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Update the assignment submission feature

Daniel Humphreys

June 11, 2010 16:11

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We would love to see a development of the feature allowing students to upload their assignments.  If would really help our institution if there was an option for email notification when a student uploads an assignment.  

Also, as of now there is no way to post a student's graded assignment back to the course page so they can read the evaluator's comments.  It has to be emailed to them as an attachment.  

It would be nice if the wording could be modified so the purpose of this feature is clearer.  Right now it says "Files" when a section called "Submit your assignments" would offer students more guidance.

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12 comments

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  James June 11, 2010 16:17

  Hi Daniel,

  Well the good news is that we've added the email notification feature this release - when a student uploads an assignment, all faculty members for the course get notified.

  I agree that the wording is a bit lacking and a comments feature would be nice... we'll see what we can do.

  Thanks!
  James 

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  Daniel Humphreys June 11, 2010 16:25

  HI James,

  Our evaluators add comments in red to the actual document file and, as of now, send them back as an email attachment.  It would be great if the faculty could have the option of deleting the current file (which they can now) and uploading a new version of it.  They could just modify the document title to say "Graded" or something.  That way a student could just check back for their graded assignment.

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  James June 11, 2010 16:57

  Hi Daniel,

  Gotcha... good to know.  So it sounds like you guys wouldn't actually need comments - maybe just a notification email to the student when a faculty member replaces an assignment.

  Thanks!
  James 

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  Robert Damon July 26, 2010 17:29

  Further, as we have gotten into this, is there a way to post assignments that would be only visible to the instructor; then, once graded, could be uploaded by the professor only visible to the student?  We are wanting to see about avoiding huge use of email and attachments, but also uploading files that would not be visible to ALL.  When the students or professor uploads a file, could there be a "visibility" choice to limit who can see or access that file?  In the course, not just in the "Files" tab?

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  Joel Wingo October 20, 2010 18:17

  An option to prevent (block) late submissions would be very helpful for us, so that we don't have to check the submission time of each individual assignment when grading it. Moodle has this feature, and it helped us sort out late assignments from on-time submissions. 

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  Paul Hartford December 17, 2010 19:41

  We have just begun to use some of these features and so have similar issues that seem to belong in this thread. Here is our wishlist:

  1. Allow the instructor to set permissions on uploads so that students may submit, delete, resubmit up until the due date if the instructor prefers, or only submit once.

  2. Make the tab read "Upload Assignment" instead of upload file.

  3. Allow instructors to download the student assignment, grade it using markup (Word for instance) and repost it in a way that it is just visible to the student. Currently if the instructor posts the corrected assignment it is visible to all students in the course.

  4. Students have confused the Discussion thread under Lesson and the bulletin board under Assignment. I think that a redesign of the Lesson page so that the discussion was in one column and the assignment in the other would help reduce confusion. Right now when you open up the Lesson, there is a toggle between Lesson and Discussion on the far right that new students miss.  Why toggle? just put it all on one page.

  Thanks!

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  Adam Sentz December 17, 2010 20:28

  Thanks for the input. Paul. A major overhaul of course instances is planned.

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  Rick Shenk December 21, 2010 20:26

  This is an important upgrade and I support the above requests, including a "memo" like communication tool which might augment returning a graded paper.  Not all submissions need markup and return.  Sometimes just a sentence of feedback would suffice.  I would also suggest changes to the Date-Time of submission (not only an option to prevent late assignments).  I suggest that the words by the date-time stamp which read "file added" should be "assignment uploaded" and that another line be added which shows the delta-time between the assignment due time and the time uploaded (late submission might show delta-time in another color, perhaps red).   Thanks.

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  Christal Fehr March 31, 2011 14:59

  The thing that would be most amazing for us is when a faculty opens up the student's submitted assignment, they can put their comments right onto that assignment without having to download and save on their computer and then send back to the student as an attachment. Would be great if that could all be done through Populi. Faculty opens assignment... types comments directly onto the essay... enters grade, saves... and bada-bing... student has their grade and assignment (with comments) returned to them. The less steps for faculty, the better.

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  Garth Friesen May 25, 2011 14:47

  As an instructor, I made use of Haiku last year and they came up with a great online marking tool called whiteboard for grading papers.  The student sends either a pdf or other type of document file which is uploaded on to the Internet with a "drop box" type of application.  As the instructor - I access the document and Haiku converts it into some sort of a editable document called "whiteboard" in which I can make comments throughout in whatever font/color I choose.  The comments are then saved to a pdf file which both the student & I have access to.  There is no emailing involved other than a notification that the grading is complete.  I am also able to grade the assignment which automatically goes to the gradebook.   What I loved about this was obviously the lack of paper, the efficiency of grading, and the ability to give feedback to my students which is critical to the learning process.  As well, the student can keep record of the instructors comments as it can be downloaded as a pdf file.    I've attached a screen grab of "whiteboard" in action.  If you can get something like this going I'll be a happy instructor.  It is critical for instructors to have both an interactive environment for grad.ing and a way of doing it quickly and efficiently.  If it takes longer than grading a paper normally - you know which option we will take.

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  Paul Hartford May 25, 2011 16:28

  Garth's comment is interesting. I just browsed here yesterday to see what was up because I was exploring Turnitin.com and wondering if it could actually be integrated with the assignment submission feature. I have not used Turnitin, but am aware of its increasing popularity. Do others in this forum recommend it?

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  Allan Crowson June 14, 2011 14:09

  I am glad to see that this feature is in the works. We too would like students to only see their own assignments and instructor responses, not those of everyone else. I also second the motion for rewording the labels and buttons to reflect assignment submission rather than file upload. We do not require anything at this point for being able to read the assignment within Populi itself, because while many may ask for assignments to be in a Word or other word processor format, assignments might also be spreadsheets, presentations, graphic files of various formats, and even more specialized formats used by statistics packages, etc. I do not expect Populi to be able to read any and all formats. Having said that, display of some commonly used format, such as TXT or RTF, might be helpful.

  I also second the reworking of the online content window to display discussion alongside the content.