Wish List - Wish List: Wish #118

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Victoria Farnsworth

Experience/Skill rating system for tool

A tool should have a rating for the experience level or skill level required for using the tool. There should be a rating level for education vs. research purposes. This will help educators know which tools might be suitable for their purposes and the same for researchers.

This may also be linked to the taxonomy.

Comments (6)

  1. Alissa Nedossekina

    The discussion started in the wish about tool page re-design (http://nanohub.org/wishlist/general/1/wish/109)

    Here is another version of a possible audience break-down for tools. We may want to combine research and education rating levels into one comprehensive rating system. In this example, both color & circle positions are used to indicate audience skill level. Colors are similar to ski difficulty ratings. Several circles can be colored at once.

    circle rating system

    Screen_shot_2009-12-09_at_3.05.52_PM.pngFile not found

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  2. Margaret Shepard Morris

    Alissa,

    I like the graphic, but propose the following changes:

    Replace “Tool Audience” with “Levels for Tool Use” -or- “Tool Usage Scale”

    and make two new headers: Skill Required & Education Required

    Replace the words “Full scale” with “Skill Required”

    Replace “Academic background (general reference only)” with “Education Required”

    … these two new headers should be same level, and somehow visually different from the lists below, perhaps a gray, all caps?

    …make the skill and the education required lists the same font size (you may have to stack Freshman/Sophomore to do this.

    Finally, on the last line…insert the word “are” rather than the comma: Easy tools are suitable for K-12 audience

    I think these changes will clarify what the chart is communicating just a bit, if we stick with the two-category chart and do not combine them…

    Will this key appear on every tool? If not, how will the audience be able to immediately interpret the graphic? Where would the key reside if not on every tool?

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  3. Michael McLennan

    According to Gerhard’s initial pass through the tools, we should have the following levels (just 4 instead of 5):

    – Easy – Freshman/Sophomore
    – Intermediate – Junior/Senior
    – Advanced – Graduate
    – Expert – PhD level

    Of course we drop K-12. You might collapse the two blues, but other than that, the colors are good.

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  4. Michael McLennan

    Here’s a first cut at skill ratings for all tools. I took Gerhard’s initial ratings and added my own to fill out the complete set. The file is tab-delimited, so it should be easy to parse or load into Excel.

    skill ratings for all tools (tab-delimited)

    tool_skill_2010.txtFile not found

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  5. Michael McLennan

    I added a draft of the text for the “audience level” page into the implementation plan.

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  6. Alissa Nedossekina

    Turned on this feature for tools on live nanoHUB, will activate for courses when I have rating information.

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