9th November 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
I had a good meeting with Harriet last week. We’re trying to work out what we can remove from her daily tasks to give her more time during the day. There are two big jobs that take roughly two hours a day: processing the forms completed by students who want a tutor, and assigning tutors to particular students. Both of these can actually be automated, by doing more sophisticated checks on the completed forms, and by developing a clever system which can select the best tutor for a particular student, or allowing students to log in and choose the tutor they want. Over the next couple of months these are two things that I have to put some hard graft in to get done.
The other thing I was working on a lot last week was another programming thing (that’s all I seem to do at the moment) do to with assessments for tutors. The trouble is that originally it wasn’t done properly, and all I want to do is make a small change, which on the face of it appears really straightforward, but in fact, after looking into it, it’s quite a lot of work. It’s a bit like a building where there are a few bad bricks at the bottom, so you’ve got to lift all the other bricks off to change them (I can’t slip them out like Jenga). That, in itself, is hard enough, but obviously lots of tutors and students use our ‘building’ so I’ve got to change lots of bricks, and check they all fit together properly, before allowing people back into the building. Nightmare.