21st January 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
I solved a problem last week that had been bugging me for ages. Basically when categorising the types of qualifications that people enter I was feeling uncomfortable because it wasn’t always clear what someone intended to mean. For example, ‘International Baccalaureate’ is a common qualification type, but any exam is either an intermediate or advanced exam, and that information wasn’t always given. Originally I thought that the best solution would be to assume a precise qualification, which tutors and students could change if they actually intended to enter something different. I never liked this though. It just felt a little silly to try and make something precise when it wasn’t. Obviously tutors shouldn’t really do this, they should know exactly what to call each of their qualifications, but that’s not always true with students.
What I’ve done instead is make sure that we simply note whether a qualification type is accurate or vague. This way, if a student enters a vague qualification type, we will favour tutors who can teach the subject at the highest possible level. However, if a tutor enters a vague qualification type then it will be assumed that the tutor has only studied that qualification to the lowest possible (and, of course, we’ll let the tutor know that an accurate qualification type will benefit him/her more).
I also spent the end of last week in Newcastle with the friend who’s helping me with online tuition. Things are really starting to come along now, and my task now is to write a lot of webpages, and do some cool stuff with Javascript.