One of the best things about online teaching–and a technology that would be useful even in a face-to-face class–is the assignment drop box. In a face-to-face class, paper due day is always a bad scene. Students who haven’t finished their papers often skip class in order to finish or in order to avoid the discomfort of not having anything to hand in. No matter what your policy, students will come in late and attempt to slip their papers into the pile. It quickly becomes difficult to tell who turned in on time and who didn’t. Students who skip miss out on the lecture. And even those who show up often spent most of the past twenty four hours working on their papers; it’s rare–and perhaps unreasonable to expect–that they also found time to read whatever was on the syllabus.
All of the various Learning Management Systems provide some mechanism for turning in assignments online. Blackboard lets you define assignment start dates, due dates, and late dates. Students who turn in their work via this “Assignments” tool simply upload an attachment and hit submit. The assignment tool puts a time stamp on the submission, and flags late and missed assignments appropriately. On the back end, it’s easy to sort the assignments by their timestamps and/or their late/missed status. The Assignments tool stops doesn’t allow submissions after the cutoff date/time. Past assignments are still listed in the student view, but the link to submit one is grayed out.
Taking assignments via email attachment is another option, of course, but I’ve always found it unwieldy. It quickly becomes difficult to tell who has submitted and who hasn’t, which submissions have been downloaded, and which haven’t, and most anything else you need to know in order to make working with submissions fairly painless. So I don’t take submissions via email. I only take them via the Assignments tool.
In a face-to-face class, I always considered it unfair to turn back some student papers one class day and the rest another. So, if I still had a few papers to grade at five minutes until class time, everyone had to wait until the entire batch was finished. In the online environment, I grade and turn back assignments in the order in which they were submitted. First in is first out. Quicker feedback is a benefit of turning in early. Students get their papers back very shortly after I finish grading them, whatever time that might be. This method would be unfair if the grading window were very large (even the stragglers deserve feedback in a timely manner). But I generally grade a batch of papers in two to three days. So I feel it’s justified.
One definite disadvantage of Blackboard is it provides no way to download all submissions at once. Older versions did, but the version in use at the institution where I teach does not. I have to download each student’s submission separately. This is a waste of time, of course. The only advantage to it is I can correct the file names of the assignments in the “save as” dialog of my browser. And I can tell (by the visited link color) which ones I’ve downloaded and which remain. I try to get students to use a consistent naming convention (e.g. lastname_firstname_paper01.pdf), but there are always some files that break the convention, so it takes some editing.
I also would prefer to have students submit their work in PDF format, as part of my grading process involves using Adobe Acrobat’s commenting tools. But I don’t know of a simple, free converter that’s easily available. So I take submissions in PDF, .doc/.docx (i.e. Microsoft Word), and .rtf (i.e. Rich Text Format).
The Assignments tool in Blackboard is also the means by which grades and marked-up assignments are returned to the student. So, when I’ve made all my comments on their papers, attached my grade sheet, and converted it all to PDF (more on that process in another installment), I attach the file using the same interface where I downloaded their submission, type a numeric grade into a text box, and hit submit. The student gets a PDF full of commentary, and the grade goes straight into the online grade book. The back-end lets me toggle between views of papers graded and those still waiting to be graded. So it’s easy to see what’s left in my queue.
So, even though there’s room for improvement, I find that accepting paper submissions online is a great improvement over the dreaded “paper due day” of my face-to-face classes. I get the advantage of time stamps; students get the advantage of quicker feedback. And none of us have to sit uncomfortably in a half-empty, very quiet room, waiting to see if anyone else will rush in the door and slide a paper into the stack.
[This is the second installment in an ongoing series of posts about my experiences teaching in an online environment after years of experience teaching face to face. You might also be interested in part one. The journey continues in part three.]