Functional Overview
The "Assignments" title for this tool should be taken to indicate its primary course management function, but its workflows are in fact of broad relevance for a variety of academic purposes. At bottom, the class of activities supported by the tool would be comprised of some or all of the following:
- the posting of a task description or criteria for submission
- the submission of some content designed to answer the posted description and meet its criteria
- the review of such submissions, and the ability to return feedback or assessment to submitters
The family of high-level use cases could thus include:
- Homework in a traditional class, whether submitted electronically or not
- Collecting, approving and rejecting conference papers or proposals for research or grant funding
- A job search committee reviewing resumes, etc. through a multi-stage process
- The refinement of a paper for publication with "pre-release" input from a few trusted colleagues
It is that first case - homework - which is the design focus, but hopefully in such a way that others are not excluded. The "Assignments" title seems therefore to narrow the case too quickly, but in the absence of a better, more generic term ( "Submissions?" "Assessor?" Every attempt achieves either an unhelpful ambiguity or lands clumsily), "Assignments" will continue to be used.
Process Roles
The class of activities can be anchored by user role in the process (as distinct from a role in the site):
- Assignment Author - that person, whether instructor or other content provider (e.g. textbook publisher or colleague who taught the class last year) who produces the task description and edits the criteria for submission.
- Submitter - that person which submits some content designed to answer or meet the posted description
- Reviewer - that person or collection of persons which reviews a submission and delivers some feedback or assessment
In the simplest homework case the author and reviewer are the same person, and after review the submission is returned directly to the submitter with a grade. But a great deal of assessment approaches ranging from the basic (e.g. team projects) to the innovative (e.g. complex forms of peer review) can take on more elaborate workflows, while other academic workflows might not carry the same assumptions about the relative authority of authors, reviewers and submitters. Process role is thus a more fruitful basis from which to proceed than an instructor-student dynamic.
Homework Considerations
The simplest case - a traditional and unimaginative model of one instructor grading the homework of many students - does not suffice for the support of even mere course management functions. More flexible support is needed for a variety of pedagogies (e.g. team projects, peer review) in the first place. In the second place it is not uncommon in larger courses for teaching assistants to take on the "Reviewer" role entirely, each responsible for a different "section" of the course, and so in addition to course management there must also be support for managing the activity of assistants. From the teaching assistant side they should only have to deal with those assignments and submissions which pertain to their limited focus, while from the coordinating instructor's side they must have support for their oversight of assistant activity (imagine, for example, a student protesting a TA's assessment - such that the instructor is obliged to intervene - and the kind of information they would need to have available to them).