Googling for plagiarists

March 29, 2005 3:45 PM

To those (2 year/4 year) college instructors out there: what experiences have you had with "course tools" to allow students to electronically post assignments?

As a side issue to today's loooong comment thread, bugbear asked whether college instructors still received student work on paper or on
disk. My question--how many of you that are instructors (TA, prof, adjunct, whatever) use course tools such as WebCT, Blackboard, or other to allow students to electronically submit assigments, and which course tool do you find works best?

posted by beelzbubba to Education (14 answers total)

At the university I'm currently at, 10% or so use WebCT. There was something similar at my last university, but really only used for class materials and not for turning in course work. When I was a GA, we only accepted stuff on paper unless we were feeling particularly generous. Of course, my subject was History, so the advantages of getting paper copies are pretty obvious. Might be different for non-writing intensive subjects.

Honestly, I kind of like WebCT. The class
posted by absalom at 4:09 PM on March 29, 2005

Response by poster: I teach first year writing (I'm a TA), so our courses are writing intensive--the advantage of getting paper copies is not immediately obvious to me. I find using "track changes" on my word processor allows me to quickly commment and return the paper. Why do you prefer paper?
posted by beelzbubba at 4:14 PM on March 29, 2005

We use Blackboard 6 at my (Law) school, but only sporadically. We do blind grading, so it's not as convenient as it could be.

When professors use it, it's typically for the document posing, discussion board, and calendar information. Student organizations also use the community tools extensively.
posted by Coffeemate at 4:21 PM on March 29, 2005

I accept assignments on paper only.

First of all, I prefer to read on paper rather than on a screen. I also like being able to grade anywhere rather than being tied to a computer. I suppose I could accept e-mailed papers (I've never heard of these systems before, students have tried to email me papers, though), but then I would have to print them out myself. And that's A) A lot of work for me, especially since I have to use pine email and then ftp the files down. B) It costs me money to print.

So paper only. And the paper is "in" when I have the paper in my hand. Emailing me the paper ten minutes before the deadline and then saying "I'll bring you a hard copy tomorrow" isn't good enough.
posted by duck at 4:35 PM on March 29, 2005

I use moodle quite a bit. It's free and open-source.

Great for submissions, for feedback, etc.
posted by MiG at 5:09 PM on March 29, 2005

Like duck, I have a strict policy of only accepting assignments on paper, unless the student makes prior arrangements to email the assignment. Where I teach, printing from the computer lab is free and unlimited, so there's no legitimate reason why a student wouldn't be able to print out their paper.

Last semester, we had to go to an information session about turnitin.com; don't know if you are familiar with that site, but it's sold as a "Plagiarism Prevention Tool" that checks the text of papers against their "huge" database (which does not include papers from buy-a-paper sites, which sort of defeats the purpose, but that's another story). None of us (English dept TAs and faculty) were convinced that our lives would be better with turnitin; but other universities have used it successfully, or so we were told.

FWIW.
posted by elisabeth r at 5:16 PM on March 29, 2005

Blackboard is often frustrating from both the instructor and the student side. There are quota issues here and student uploads are charged against available course content. Also, it is fairly obfuscated to upload from the students point of view which causes more problems then it is worth. Blackboard has had some stability issues this semester as well.

It is useful to accept items via email and ask students to tag the subject with a specific word. You may then sort it with your mail program. This is also more reflective of the business environment than the strange institutional systems I've seen. Finally, it is better that you teach them how to attach, not their future employer (yes - seems silly, but always a few every term).
posted by ix at 5:39 PM on March 29, 2005

I've used WebCT and like it a lot for shortish assignments. I find it quicker and easier to grade that way; students seem more inclined to read my comments; I don't have to fuss around with turning back paper copies and keeping track of the strays that accumulate when people aren't in class on the day when you pass them out*; your comments are stored together in a place where either of you can refer to them later whenever you want; and you can set it up to absolutely not accept assignments after a certain time, if you so desire, which students seem to accept more readily than the version of the same thing that involves saying "no" yourself.

Turning in assignments by email seems frequently to involve a lot of heartache, as well as room for excuse-making. Because tech support for WebCT is handled by the university, and tracking students' access is relatively transparent, it feels more dependable to me in that regard. I wouldn't want to use it for anything where I was planning to do margin notes -- "track changes" is okay, but too prone to technical glitches in transmission for my own taste. But I'm moving more and more toward end notes only, anyway, even for assignments where the main point is giving feedback on the quality of the student's writing, so I can see myself moving more and more toward using WebCT for all assignments.

*This is huge for me. I loathe the pile of papers, and especially the stragglers that then I inevitably forget to turn back the next time I see the student in question. Ugh.
posted by redfoxtail at 6:32 PM on March 29, 2005

I'm not an instructor, but I've helped set up a few courses using WebCT and Vista (the new version of WebCT). Vista is ten thousand times easier to use as a designer.

Very few of our professors use the course sites for anything beyond posting a syllabus, the grade book, and occasionally the discussion forums. I'm hoping that as the University switches to Vista they'll find it more useful and stop asking me to post all the course materials on the main website. We have 3 or 4 completely-online courses that are run through WebCT/Vista and they seem to work just fine.

I only know of one professor in the department (out of 20 or so) who required papers be submitted electronically. He runs them through TurnItIn before grading. A year ago I worked with another prof in a different department who used to require papers be submitted through the old version of WebCT. He complained that he couldn't bulk upload the graded papers (or something like that). It got to be too time-consuming and I think he quit doing it that way.
posted by belladonna at 7:15 PM on March 29, 2005

Best answer: I let my comp students turn in their assignments on Blackboard but only using the Assignment tool. I've had too many missed emailed papers, and the dropbox was a nightmare to use, but I find the Assignment feature to be pretty reliable.

I also let my students know that, although they have the option to turn in their papers electronically, it's their ass if the internet gods smite their efforts. Basically, I don't give them the benefit of the doubt: if they submit a paper, and I don't get it, it's late and penalized accordingly. I find this caveat limits the number of electronic submissions primarily to those from students who physically can't make it to class, since I also (on paper) don't give extensions for the plane you missed because of the flu you caught at your grandmother's funeral.
posted by bibliowench at 7:16 PM on March 29, 2005

Oh, yes, setting things up via WebCT is slow and painful.
posted by redfoxtail at 7:34 PM on March 29, 2005

offtrack question about webct:
Why oh why did they make everything use crummy scripts?
I like open a bunch of stuff intabs, but its impossible in webct. If I want to look at the assignment at the same time as commenting on the discusion board im out of luck unless I want to log into webct twice, which is a pain.
posted by Iax at 2:29 AM on March 30, 2005

Blackboard is awful, awful, awful. I cannot believe how terrible that software is.

Moodle, however, is wonderful. And free. Why so many schools spend thousands for Blackboard when they could be running Moodle for free is a mystery I will never understand.

In my case, many of the assignments I give are expected to be turned in by ftping them to a web server (it's a web design class, you see, and so learning to upload is part of the skill set required). But some are not, and for those, Moodle has worked wonderfully.
posted by litlnemo at 5:55 AM on March 30, 2005

I hate, hate, hate WebCT/Vista. Can you say Java nightmare?

Also, the tech folks at my uni don't understand bandwidth, so at the beginning of every semester, the Vista site crashes for two weeks.

Maybe this is OT, but I'm a university student who is required to use WebCT and it's the bane of my existence.
posted by SlyBevel at 6:19 AM on March 30, 2005