Atutor.no

I've been posting several things we wish to adjust, change or develop in ATutor lately, and here's one more!

One of the things we get the most negative feedback and support questions on, is how assignments work, both from students and our instructors.

Today you deliver assignments from the "my files" area of the file storage. There are some good things about this, specifically that you can use the "my files" are to store your assignments, keep revisions, and work on them there till they are done, then deliver them with a click or two. Also, creating a new assignment for instructors works just fine!

Sadly there are also many problems with this.

For students:

• Most of our students don't use "my files" to store these files, so delivering assignments through it becomes cumbersome. You first have to find and upload to "my files", select files from there, click deliver, then choose which assignment to deliver, then actually deliver.
• You need to activate "file storage" even though it isn't used for anything else than assignments.
• The students have nowhere to see which assignments a course has, or when they are due before they actually select a file and click "hand in". Then you get a list of the different assignments with their due dates.
• Feedback on the assignments are delivered as a comment to their files, so they need to manually check back here to get feedback.

For instructors, which is where we get the most complaints:

• First and foremost, every time a course uses assignments we get this complaint: there are no way for an instructor to see who has delivered and who has not. When chosing assignments -> submissions they get a list of folders named after the users username. They then have to manually click each folder to see if there are files handed in.
• Earlier there was no way to give feedback from here either, but now you can do this via the comments. However, it is still cumbersome to see who you have commented to, and who you haven't

Main issue

I believe the main issue here simply is that the file storage is designed to be a tool to store files, not a place to hand in assignments. It works great for what it is originally designed for, but not optimal for what it is tweaked into also doing.

I am personally partly responsible for this, as we partly specified this functinality years ago, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't look at it again now, after we have gotten this feedback and experience with how students and instructors use it.

For me the solution is to move it out from the file storage and do one of the following with it. Which of these is better is up for debate:

1. file uploads as separate question type to be used in tests.
2. assignment as own tool.

File uploads as question type to be used in tests.

In this scenario we would use the test tool as it is today, but assignments would be handled through a specific question type that would allow you to upload files. The typical scenario for us would be to create a test with one / two questions of the file upload kind.

The good thing with this is that you would have all the functionality that is in the test tool today (title, description, availability, number of possible tries, when to release results, submission lists etc). It would also work with our certificate module out of the box, an all in all it seems to me simpler to develop and maintain.

You would no longer manage these with manage -> assignments, but via the test tool.

The bad thing is that assignments and tests are different things, and this might be confusing. You would also need to name the tool (and thus the tab) "Tests & Surveys & Assignments" (in Norwegian "Tester, spørreundersøkelser og innleveringer") which undoubtely is a very long title for a menu item.

Assignments as it's own tool

In this scenario you would still manage the assigments as today, but they would be available to the students through its own tool / tab, named "Assignments". We would have to develop more, like a student front end, some way to see submitted assignments in the assignment module and etc.

What's better?

I think I personally lean more to one of the solutions above, but I would love to get some more feedback here - fire away in the comments!