Quote:
Originally Posted by chaley
Have you looked at creating a user category for each TA, then populating that category with the students in that TA's section? This scheme would eliminate the external file. The user category would show the students in alpha order, making it as easy to see the list of students there as in the external file. The search is easy: click on the user category.
To make it even easier, create an "enrollment record" book for each student. Tag that record with the section(s) that the student is in. Given that, creating or updating the user category is as simple as searching the enrollment records for the section name, selecting all the books, then dragging the author (the student's name) to the user category.
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Chaley,
I worked through a tagging system a couple of years back. But changes in calibre (accepting a folder, to read in automatically) and the way my friend worked his system between the now three campuses, made me rethink things. And I came up with the solution I outlined waaaaay above. And it really does work. I'm just worried it will stop working due to limitations in Windows more than anything else.
I should further explain that the students are all taking the professor's course, at whatever year level, and this system if merely for submitting papers and essays. The discreet files are copied into Calibre for later reading on the TA's iPads, who mark and comment and send the summary to my friend. The files are also referenced for later submittal to a plagerization service. (It's a catalog export to a csv file and then I've written a small app that creates a text file with the file locations of the original DOCx's for mass uploading to the testing site). All of this later stuff is based on date added to the Calibre database. I know, I know, kludgy as all hell and it would't be needed if the college had a decent centralized content management system, but it doesn't.
It's obvious that there is no direct disk input function within Calibre's GUI to get this done. Sigh. And my needs are so esoteric, it would be a waste of time to have Kovid look at it, shake his head and send a NO reply.
So, I will persist with that that is working and pray my luck (in these sort of things) holds out. One TA is monitoring 100 students currently, which makes me think that's the thin edge of the maximum. But a total of 300 is juuuuuust about at the edge of what the professor can handle in any given term. I'm going to rename old searches to include a year code as they go from one year to the next.
As it is, I will be alerting each TA that they are in charge of providing me emails, copied to their boss, of their master list with any new edits. Then, it's up to them. And all I have to do to maintain the house of cards is to spend all of three minutes copying, pasting and renaming in Calibre. Am I REALLY that lazy that I can't afford three minutes every now and then? Well, speaking as a programmer, yeah! But in reality, no.
Thanks for suggestions to a tag system that would, probably equally as well as what I've got.
Regards, GM