Prof. Stein used WordPress for general information about the course including assignment descriptions (see: Assignments > Montage vs Long Take Wars).  These assignment descriptions then contained links to Moodle assignment “activities” where students could submit their assignments.  The WordPress site was also used as a place where students could blog about projects and share the videos they produced as part of their course work (see: Categories > Montage)

Prof. Stein used Moodle to distribute readings, collect assignment submissions and as a place for online discussion and used Moodle’s grading functionality to grade assignments and forum posts.

This screencast is the first in a series based on an interview Alex Chapin did with Louisa Stein in the spring of 2011. 

Receiving Assignments

Both Jason and James use email as the primary means of collecting assignments from students for the following reasons:

• emails are timestamped providing a simple way to ensure deadlines are met
• email provides a single place to archive records of all papers
• email ensures a definitive version of student work

Both ask students to simply attach their assignment to an email post and send it them. To help organize emails from students, they often ask students to include something in the subject line of the email that will flag the email as one containing an assignment.  For example they might ask students to put the name of the assignment in the subject line (e.g Assignment 1) perhaps even include the course code (fmmc0243).  This allows them to use “email rules” to filter these emails into a folder for later review. Both have similar workflows for compiling assignments for grading.  Each downloads papers to a single folder on their computer, opens the documents and does a quick check for the correct title and makes sure the word count was within the assignment guidelines.    For many classes, they would then send students an email confirming they received of the paper.

Grading in Microsoft Word/OpenOffice

Jason requires his students to submit their papers in .rtf format, a rich text format that is compatible with most word processing applications.  While Jason uses OpenOffice, similar features are available in Microsoft Word.  The document is opened and “track changes” is enabled (Tools > Track Changes).  Track changes allows Jason to add changes to the student’s paper in a way that preserves the original version for the student to compare.  Jason uses the commenting feature (Insert > Comment) to add comments inline.  For frequently used comments Jason has set up AutoText (Insert > AutoText) entries.  Jason will usually add additional comments as well as the grade at the end of the document.  Then he saves the document appending to its original filename “-comments-JM” and attaches it to an email to the student.

Grading PDF documents

James prefers to do his grading in .pdf format and has published detailed Essay Submissions guidelines.  James uses Adobe Acrobat, software that is not widely available on campus, but many of his techniques can be followed using freely available PDF tools.  For PC users he recommends Foxit Reader and for Mac users Skim (Macs also come with an application called Preview that is comparable).  Like Word, these tools also have commenting features that allow you to insert inline comments.  Some of these tools also allow you to create stamps of various colors and sizes that can be used for common comments. James has compiled a number of such stamps.

The exam contains about 90 questions, most of which are either multiple-choice or cloze type questions, and progresses from easier points of grammar — verb conjugation in the present, possessive and demonstrative adjectives — to more difficult ones — choice between past tenses, use of the conditional and the subjunctive.  There is a section to test reading comprehension, consisting of questions concerning a short text. The exam is configured to allow students to access the questions only once and has a time limit of 1 hour 15 minutes.  Student answers are saved to a database and scores can be exported into a spreadsheet.  Results from this exam determine what level courses students are allowed to take at Middlebury.”