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Essay question with History

1 Initial Problem

When writing essays in online-exams, it's necessary to have a backup-system for the admins of the test/participants, so it's possible to recover e.g. from the last 10 saved versions.

2 Conceptual Summary

Student-Version (preferred by SIG EA):

• The examinee can iterate through versions at will, the latest input is stored as most current version before restoring an older version.
• The participant can use this feature during a test inside the (essay) question element. It might be a new button below the text (e.g. "savestates and recovery") which triggers a modal/sidebar, where former version are shown and can be selected. After selecting a version, the participant has to agree to this recovery.
• The system stores 10 (default, configurable) restorable versions, according to the grandfather-father-son backup-principle (Generationenprinzip).
• A Version is created with every save-action (auto and manual), IF the current input differs from the last saved state.
• Versions might be purged when the test is handed in (depends on Optional History for saved Testinput).
• Implementation focusses on essay questions, but the function shall be usable for qst-plugins too.

Pre-state for a first implementation from the original feature-request:
Admin-Version:

• It could be implemented for test-admins with the aim to recover one of the last 10 saved version - in problematic cases (eg. in Online-tests, when students clear the text and click Save => Backup-requirement).
• Implementation would look like the GUI for individual additional time in a test.
• ILIAS should save this admin-intervention in the history.

3 User Interface Modifications

3.1 List of Affected Views

This feature could be placed at different pages:

• New option in the Admin->T&A->Log Data section, including an option for how many versions shall be saved for each affected question.
• New option in the test settings, including an option for how many versions shall be saved for each affected question.
• No option at all, this behaviour becomes an inherent part of essay questions (and plugins who use this feature).

A button and a modal/sidebar have to be added to the essay-GUI. Those elements shall be usable for qst-plugins too.

3.2 User Interface Details

3.3 New User Interface Concepts

4 Technical Information

5 Contact

• Author of the Request:  Hansjörg Lauener & SIG EA
• Maintainer: (will be set by Jour Fixe / maintainer)
• Implementation of the feature is done by: {The maintainer must add the name of the implementing developer.}

6 Funding

If you are interest in funding this feature, please add your name and institution to this list.

• University Leipzig

7 Discussion

C. Jobst, 01.08.2014:
 
Since we had a lost answer in one of our last assessments, we made a slightly different modification to our code.
 
The answers are committed to the log data for assessment with every saveaction. It does not interfere with the current loggingbehaviour.
 
The code/diff is on GitHub. Whoever finds it usefull, feel free to use it.
 
The database has to be altered for this to handle large text:
ALTER TABLE `ass_log` CHANGE `logtext` `logtext` LONGTEXT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NULL DEFAULT NULL ;
 
This is how it looks like:

C. Jobst, 5.12.2016: The request has been approved during the SIG EA Workshop in Leipzig. To consider depending current feature-requests the original request has been updated.

8 Implementation

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