Rating UDG Agora Comparte Reports on a Scale of 1-5 Tacos

We have just finished the 8 week online phase of the UDG Agora project, this the second year I have been part of this project run by the Justice Institute of British Columbia for faculty at the University of Guadalajara.

This is where we tell them about Comparte (Spanish for “Share”), a site I made last year as a place for participants to publish the results of their course redesign projects.

Yep, this is Alan again using his SPLOT code, this is the TRU Writer SPLOT, with a few enhancements. Building it last year got me to think about and implement a means for contributors to get a special link to use to re-edit their work (it does require them entering their email address, but there is a way for admins to get the special link too).

The site is nearly all in Spanish, including the interface, and instructions on how to use to (thanks to “Kike” Jorge Enrique from UDG, including a screencast video).

We wanted to have many ways to find reports, because the collection we have will help the current cohort get ideas how to share their results.

I modified the “tags” input field on the writing form to ask for two sets of tags- one for the academic discipline of the project, and another for technologies used:

Two separate tag fields

The first one are normal WordPress tags, I created a second taxonomy for the tech tags. This provides us in the footer different ways to find reports of interest (there are 127 reports from last year):

We also have reports grouped into categories:

Proyectos de Apertura (Openness)
Proyectos de Aprendizaje Activo (Active Learning)
Proyectos de Creación con Medios (Creation of Media)
Proyectos mezclados (Remix)
Otro tipo de proyectos (Other types of project)

And one always has good old search:

During our last live hangout where we provided an overview of Comparte, an idea wormed in my head. I had started to add a category for “Featured” reports as good examples (or “Distinguido”). But how do we find which ones to feature?

Why not let the project participants tell us? I already use the WP-Post-Ratings plugin on the Challenge Bank. Because I am running a multi-site, I just needed to turn the plugin on.

I had a whacky idea, to not just do 1-5 stars as a rating.

The never ending search for the best fish tacos @ds106dc #tdc1744 #ds106 pic.twitter.com/f8nS0z9GNr

— Alan Levine (@cogdog) October 17, 2016

Of course, tacos!

The WP Post Ratings plugin page had the answer for how to create my own graphics, just make a new folder inside the plugin’s images folders, and make sure it had graphics with the same names as the ones on the stars folder, just made of tacos:

And they just show up as an option in the plugin (the one thing to watch for is a plugin update, I will have to re-upload the images)

Getting them on the site means modifying my template to include:

A bit of CSS was needed to make them look good, but they ow show up on the from listing of reports:

“Sin evaluar” means that I have not rated it yet (ratings are tracked by cookies), so I can choose my number of tacos to award, and just click the appropriate taco. The ratings also show up on the individual report, under the name of the writer:

Here it is showing that 1 vote has been cast, and the average is 4 out of 5 tacos, and that I have already voted (so i cannot stuff the taco box).

The plugin provides a widget, so I have in the bottom right, the 5 most highlight taco-rated reports (“most voted”)

The plugin also provides a link I can use on the menu, to show all of the reports, sorted by the highest average rated first.

Maybe tacos are not the most academically rigid form of assessment. But most people enjoy tacos. Well, I took a poll in my house…

flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license

These guys like them too…

flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license

So I invite you to seriously spend some time in Comparte and really find us the best 5 taco reports. If you help, I will buy you all a taco.

Top / Featured Image: This is the design of a t-shirt sold online by Headline shirts. It’s not openly licensed and the designs are apparently ©. So I bought a t-shirt as a gesture of appreciation. And I am blogging it, in the hopes the 100s of thousands of my readers buy shirts from them.

Would you rather have iron clad control of media or more sales?