e-status

a web-based platform for solving statistical problems

link to e-status

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Features

The platform has been designed to be simple in its application, but powerful in its capabilities. An administrator creates a course, which is the main framework for registering a group of students. At the same time, the administrator gives permissions to a group of teachers so that they can manage the course.

The teacher has a special editor for editing the problems, which can be shared with other teachers. A problem usually includes parameters that may be set at random: these parameters can be numbers, vectors, strings, graphics or any structure supported by R.

The e-status editor is also used to shape the problem questions. Each question has a specific code to evaluate the student's answer, and other attributes such as the correct answer (if there is one), the expected type of answer, weight, number of attempts allowed, or links for help. The same editor is allowed to test the problem, in the same way that a student would see it. In this example you can see how an exercise looks in the editor.

The problems are allocated to a subject in containers called blocks. Each block of problems can be associated with every student group or with only a few groups. It can also be restricted to specific dates, during which the problem is visible. The blocks can be used to organize the topics of the subject thematically, or to contain an exam problem, which is available only for a limited time.

When a student accesses a course within e-status, he/she can see the list of blocks that remain open, together with summary information about the results of each problem. During this time the student can take a look at some problem statement (shown without real data and therefore cannot be answered), solve a problem, or consult the history, where he/she can find −synthetically or in detail− information about his/her own progress. The teacher has access to all the information, as well as several descriptive statistics.

Regarding other features, a teacher can organize anonymous surveys, with the possibility of cross-referencing the answers with the student performance; students can also rate the problem's usefulness; users can choose between three languages (Spanish, Catalan and English), although other languages can be incorporated without changing the application; students can also customize the tool minimally, with an avatar and an alias; though e-status is not intended as a rating tool, you can extract a dump with several types of indicators in a spreadsheet to be used for convenience by the teaching staff.