31st March 2014 9:00
By Blue Tutors
We made a big leap forward with the qualifications framework last week. Not only did Harriet finish a big task that she’s been working on; categorising all the qualification types that our tutors and students have entered, but I wrote two algorithms which I’ve been dreading tackling. Basically the algorithms tell us how connected all of the subjects are, and I had made the decision to run these algorithms regularly so that we have an up-to-date database of the subject categorisation which would make matching a tutor to a particular student’s requirements much quicker. However, the worry of doing it that way is how long the algorithms might take. The nightmare scenario is that I run a function and it keeps our server busy for an hour, so I was amazed when the first function took a matter of seconds, and the second around 2 minutes (something which I’d like to reduce further, but is manageable if we run it only once a day in the middle of the night).
The upshot of all of this is that we can now click a button and see how suitable a tutor is to teach something. Before it’s always been binary – either a tutor was allowed to teach something or they weren’t. Of course we could still look at each tutor’s profile to get a better idea of their ability, but that takes so long, and this new way removes human subjectivity.