Saturday, February 12, 2011

CPR update

The original plan for our Calibrated Peer Review assignment was that students would submit their draft assignments by last night.  Next week is Reading Week, a mid-term break with no classes or assignments due, so this would give them have a week off before doing their three calibration reviews (one week) and their reviews of three student submissions (the next week).

But getting the CPR system up and running at UBC is taking longer than I had hoped, so I've set back the due date until next Sunday (at the end of Reading Week).

I had anticipated that there might be problems't getting the CPR software to work as intended, and had set the original the due date with the plan that it could be changed. However the problem isn't software implementation at all, but the legal license agreement between UBC and UCLA. 

The agreement includes an 'indemnity' clause that (I think) protects UCLA from the consequences of anything bad that UBC might do. But UBC's lawyers have provided a standard indemnification clause that isn't as sweeping as the one UCLA specifies.  Any changes to this could require months (years?) of back-and-forth between the legal counsels for the two institutions.

The new version of CPR (CPR4) is the first one to have a local component installed on the user's computers - the previous versions all ran entirely on the UCLA system and were remotely accessed by students at other institutions.  So I was concerned that UBC might be the first foreign user, and that all the legal bugs still had to be worked out.

Luckily my UCLA contact assures me that there should be no legal problems, so the local installation is proceeding.  With luck, we'll get all the bugs out next week and be ready for the students next weekend.

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