Legacy Systems

MSD Feedback System

This web-based feedback system was developed in 2004 when neither WebLearn nor existing third-party tools provided the functionality required by many of the MSD’s courses to collect feedback online. In most situations, the MSD Feedback System has now been superseded by the WebLearn Survey Tool and we have therefore ceased actively developing the system. However, there are still a number of scenarios in which the MSD Feedback system is a better, or the only, choice:

1. Where you wish to allow students to answer the same group of questions (e.g various questions about their experience in a hospital) about multiple hospitals when students may have visited an unknown number - one to three, or more.
2. Where you wish to show or hide one or more questions according to the answer given to a previous question. For example, there is no point asking students numerous questions about their meat buying and preparation habits if they have already indicated that they are vegetarian.
3. Where you wish to collect feedback for Feedback Gets Results or the Electives Explorer, both of which depend upon the MSD Feedback System.

Try it yourself

Demonstration of Survey System Features (Oxford SSO required)

New Report Tool

To allow users to create richer reports within the feedback system, particularly for returning elective students, we have introduced an improved report-writing tool (CKEditor with CKFinder, for those interested in the technical details). To help users get started with these we have created a one page-how to guide and a short (homemade) video:

Getting Started with the new Report Tool (PDF) 

A few tips and tricks for creating rich reports using the new report tool (CKEditor) in the Medical Sciences Division survey system, covering images, working with large reports, printing and pasting from MS Word.

Electives explorer

1. Built on top of the MSD Feedback System, Electives Explorer:Collects mandatory feedback and a 500-word report from students when they return from their elective placements in year 6 of the Medicine course – this uses standard features of the MSD Feedback System.
2. Allows students (in year 5) planning their electives to view previous students’ feedback on their electives. Students can search either simply by country or by features such as specialties offered.

With the phasing out of the MSD Feedback System, we are looking at other ways of providing this functionality.

Feedback gets results

Recognising the problems of persuading a satisfactory proportion of students to provide feedback on a course, in 2007 MSDLT commissioned the old Academic Computing Development Team at Oxford University Computing Services (now IT Services) to develop Feedback Gets Results (FGR). The system:

1. Automatically notifies students by email that an administrator has made data about them (usually assessment results, uploaded as an Excel spreahsheet) available to them on the FGR website and provides a link from which students may access them.
2. Optionally, requires that students complete the relevant online feedback form (delivered via the MSD Feedback System) before being allowed to access their data.

ProSpec

ProSpec was a simple tool to enable course administrators to update and publish their programme specification. A WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor was used to populate standard fields, making it easy to create a new programme. Each field could then be edited individually for straightforward updating, and updates were not made live until the new version was published.

Features included:

• Version control
• Multiple editors per specification
• Publication notifications
• HTML and PDF views
• Word download

Rapla - Room bookings and timetabling

Rapla was a flexible multi-user resource (e.g rooms, projectors, etc) and event planning system. It featured multiple calendars views, conflict-management, fully configurable resource and event types and many import/export functions.

We ran Rapla for the Medical Sciences Teaching Centre to track its complex room bookings for undergraduate teaching and conferences. 

A read-only view was visible via the web. Rapla also mad it easy to reuse data in other formats. For example, we fed it into WebLearn to create a page which is shown on the MSTC Foyer Display Screen, to guide students and visitors, and to make them aware of important announcements.