Google Summer of Code Application Notes

1. Describe your organization.

MarkUs is a Ruby on Rails application for grading student assignments. The goal of the project is to make it easy for graders to give high quality feedback to students. Students form groups, submit their assignments, and receive their results and feedback using MarkUs. Instructors map graders to students, manage assignments, due dates and penalties, view the progress of the graders, and release results to the students. Graders annotate students code, fill in rubrics and keep track of their work.

We have been working on MarkUs since August 2008, but MarkUs grew out of another online grading tool OLM that had been in development and use since 2004. MarkUs is used by several thousand students in Computer Science and Engineering courses in three universities: University of Toronto, University of Waterloo, and Ecole Centrale de Nantes. It is fully internationalized, with current support for French and English. We have received positive feedback from users who interact with MarkUs through a screen reader, and who heavily use the accessibility features of MarkUs.

Although MarkUs began as a project developed entirely by undergraduate students either as part time project students, or full-time summer students funded by a grant, it has grown into a full-fledged open source project. There are currently 47 people on the developers mailing list, and a core group of developers who manage releases, review submitted code, and mentor new developers. We have also had three industry advisors, Mike Gunderloy, Adam Goucher, and Blake Winton who have helped us in refining our development process and with resolving technical issues. The project originated with and is supervised by Karen Reid, a faculty member at the University of Toronto.

2. Why is your organization applying to participate in Google Summer of Code 2011? What do you hope to gain by participating?

We have a history of working with students in an open source environment, and our project has reached a level of maturity where we have a core group of developers, a clear development and review process, and substantial experience mentoring newcomers to the project. MarkUs is now at a stage where students will learn good open source practices, and will be able to make significant contributions to the project. We rely almost entirely on volunteer work, and the support from Google Summer of Code will be most appreciated.

3. Did your organization participate in past Google Summer of Codes? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.

MarkUs has not participated in past Google Summer of Codes, but a number of our developers and administrators have been involved both as students and mentors for different organizations. I have mentored a student on an Eclipse project. Mike Conley one of our potential mentors was a GSoC student on ReviewBoard last year, and has mentored several students working on MarkUs and ReviewBoard since.

4. If your organization has not previously participated in Google Summer of Code, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?

We have not applied in the past.

5. What license(s) does your project use?

MIT

6.What is the URL for your Ideas page?

https://github.com/MarkUsProject/Markus/wiki/GSOC_ideas

7. What is the main development mailing list for your organization? [email protected]

What is the main IRC channel for your organization? #markus on irc.freenode.net

8. Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.

We would ask applicants to use the following application template: GsocApplicationTemplate

9. Who will be your backup organization administrator?

Any of the potential project mentors could take over as a backup organization administrator. They have a clear grasp of the inner workings of the MarkUs, and also understand the current goals.

10. What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.

All the people who have agreed to be mentors have had experience mentoring students in different capacities. Mike Conley has been a project mentor for undergraduate students students working on ReviewBoard and Markus. Severin Gehwolf has been helping students getting involved in Markus, and very active in reviewing patches. Nelle Varoquaux has been a project mentor for engineering students working on Markus. All three are core developers, and have a very good knowledge of the code base, and are very active in the IRC chanel and on the mailing list.

11. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?

We will insist on regular (twice a week) meetings with students to monitor their progress. If a student does not communicate appropriately, we will make every effort to contact them, and work with the Google Summer of Code organization to contact students. If students are given sufficient opportunity to reconnect, but fail to do so we will contact Google and fail the student.

12. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

Three core developers have committed to mentor GSoC Students for MarkUs. If one of them is unavailable, the other two mentors will step in. Moreover, we've assured for a fourth mentor to step in if need be.

13. What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?

Our experience showed that students have their best development experience if they have at least completed their basic MarkUs development setup before the start date. We will encourage students to tackle a small outstanding issue as way to familiarize themselves with MarkUs development. We usually get in touch with students as soon as we have their contact information. Communication in general is done via email, our mailing list or the MarkUs IRC channel. The core developers, organization mentor, and other developers are almost always on the IRC channel.

In order to keep students engaged, we try to get back to them on a regular bases and make sure that students will get matched up with projects in which they are most interested in. We try hard to keep our community welcoming and supportive. The code review process is a specific example of the working atmosphere on MarkUs. The core developers nearly always preface their comments with praise for getting the work done, and gently redirect novices to adopt standard practices and complete tests.

14. What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after Google Summer of Code concludes?

We are always at the lookout for new core developers and regular contributors. Depending on the knowledge of the student and his or her aptitudes there are various roles a new developer of MarkUs could play. It will depend on the individual student, but we'll ensure to get back to them on a regular basis, be open for new ideas and try to connect as a community. Not every participant will want to stick around, but we have a pretty good track record so far, partly because MarkUs is an excellent training ground for relatively new web programmers.