[Using Sakai] Online submissions of examined essays (Assignments)

[Perpich, Diana]

Hello, Adam,

We're running a somewhat similar project this summer with incoming  
students submitting via Assignments to a Writing Center site.  Our  
collected wisdom is limited at present, as our pilot was quite small  
(200 students).  We are sure to know much more soon, though.  Over the  
course of the summer almost 5000 incoming students will submit their  
writing samples as attachments to the assignment posted at the site.

By the way, we'll be presenting our lessons learned at the Boston  
conference as part of our Mega Sites session.

Although we have 5000 students submitting, they will submit on a  
rolling deadline.  Each student is expected to submit 5 days before s/ 
he arrives on campus for orientation and a new set of 100 students  
arrives every three days.

Still, we were very concerned about the Instructor view of one  
assignment with 5000 entries.  In our test instance, it took many  
minutes to display the first page of submissions, and then equally  
many minutes to sort by date so that the most recently submitted rose  
to the top.  We weren't confident that Download All was going to churn  
successfully at that volume either.  We didn't even test it.

Placing the students into Groups and creating a series of clone  
assignments, one group assigned to each, seems to have addressed the  
scaling challenges of a single assignment with that many submissions.   
That doesn't speak directly to your concern about the 4:59 glut, but  
it might give you some food for thought about navigating the  
submissions once they're in the system.

Our submissions are only about three pages each and Our Writing Center  
has no intention of printing out the 5000 entries.  Only about 200 of  
them will be read over the summer for immediate evaluation and the  
Writing Center staff intends to read the downloaded electronic  
version.  On a related note, I did recently receive some strong  
negative feedback from a program coordinator who was frustrated about  
picking up the cost of printing her departmental Course Evaluations.   
I asked her why they were printing them out: whether the print pages  
were actually being read and evaluated or if they could be printed as  
mere thumbprints, perhaps 12 pages per side-- illegible to the naked  
eye but proof that the file existed and could be printed if required.   
We have no institutional requirement to save the printed documents,  
even as thumbprints.  User preference may be playing a big role here;  
a significant number of instructors may well be still very  
uncomfortable with paperless evaluation.

We've learned other lessons about using Assignments this way, but most  
of what we've learned is directly related to the fact that our Writing  
Center site will almost certainly be the first experience with Sakai  
for these incoming students.  I'm presuming that students accessing  
your Examinations site will be well-experienced with Sakai in general  
and have at least some exposure to the Assignments tool.

I hope this has been helpful.  We'd be interested in learning more  
about your own lessons learned from your pilot.


[dlp]






diana perpich | CTools Support | digital media commons | University of  
Michigan



On May 11, 2009, at 10:41 AM, Adam Marshall wrote:

> Folks,
>
> We are planning to run a pilot of the Assignments tool with our  
> Examinations
> Dept. They have asked me to ask the collected wisdom of the Sakai  
> community
> if anybody has done anything similar.
>
> Currently students will hand in printed essays to the Exams School  
> who then
> make the essays available for collection by individual departments for
> marking. The proposal is to do this through the Assignment tool  
> instead.
>
> I think the Exams School are worried that lots of Essays will  
> 'close' at 5pm
> on a Friday and that there will be a glut of submissions at 4.59. Does
> anybody have any experience of the kinds of exceptional loads that  
> can be
> generated? Has this been factored in to the hardware / software
> configuration?
>
> They also ask about how institutions have managed the passing on of  
> printing
> costs from the student to the department. Under the current scheme,  
> every
> student prints out their own essay; in the future scheme each dept  
> will be
> printing out (say) 200, 10 page essays per week with a noticeable  
> impact on
> their budget.
>
> Any information would be most welcomed.
>
> Adam
>
> -- 
> Adam Marshall:       OUCS, 13, Banbury Rd. Oxford OX2 6NN.
> The upcoming new WebLearn service: http://beta.weblearn.ox.ac.uk
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>
>
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