E-Submission and Marking on VITAL

For more information contact: Thomas Eckl.

On VITAL, creating assignments, submitting solutions by students and marking of solutions works as follows, with further instructions and templates to be found behind the links.

• The lecturer enrols the markers on the VITAL module. By enrolling them as "Teaching Assistant" they have only restricted rights on the VITAL pages, but they can mark.
• If the students are supposed to submit in groups, the groups must be created. This can be done either by hand, possibly by a TA, which is tedious for a large number of students, or VITAL assigns students to groups of predefined size randomly.
• If you want to fine-tune the assignments of students to groups further without doing it completely by hand, for example unmixing programmes or for mixing XJTLU students with native students, it seems possible to prepare a csv file using Excel and upload it to create groups. See the Blackboard Help for details; this needs further testing.
• The lecturer creates each assignment, attaches the problem sheet, enters the maximal possible marks and sets a deadline. Several attempts can be allowed. Note the particular actions necessary for group submission.
• The lecturer may create an announcement on the VITAL module describing how students produce a pdf file from their handwritten solutions. Such an announcement can be extracted from this Word file which after some adjustments may also be used to produce a hand out. Insist on only accepting one pdf file.
• The students proceed as follows:
  • The students scan in their handwritten solutions and produce a pdf file. This can be done on university printers (without additional costs) or using free apps (for example camscanner) on a smartphone.
  • The students submit their solutions as one pdf file on VITAL.
  • If the students are supposed to submit in groups, every group member may submit the solutions of the group, but only one solution per group can be submitted.
  • The submission deadlines are not strict, late submissions will just be marked late.
• Markers can access the submissions via the Grade Centre, comment and fill in marks. Typed comments can be attached to the overall mark, or to particular spots on the submission. It is also possible to download and even print out submissions, but working offline and uploading several marked and commented submissions is difficult.
• There are a few spare tablets available on which comments to solutions can be written directly by hand. The process is a little bit clumsy. Ask Thomas Eckl if you want to try it; the tablets will be handed out on a first-come-first-serve basis.
• A small minority of students do not hand in pdf files, or several of them, or pdf files in very bad quality. Trying to read and mark their solutions in other ways is possible but time-consuming. The best way to deal with this problem seems to refuse marking (treat them like unreadable handwritten solutions). The university provides all the necessary technical tools to produce the requested pdf file for free and in good quality: a scanner and a computer account with internet access and e-mail.
• Lecturers can access the submissions via the Grade Centre and moderate. Changes to marks and the general feedback comments are possible whereas it is not clear how to dismiss some of the inline comments of the first marker; it seems that the moderator has to redo the whole marking if changes to them are necessary.
• Students can see their marks and their (commented) solutions on the Grade Centre. It is possible to hide the marks and commented solutions and make them visible to the students later on; this allows moderation and prevents students complaining about delays.
• You can create total columns in the Grade Centre, with weights attached to particular columns if necessary. You can also download the grades to a csv file, which can be imported to an Excel spreadsheet.

For not-so-technical enquiries on e-submission on VITAL you can ask Thomas Eckl, but also Anna Pratoussevich, Alena Haddley and Kamila Zychaluk. The eLearning Unit is very helpful on more subtle questions, and can be phoned under 42490. If things are not working properly contact CSD.