View Source Attempt design

Torus attempts track student interaction and results for pages, activities and parts of activities.

Attempt Hierarchy

Torus models attempts in a hierarchy that mirrors the hierarchical structure of course content. So for every page that a student visits in Torus a page attempt record is created. For every activity that exists on a visited page, an activity attempt record is created (which points back to the parent page attempt record). Finally, for every part that an activity defines, a part attempt record is created.

The entire attempt hierarchy is rooted in a resource access record that tracks, amongst other things, the rolled up student result (aka grade) across all attempts.

Attempt History

The Torus attempt hierarchy supports preservation of historical attempts. Consider an example where a student takes a graded assessment (i.e. a page) that contains two activities (each with one part) twice. The full attempt hierarchy, with history, would look like the following:

Resource Access
--Page Attempt 1
----Activity A, Attempt 1
------Part 1, Attempt 1
----Activity B, Attempt 1
------Part 1, Attempt 1
--Page Attempt 2
----Activity A, Attempt 1
------Part 1, Attempt 1
----Activity B, Attempt 1
------Part 1, Attempt 1

As another example, consider an ungraded page that contains one activity that a student attempts several times:

Resource Access
--Page Attempt 1
----Activity A, Attempt 1
------Part 1, Attempt 1
----Activity A, Attempt 2
------Part 1, Attempt 1
----Activity A, Attempt 3
------Part 1, Attempt 1
----Activity A, Attempt 4
------Part 1, Attempt 1

Attempt States

Attempts can exist in multiple states. These states are:

• Non-existent: The student has yet to access the page, thus no attempt exists.
• Active: A student attempt is "active" when they are currently interacting with this page or activity therefore the attempt is "active".
• Submitted: The student submitted a response for an activity that requires manual instructor scoring, thus the attempt enters a "submitted" state. The attempt is now read-only for the student.
• Evaluated: The student response has been evaluated (whether automatically or manually) and a score has been recorded into the attempt record. The attempt is now read-only for both the instructor and student.