Discussion: Avoid Sigrid becoming New Public Management

[bengterik]

When in a low-intensity lab or helping session the managing of Sigrid can feel a bit forced. For example, forcing students to join the room and reminding them to leave the queue. It also promote the TA to assume a passive role, looking at the browser waiting for someone to join the queue instead of “roaming the room” checking in with the students. That being said, Sigrid is still very useful and appreciated in sessions with a lot of students in need of help or wanting to present.

I hope to start a discussion about how we use Sigrid in the next iteration of the course and onwards. I would very much appreciate thoughts and possible improvements below.

Things that I can think of in this moment are:

1. Make the use of Sigrid optional to the lab supervisor, i.e. the start the room only if there are many students in a session

• Would give more agency to TA.
• Might cause confusion/annoyance for the students.

2. Tighter integration in the lab rooms, for example that the (digital) room always exists and that the physical room has a screen (an actual "Sigrid Monitor" :-)

• The TA wouldn't have to start the room and supervise their laptop/phone.

3. Go back to chalk and WB-pens and ask for ambulance help in Discord or have them circle between the rooms.

• Although a bit drastic, it is the way that queueing is handled in all other courses I have taken. I’m not sure if I am in favor of this as I think there should exist a reasonable middle-ground.
• Chalk and WB-pencils should be distributed to 30+ TA’s…

[bjornregnell]

Thanks for starting this discussion @bengterik I think the proposed middle-ground option 2 sounds promising, but I'd like to hear more voices and thought about this before we invest in new features of Sigrid.

All supervisors are welcome to add new thoughts and input here!

[bjornregnell]

If we have all rooms always available then they could have a two different states that a super-visor can toggle between where queues are either "active" or "inactive" to signal that a room is not using queues and when queues are inactive then you can't join any queues of that room. If rooms are by default inactive and a supervisor needs to activate the queues then people cannot queue until there is a supervisor present, which might perhaps be desirable anyway?