Submission of assessments goes online
First-year undergraduates at Sussex are about to start submitting their assessments via a new electronic submission route, with the first deadlines on Monday 20 October.
On assessments selected for electronic submission, students will no longer be required to take printed copies to the relevant school office. Instead, they will upload their work using a new facility in Study Direct.
The service is being introduced on a number of first-year modules and initially will allow text-based assessments such as essays to be submitted and marked electronically.
Professor Clare Mackie, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Teaching and Learning), said: “We have reached another important milestone in our phased implementation of electronic submission and feedback for coursework.
“Students have told us that enabling coursework to be submitted online will provide a significant improvement in their learning experience.
“Staff, both academic and administrative, welcome the opportunity that online submission provides to free up resources and to focus on more face-to-face contact to support students - something which can be difficult when workloads increase as assessment deadlines approach.
“Our plan is to implement this project step by step so we can learn from the experience and keep improving the service as we widen its scope.
“Coursework and feedback are essential parts of the teaching and learning process and their management is a significant part of schools’ administrative workload, so getting this right is essential.”
Students’ work submitted online will automatically be checked by the Turnitin text-matching service – enhancing safeguards against plagiarism and encouraging students to follow the best academic practice on citation of others’ work.
More information for students is available on the Technology Enhanced Learning website, including videos demonstrating the process and frequently asked questions.
Staff will be able to mark work both online and offline to provide feedback directly to individual students via Study Direct. The Technology Enhanced Learning team, led by Dr David Walker and Project Manager Catherine Jones, have been undertaking an extensive programme of staff training to support the deployment of the new system.
School Administrators have been working closely with the project team and Academic Registry colleagues to ensure that systems, policies and processes are redesigned to support the introduction of the new system.
The new development is part of an e-submissions and e-feedback project, a three-year initiative to improve the assessment systems used by students. Teams from across the University, including IT Services and Technology Enhanced Learning, have been working on the project since early this year, developing a solution that is closely integrated with existing systems such as Study Direct and Sussex Direct and puts the entire assessment process online, from submission to marking and feedback.
Professor Mackie said: “We are focussing on text-based materials and first-year undergraduates this year, though we are continuing to evaluate the best ways to extend the service to include artefacts and complex formulae and formal notation, all of which are more difficult to assess and mark in an online environment.”
E-submissions will be extended to more students and additional types of assessment over the next few years.