due date:

• Icon is too small, but well-located
• Respondents B and C know to click there, but not exactly what to expect (in current UI, submission + URL for repo are awfully close)

What would be nice-to-have?

• Respondent B: would like to be able to set a difficulty level for assignment
• Respondent F: number of days passed since the deadline, four hours. In a perfect world, there would be a counter or a context in the repository (can we do that with milestones?)
• Respondent B: a temperature bar to show commits/progress
• Respondent B: Tick marks from the time of submission to deadline, wants to see students working semi-regularly
• Respondent B: Sometimes the assignment is too hard—for whatever reason the class as a whole is too hard

Other key data:
Respondent B: When I work in time management, it’s usually another tool (Jira, etc)

[mozzadrella]

Follow up from Respondent C:

This isn’t from our conversation, but I thought of another use case. At times, students complete the assignment early yet are hesitant to explore extensions since they fear breaking their lab. While I reassure them this is why we use source control, if there was a way for a student to mark a given commit (perhaps a tag) as their submission, it would make it easier for me to rollback to this earlier version if needed. As I type this, I could just have students create a tag and that would work fine….

[nwoodthorpe]

Thanks so much for doing this survey :)

So looks like the biggest concerns/feature requests are:

1. Make it more clear that viewing a submission is viewing a commit SHA
2. Have a clear, obvious way to view the student's latest work, not only their submitted work.
3. Show the number of commits, perhaps highlight repos with 0 commits
4. Summary of repository activity
5. Sort repos by (submitted, not submitted)
6. Introduce a concept of late submissions?
7. Make due-date field more obvious
8. Be able to "submit" a commit that isn't the latest commit

@mozzadrella does that sound right? Am I missing anything important?

My work in #920 solves points 2 and 3. I need to do a bit more on that now that deadlines are shipped, but that should be good to go super soon.

Looking at the other points:

1 - This sounds like a messaging problem. If our current implementation isn't as intuitive as we thought, we might need extra documentation. Maybe some tooltips explaining certain things, or link to a page that describes deadlines somewhere?

4 - This is a hard problem, but I think it'd be great to implement. GitHub has some really cool graphs on a repository under insights/graphs. Maybe we can find inspiration there. There isn't much room on the assignment overview page, so I'm imagining either a tooltip the teacher can hover over to view history for users, or a separate page we link to from the assignment overview page that shows activity graphs for each repository. Another idea would be to have a button on the assignment repo view that says "View activity" and when clicked, it replaces the whole repo partial with a graph. There can be a button on that partial to return back to the old one. If you're confused by what I'm saying here, I can outline it with pictures :P

5 - I think this is a great idea. It'll have to be a full page reload because of our pagination, but I don't see why this can't be done. How would this play with multiple deadlines?

6 - I don't know how to solve this under our current model right now, I'll think about it a bit more. Right now, the student can't really "submit" something, so the idea of "submitting" 2 days late isn't really possible.

7 - This is something we can definitely do. I'll fiddle around with some designs soon.

@tarebyte @johndbritton

[mozzadrella]

Make it more clear that viewing a submission is viewing a commit SHA
Have a clear, obvious way to view the student's latest work, not only their submitted work.
Show the number of commits, perhaps highlight repos with 0 commits

@nwoodthorpe think these are within grasp.

[nwoodthorpe]

@mozzadrella

So now that our UI changes have shipped, I think we've addressed the main concerns. This is the new UI:

• We now show the number of commits
• We have a "View Repository" button that always brings the teacher to the latest version of the repo
• When hovering over the "submitted" text, we see "View submission".

Were there any other main concerns before we full ship this? I'll fix the default time for deadlines today.

[mozzadrella]

@nwoodthorpe I think it looks great--can't wait to share with teachers widely!

[nwoodthorpe]

Going to close this, I think we've addressed the action items we pulled from this research. Thanks Vanessa!