[phpesp-dev] [Fwd: phpesp suggestion]

[James E. F. <jf...@uv...>]

Any -devel people want to look into this?  Maybe you can just hit 
"reload" on your browser 50 times.  ;-)  Maybe it's just a few lines of 
change.  I've got no time to work on phpESP now, sorry.

-James

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: phpesp suggestion
Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2005 10:55:37 -0800 (PST)
From: Lars Jensen <je...@ph...>
To: jim...@us...

Hi  James,

First of all, thank you so much for phpESP - it is a wonderful project.

The reason I write to you is that I'm trying to test phpESP as a tool
for doing large scale student evaluations of instructors at our college
(I'm with a community college in Nevada). In my pursuit of this I have
run into this question, which is the only thing that is holding me up in
being able to implement the evaluation process for the college:

	It is possible to modify the survey_copy.inc script so that one
	can make multiple copies (N copies) of a survey?

It seems to me that this ought to be an easy thing to do, but I am no
programmer, and we don't have any php programmers at the college. With
the ability to easily create multiple copies of a survey, I would be
able though a relatively simple and automated process to set up large
scale evaluations using the model described below:

MODEL FOR SETTING UP EVALUATIONS FOR LARGE NUMBER OF CLASSES

The constraints are that evaluations must be confidential and secure.
This means that students must login with authentication and be able to
take the survey once. All classes would have the same survey. Students
must only be able to take a survey for the class they are registered
for.

In the model we envision we would set up a group for each class, and
make the students in the class group respondents for that group. It is
easy to put this info into the phpESP database using csv files with
phpmyadmin. The problem is to create a copy of the survey for each
group. If the survey_copy.inc script could be modified to create N
copies (where N can be as large as several hundred) then our problem would
basically go away. After N surveys have been created, we can use csv
files to rename the surveys, and reset the group the surveys belongs to,
and presto, we can use phpESp for confidential evaluations of a large
number of classes.

As mentioned above, my programming skills are not sufficient to do the
needed modification of survey_copy, but I think this would be a GREAT
added feature to phpESP, would be widely used among colleges and perhaps
other institutions.

Thank you so much for reading this. If you consider the suggestion
worthwhile, and decide to implement it, I would be happy to write a set
of detailed instructions, or a help file,  on our model.

This semester we are going to try out the model in small scale, for 50
classes or so, and we will use the present survey_copy and simply make
50 copies, one at a time through the phpESP management interface.

Sincerely,
Lars Jensen
Math Department
Truckee Meadows Community College
Reno, NV

--
Lars Jensen, TMCC/Vista B200, 7000 Dandini Blvd, Reno NV 89512-3999.
Internet: <je...@ph...>, www.tmcc.nevada.edu/~jensen/
Tel: 775.673.7113  FAX: 775.674.7592