22nd July 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
I started Harriet working on the big qualifications task last week. It’s always a little quieter for her over the summer, so it seemed to make sense to get her help and it’s pretty interesting stuff too. I did a little analysis of the extent to which we have categorised all the disciplines and we’ve actually done 98% of the qualification which have been entered. Annoyingly, however, that 98% only represents a third of the work needed, because we’ve categorised a third of the disciplines, which account for 98% of the total qualifications entered by tutors and students.
My next task is to write the algorithm that scores the link between two disciplines, which is quite an exciting thing to embark upon. Certain aspects are pretty easy; science contains biology, chemistry and physics, so linking biology to science doesn’t pose a problem. However, I also need to connect biology and chemistry, which is more of a challenge. It would be easy to say that they aren’t connected, but that’s not true because certainly someone with a degree in biology and an A Level in chemistry would be a better A Level chemistry tutor than someone with a degree in English and an A Level in chemistry (assuming equal teaching abilities). The answer really lies in what I discussed last week about good categorisation of the disciplines, and I’ve been having a few thoughts about that; I think I’ll display the categorisation to all of our tutors, and ask them to help. Given that we have so many academic experts, it seems silly not to ask their help if they’ve got 5 minutes.