Approving Student Work
Before student-generated records can be added to the BOLD library and sent to GenBank, they must be approved by an instructor and submitted for additional data validation by SDP Administrators. The Course Management console shows the records queued for instructor review from all courses in the section called "Record Approval Queue".
Analysis Tools
It is recommended that instructors utilize the built-in analysis tools provided by the BOLD-SDP to help confirm the quality of the records assembled by their students. These tools can provide further insights into the quality of the records as they allow all records in a course to be compared at once, which could include highlighting errant records (such as a taxonomic mis-identification found via using the ID Engine). The analysis tools are available from each course record list. Here is a brief overview of the analysis tools available for instructors to use on the barcode records in each course they manage:
- Barcode Gap Analysis
Determines the distance to the nearest neighbour for each species, where distance is a measure of sequence similarity. Distances between specimens of the same species will tend to be much smaller than distances between different species, since larger distances indicate higher sequence divergence.
- Alignment Browser
Visualizes how the sequences of a project are aligned together.
- Accumulation Curve
Estimates how diverse and complete collection efforts for a certain site have been. A steeper curve suggests high diversity, not yet included in the data being analyzed. Curves with flat tops indicate that most species have been collected from that site.
- ID Engine
Queries the existing database for nearest matches.
- Taxon ID Tree
Illustrates how the specimens in the project cluster together based on their sequence similarity, with horizontal lines in the tree indicating how similar sequences are to each other.
- Map Collection Sites
Provides a Google Earth image with mapped collection sites
- Image Gallery
Creates a library of selected specimen images. By default, a single image is picked for each specimen in the course. You may click on images to zoom in a new window.
In the Record Approval Queue, instructors can quickly access an overview of the record, including the number of images and trace files uploaded and the sequence length and quality. Instructors may carefully examine each Specimen (using the Sample ID) and Sequence (using the sequence link) page to ensure that there are no mistakes and that the record meets data compliance standards. If the record does not meet standards for approval, the instructor may annotate individual specimen and sequence pages to provide feedback and guidance to their students.
- To approve a record, and forward it to the next step in the validation process, instructors can click on the green check mark in the validation column. This adds the record to an SDP administration queue, which allows project leaders and members of the scientific community to vet these student-generated barcode records before moving them to the BOLD researcher workbench and submitting corresponding nucleotide sequences for publication in GenBank. The green check mark will not be available to click unless the record meets the basic requirements for specimen and sequence quality and completeness.
- If a record is unable to be completed, or is of low quality, instructors can remove it from the SDP by clicking on the red x in the validation column. This permanently deletes the entire record and audit trail from the BOLD-SDP, so should only be used when a record is no longer needed for course grading. There is a confirmation message pop-up that requests a confirmation before a record is deleted.
- Should a record need further work by the students, it should be left in the Record Approval Queue until it meets the criteria to be validated.
Queued Records List
Figure 3-10: Queued records awaiting instructor approval before being sent to an SDP administrator. 
