12th July 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
I had a major breakthrough this week with the qualifications stuff I’ve been working on. Basically everything we’ve done so far has been conceptually easy, but quite laborious. Now, I still have about 6000 things to categorise, which is going to take me at least until the end of July, but after that it stops being about working hard, and we’ll have to work smart. My headache was how to decide the way in which every subject links to another, because there’s overlap, there’s sharing of skills but not content, and many other situations, and we want to ensure that, given the subject to be tutored, we can look at a tutor’s qualifications and determine how good a fit the tutor is. I say “we”, of course this process has to be automatic.
I’ve come up with a system that first requires us to put every subject in something like a Venn diagram, and then run an algorithm that tells us how related each subject is to every other subject. I haven’t written the algorithm yet, and that is slightly intimidating, but once done, everything will run ridiculously quickly through the website, and I really couldn’t ask for anything else.
Otherwise this week I was liaising a lot with our programmer who’s sort out online tuition, and that is just about ready for testing, so hopefully next week I’ll have some concrete results to write about.