Written by Berlin Fang
Collecting student assignments by email can add to the increasing clutter of our digital lives. Well, there is a method to madness. You can collect assignments using your learning management system. All major learning management systems (OpenClass, CourseSites and Moodle) have ways for you to collect student assignments, grade them and record them directly in the grade book that comes with the learning management system you use.
The benefits of doing this is that you do not have to sift through your emails to find a particular attachment and then relate that to a particular class. Nor would you have to create folders to store such files. A learning management system would streamline the entire process while students can get quicker feedback as soon as you have given them.
I am going to use CourseSites as an example to show how it works to management assignments with a learning management system.
While this tutorial shows you as an instructor how to manage assignment using CourseSites, the following tutorial shows students how to submit an assignment. Consider copying the URL and share it with students if you intend to collect assignments the way I explained:
http://ondemand.blackboard.com/r91/movies/bb91_student_submit_assignment.htm
Please note that you can also create “self and peer evaluation” type of assignments or group assignments using CourseSites. Let me know if you need any help creating this type of assignments. In addition, you can also download all your assignments from the learning management system, grade them offline and enter your grades online if that’s more desirable.