ELECTRONIC SUBMISSION SYSTEM

An Electronic Submission System to Enable Students to Electronically Hand in Their Assignments

An Electronic Submission System to Enable Students to Electronically Hand in Their Assignments

Introduction

Assignments are a powerful tool for enriching academic experience. They are intended to promote assimilation and enable learners to evaluate their knowledge gained in the classroom. In a traditional learning environment, students submit assignments physically but with the rapid advances in technology, submission of assignments has become easier and simpler as never imagined before. Most universities today provide a learning management system complete with a host of tools for the teaching and learning process. One of the tools is the online submission of assignments (Babbie, 2002). In an e-learning environment, online submission of assignments is intended to enable students to communicate and to maximize their online learning experience. This study investigates the effectiveness of using online submission assignment tool at a large university in Malaysia. Students from two different faculties were selected based on the nature of their subjects. Findings suggest there are four major areas of concern when designing and implementing the online submission of assignment (Anderson & Kanuka, 2003).

Electronic Submission System

Electronic Submission System is a system contained within the virtual learning environment. The functionality of the electronic submission system module has been extended to cater for all the Department's needs in terms of receiving assignments from students, making them available to tutors to mark, returning grades, comments and marked work to students and keeping Registry and course administrators informed at all stages of the process. Extension requests are an integral part of the system. By having the assignment handling system integrated into Moodle, which can also act as a course website, all aspects of dealing with assignments are maintained in a single location, accessible from anywhere with an internet connection. By dealing with assignment submission electronically over the internet, all students, wherever they are in the world, can operate to the same time schedule. No-one has to allow time for posting assignments in the regular mail.

An electronic system reduces the amount of paper handling required. The Registry staff does not need to photocopy assignments nor spend time and money putting them into envelopes and posting them out to tutors. Archiving electronic versions of documents reduces the physical storage space required for paper versions (Landauer & Dumais, 2007).

Our electronic submission system includes email notifications to relevant personnel of key events: submissions, extension requests, uploading of grades and marked work. Everyone involved in the process can access the system at any time to check whether assignments have been received or marked and the status of extension requests. Communication between all those involved is easy, lessening delays in the whole process.

The logging of every action is integrated into the system so it is easy to track who submitted what and when, and all documents uploaded to the system are stored for easy reference and retrieval. The system has been developed to provide an easy-to-use interface, supported by full ...