Access to AMC for "non IT" teachers via the web

Added by Machon Chen over 10 years ago

Hello

my wife is a teacher and I am an IT veteran of 30 years.
She does every year lots of written exams, hand made and hand corrected which takes countless hours.

So I looked and found AMC and installed it on debian on an old PC and figured more or less how to use it as a user.
I like it very much and it seems very powerful and with lots of functionality.

But, for a normal teacher or school the installation is much too complicated and also the interface needs simplification.

You should think of somehow offering AMC as a service with a web based interface so that the teachers can just enter questions, answers, scorings, students in maybe an excel and upload them.
(AMC Text is already difficult for non IT and LaTex even more so).

Keep up the good work and Best regards


Replies (2)

RE: Access to AMC for "non IT" teachers via the web - Added by Jean-Marc Gervais over 10 years ago

It is not a full solution, but you can prepare and then offer a USB-key with AMC ready to use for basic users, see Wiki.

But sorry, there is yet only a French version image file. (French Wiki here)

RE: Access to AMC for "non IT" teachers via the web - Added by Nikola Z. Guscic over 10 years ago

Most of the teachers in my school have recently switched to AMC. We set up a few desktops in the administration building as a dual boot Windows/Linux and set up AMC with all other needed components on Linux system.

Most teachers just want a simple system to score their exams without too much hassle. For them we prepared blank templates that will always output same answer sheets. For example there is a template for 30MCQ, 40 MCQ and 50 MCQ. School has already photocopied tens of thousands of these templates so teachers don't have to print them. Teachers just have to create the answer key with blank options, like this:

*Question 1
-
+
-
-

*Question 2
-
-
-
+

So what it comes down to is, 'non-tech' teachers can write their exams in MS Word like they are used to. They just have to write a simple answer key like above. When they want to score their exams, there is a staff on duty to help them with scanning, copy/paste their answer key in the prepared template and walk them through the steps of AMC scoring. Usually after a couple of tries teachers can work independently (though not all!). There is always a staff on duty to help them if they get stuck.

Name lists for all the classes are already in the system so teachers don't need to worry about it. During mid and final exam weeks we process about 70 class exams (2000 copies) per day using this method and most of our teachers are very NON-IT.

How about essay questions? We have custom Excel spreadsheets for grading. We can copy paste the entire output of 'Marks' worksheet and it will integrate seamlessly with our spreadsheets. Then the scores for essay questions are inputed manually in the grading spreadsheets, it is faster than ticking boxes.

This work-flow seems to work quite well in our school. Of course, this way you just get to use AMC for scoring MCQ, shuffling options are all disabled and you only get basic functionality. But most teachers seem very happy to keep things simple.
Now I am working with several more adventurous ones to encourage them to use AMC_TXT templates and actually create exams in AMC, getting more functionality.

Btw, we have also offered a LIVE-USB image with pre-configured Linux system containing AMC, xsane scanning program, Excel through Wine and everything else that is needed. However, so far, not a single teacher seems interested in burning that to a flash disk and using it. They are just much more comfortable to walk in the administration building and use the system there under the guidance of a tech-savy person.

Best,

Niko Z.

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