I run a small coaching college with a bespoke curriculum that I have developed over the last ten years. The teaching and delivery method is fairly formulaic and uses a ‘knowledge tracker’ (Excel spreadsheets) to keep a track of students’ progress over the year. The approach itself is fairly simple – basically it’s a hierarchical approach of learning small pieces of information which cascade up into broader tasks which cascade up into an overall goal. A student might have ten goals over the year; Goal 1 is broken down into ten tasks; these ten tasks are further broken down into five to ten small objectives. Over the year lessons are are tied to these third order objectives with the related task in mind. Stats are kept on each objective and task, so if a student is struggling later on we can go back and see where his or her weaknesses were and target those. Near the end of the semester these tasks are consolidated, and the final assessments test the students on the overarching goals. As I said, we using Excel spreadsheets at the moment – one for each student which looks like this:
1 Goal
1.1 Task (with progress and achievement stats as metadata)
1.1.1 Objective (with progress and achievement stats as metadata)
1.1.2 Objective
1.1.3 Objective
1.2 Task
1.2.1 Objective
1.2.2 Objective
2 Goal
2.1 Task
2.1.1 Objective
2.1.2 Objective
and so on…
There’s nothing magical about this approach – it’s the content that we’ve developed and the way we track progress which is where our success lies. But as I mentioned, we’re using Excel which is becoming increasingly clunky and tedious, and I’d like to explore the option of developing an Access database. This way when it comes to the end of the semester with the push of a button we can query the database for all 85 of our students and bring up report which details their weakest ‘objectives’ and ‘tasks’ and target those (currently we do this in Excel but it takes significant time).
I dabbled in databases years ago and have a general idea about relational tables. I can see with our curriculum we should have a table for all Goals, a different table for all Tasks each linked to their parent Goal through primary and foreign keys, and one for all the Objectives, again linked through keys to the parent Task, as well as a Table for the students. However, I imagine the general concept and framework of this kind of database isn’t exactly unique - after all it's just hierarchical information - so I’m wondering if this particular kind of database has a name and whether there are guide out there on how to build the general structure?
Many thanks.