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Managing Assignments
Introduction
WebCT Help for: Managing Assignment, German Version, French Version.
This page discusses the advantages of using the assignment tool and difficulties that might arise. Some further information concerning the use of an Assignment in Vista can be found in Part 4, Chapter 8, Sect: "Assignment and Assignment Dropbox", Sub-sect: "Managing Assignments" in the Designers and Instructors Reference, WebCT Vista 4 (pdf, 2.5 MB) p 177. Get UN & PW at edutech Vista Support.
Strong points
The assignment tool is not just one tool, but the management center for the teacher's action, when giving students tasks to accomplish. The tool helps with:
- getting the task out to the students
- allowing to give different assignments to different students
- allowing for individual or group assignments
- collecting the answers and making them easily accessible for the teacher
- controlling due and cutoff dates
- allowing follow-up activities
- letting students modify submissions after they have been submitted.
- allowing teachers to give individual feedback
- allowing teachers to grade students returns
- publishing students returns
- integrating other tools such as, calendar, mail, grade book
Week points
- Text formatting in the assignment text fields are not preserved (however HTML-formatting is).
- No automatic action can be set to be triggered by the reception of a students submission, to provide an automatically feedback, e.g.)
Hints and Tips
Let them work off line
You can give all the instructions for an assignment to the students in the corresponding "instructions" field in Vista, but, especially for complex tasks, such as case study analysis, it might be useful to also prepare the whole assignment on a separate page that you annex to the task as a downloadable file for students to print out. This will allow them to work outside the course platform until they login to submit their results.
Differentiate between students
The assignment tool allows you to provide different variation of one task to different students or student groups. This can be used e.g. if your students differ in preparedness or competence. But you can also create a difference in knowledge if you let student groups work on the same question from different points of view. In your next f-2-f course, when having the groups report on their assignment, the other groups will profit form these different perspectives that will be new but enriching to them. This two phase assignment can (Thanks to Chandra Holm for this one !)
Advantages and disadvantages of web site submission possibility
The assignment tool allows you to let students send their submissions as a text document or as a web site. For the latter to be useful, your students need to master HTML files and how to link among them. They have to create a home page and would need to know how to link dependent html pages to the home page that would server as the table of content for the other pages. Here the technical aspect can become more important then the learning matter, when you are not dealing with informatics students. On the other hand, if your students are web page savvy, submitting their assignment in the form of web pages provides them with a much broader and flexible way of presenting their material.
Individual or group submission
The assignment tool lets you choose between an assignment for: "All students individually", or "Groups of students".
In the first case, each student will have to produce a submission. In the second case, one submission per group is sufficient to satisfy the system." Don't confuse these two overall choices with the sub-choice that you get with the first one: "All students individually", where you can "Create additional sets of instructions for groups of students." If you select this setting, you produce an assignment in two phases. First, each student has to produce an individual submission. Only on delivery of that, she or he gets access to the second phase, to the additional instructions that will have to be tackled through a group effort.
Publish or not?
The assignment tool allows you to decide whether only the teacher has the right to publish students' submissions, or if it is up to the students to decide if they want to submit.
So you might want to ask your self, if your students are already sufficiently self-assured or proficient in the subject to survive in the glare of publicity. If you disable this option for first semester students, you can take away some unrelated stress from the learning task.
Other Resources Concerning this Subject
- Managing Students. Assignment Dropbox Houston University - Victoria
- Assignment Guide for Students from Steve Gallager at the City University London
Consult also the HOWTOs: