Course Management
Course management involves the management of assignments, submissions and their gradings. Introducing a new course in the OpenSubmit system involves the steps described below.
In the teacher backend, new courses can be created by users having the Superuser status flag activated in their user settings. By default, this is only the case for the superuser you created during the installation.
In the Courses section of the backend landing page, you can create a new course. The most important settings are the course owner and the student tutors (see also the description of user roles).
If you want to allow group work in your course assignments, set the Max authors setting to a value greater than 1.
The Active checkbox decides if any assignments from this course are shown to the students, regardless of their deadlines. This allows to put courses in an 'archive' mode after the term is over.
The LTI key and LTI passphrase are optional. You need to configure them if you want other learning management systems (LMSs), such as Moodle, to integrate OpenSubmit into their content. In this case, the LMS needs a key and a passphrase that you configure separately for each OpenSubmit course. This makes sure that the system knows automatically the course in which the external LMS user is interested in. Such users don't need to perform any authentication, OpenSubmit believes in the identify information forwarded by the LMS. If the user already exists with the same email address, the LMS identity is added to his social login credentials.
Depending on the authentication provider, students get automatically an account and end up on the student dashboard. By default, none of the existing active courses in OpenSubmit is linked to them. This leads to the fact that they can't see any course assignments by default.
If you want to make sure that students automatically see the assignments for your course, you need to tell OpenSubmit the course ID when entering it. This can be done by linking to a course-specific OpenSubmit URL, for example on your group home page or in your LMS. The URL is shown in the course details page.
Before you can create assignments for students, you must think about the grading scheme. A grading scheme is an arbitrary collection of gradings, were each grading either means 'pass' or 'fail'. For this reason, you first need to create some gradings (w.g. 'A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'F') before you put them together as one named grading scheme.
With an existing course and grading scheme, you can now create a new assignment. Assignments have a set of mandatory properties:
- The title of the assignment.
- The course this assignment belongs to.
- The download URL for the task description. Tis is typically some PDF file on the course home page.
- The grading scheme being applied to this assignment.
You also configure three relevant dates:
- The publish at date is the time when the assignment will become visible for the students.
- The soft deadline is the one being shown to the students in the frontend. The countdown for the remaining time also relies on this value.
- The hard deadline is the one after which to more submissions for this assignment are possible. After this deadline, the assignment also disappears from the list of open assignments in the frontend.
In the time period between soft and hard deadline, the countdown for the assignment in the frontend remains at zero. The distinguishing is intended for the typical late-comers, which try to submit their solution shortly after the deadline. Broken internet, time zone difficulties, dogs eating the homework ... we all know the excuses.
If you don't like the idea, simply set soft and hard deadline to the same timestamp.
Each assignment can be configured to expect a file atachment as part of the student solution submission. For the ease of internal management, only one file per submission is allowed.
The has attachment flag in the assignment settings defines if the student is demanded to add a file to the solution. Setting only this flag would allow you to let the students to upload some PDF or text file as part of their solution.
In case you want to leverage the code evaluation features of OpenSubmit, more settings must be done. The student code upload is then expected to be a ZIP or TGZ file, which you need to state in your own assignment description document.
The attachment test timeout value defines how long student code is allowed to run on the test machines. This should be some expected maximum value for correct solutions, and serves as last line of defense against broken or never-ending student code. Code extending this timeout value is marked as 'validity test failed' (see submission state model).
The attachment test compile flag declares if the student code should be compiled before running the validation scripts. If this is set, the both the commands ./configure (allowed to fail) and make (not allowed to fail) are called in the direcory where the student code was unpacked on the test machine.
The attachment test validity file is the validation script to be executed automatically for each student submission. Details about this validator are described on a separate page. Code failing this test is marked as 'validity test failed' (see submission state model).
The validty script download flag defines if the students should get a link to the validation script for downloading it. This makes programming for the students much more easy, since the can locally if their uploaded code would pass the validation checks.
The attachment test full file is the full test script. The programming rules for this script are the same as for validators. This test code is never executed automatically, but only on direct request in the teacher backend. The idea here is to have some additional measurements or checks being done after the deadline, in order to allow better grading or ranking of students. Code failing this test is marked as 'full test failed' (see submission state model).
When all assignments and course settings are in place, the grading procedure can take place after the hard deadline.