Online submission
Information and Communications took the plunge (just as term started) last September (05) to provide online submission for every element of coursework. It wasn't manatory except in a couple of units that moved 'electronic only' submission.
The department isn't new to electronic submission with a variety of methods including previous webct submission, submission to web space and network drive submissions being used for a variety of taught units. Moving to electronic submission, in support of traditional paper submission for all other units was not a giant leap. The key desicion was to create Submission Zones for the three Levels (years), plus one for Masters units. This was seen as an interim setup prior to the move of all units to WebCT Vista. The ideal being that once this is implemented each unit can have its own submission boxes.
As far as I can tell at present the whole operation was overall a success. It did rely heavily on our Information Officer to get the correct students seeing the correct zones. As this was a blunder bust approach all students could see all assignments for their level, not just the ones for the units they were taking. There was also cross over with masters students needing to see some undergraduate assignments. There were also Combined Honours students and Erasmus students to deal with.
Each assignment was set a cut off time of five to midnight on the date of submission. The theory behind this being that the paper submission could be dealt with (usually at 3.30pm) and then the student would have sufficient time then to organise the electronic submission. The downfall in this approach was that any student who then had difficulties could not get support at this late hour. The simple answer to this seems to be a 5pm electronic submission deadline.
The other key issue was either late submissions, or more importantly agreed late submissions (extensions). WebCT can be configued to allow late submissions for each unit which will work fine in the Vista environment. Our policy is up until 2 weeks after the deadline for 40 percent max mark. The problem comes after this time. We did address this by creating a Late Submission box as a catch all resource. Unfortunately if a student has submitted one item, they could not then submit another.
The simple answer may be not to accept online submissions beyond the additional two weeks. Any extended submissions would be emailed directly to the tutor. This is something to discuss.
Actual access to the submissions was also another issue. Using the Submision Zones only myself and the Information Officer had access to the submitted work. One of the trickiest things was actually downloading all the assignments. because of the blunder bust approach when downloading we were faced with entries for every student on that level, and not just the students taking the unit. To avoid downloading multiple empty folders we had to select the actual submissions individually to then download as a batch.
Many of the problems will be removed as we move to the Vista environment. Each unit will have an ACW section which will contain the assignment briefs and the submision boxes (?) for each element of assessment. By default, only those doing the unit will have access to this area.
Student feedback was very positive, with some asking for more 'online only' submissions. I do have feedback from two small surveys (with small responce rates) that I will publish. I will also look at how many students submitted when it wasn't mandatory. Watch this space!
Information and Communications took the plunge (just as term started) last September (05) to provide online submission for every element of coursework. It wasn't manatory except in a couple of units that moved 'electronic only' submission.
The department isn't new to electronic submission with a variety of methods including previous webct submission, submission to web space and network drive submissions being used for a variety of taught units. Moving to electronic submission, in support of traditional paper submission for all other units was not a giant leap. The key desicion was to create Submission Zones for the three Levels (years), plus one for Masters units. This was seen as an interim setup prior to the move of all units to WebCT Vista. The ideal being that once this is implemented each unit can have its own submission boxes.
As far as I can tell at present the whole operation was overall a success. It did rely heavily on our Information Officer to get the correct students seeing the correct zones. As this was a blunder bust approach all students could see all assignments for their level, not just the ones for the units they were taking. There was also cross over with masters students needing to see some undergraduate assignments. There were also Combined Honours students and Erasmus students to deal with.
Each assignment was set a cut off time of five to midnight on the date of submission. The theory behind this being that the paper submission could be dealt with (usually at 3.30pm) and then the student would have sufficient time then to organise the electronic submission. The downfall in this approach was that any student who then had difficulties could not get support at this late hour. The simple answer to this seems to be a 5pm electronic submission deadline.
The other key issue was either late submissions, or more importantly agreed late submissions (extensions). WebCT can be configued to allow late submissions for each unit which will work fine in the Vista environment. Our policy is up until 2 weeks after the deadline for 40 percent max mark. The problem comes after this time. We did address this by creating a Late Submission box as a catch all resource. Unfortunately if a student has submitted one item, they could not then submit another.
The simple answer may be not to accept online submissions beyond the additional two weeks. Any extended submissions would be emailed directly to the tutor. This is something to discuss.
Actual access to the submissions was also another issue. Using the Submision Zones only myself and the Information Officer had access to the submitted work. One of the trickiest things was actually downloading all the assignments. because of the blunder bust approach when downloading we were faced with entries for every student on that level, and not just the students taking the unit. To avoid downloading multiple empty folders we had to select the actual submissions individually to then download as a batch.
Many of the problems will be removed as we move to the Vista environment. Each unit will have an ACW section which will contain the assignment briefs and the submision boxes (?) for each element of assessment. By default, only those doing the unit will have access to this area.
Student feedback was very positive, with some asking for more 'online only' submissions. I do have feedback from two small surveys (with small responce rates) that I will publish. I will also look at how many students submitted when it wasn't mandatory. Watch this space!
posted by Richard E @ 5:17 pm
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