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The Angel Assignment Management System is a powerful tool for instructors and students to manage assignments efficiently. It allows instructors to upload course materials, monitor assignment submission status, and grade assignments, while students can check course information, submit assignments online, and view their grades. The system also provides features for parents and teachers to make assignments, review student lessons, and access curriculum materials.
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Acknowledgement
I would like to have this opportunity to thank my project advisor, Dr. Pavel Naumov. His patience, encouragement and advices have greatly helped me during the implementation. I could not achieve the success without his help.
I am grateful to the other committee members: Dr. Linda Null, Dr. Thang N. Bui, and Dr. Qin Ding for reviewing my paper. I also appreciate the help from Dr. Bui, Dr. Null, and Mr. Hans Royer during my Master’s study.
Finally, I feel a deep sense of gratitude of my family who has been giving me continuous support throughout my study.
1. Introduction
Assignment management is one of the fundamental activities in education. In traditional assignment management schemes, assignments are recorded on paper, floppy disks, and emails. They have to be delivered or organized manually. This is inconvenient and inefficient, and may cause many problems due to material limits and human errors, such as disordered printouts (without page numbers), damaged floppy disks, etc. Furthermore, instructors and students usually are unaware of the ongoing academic information, which can be used to help them find out problems and improve their teaching and learning qualities. Therefore, it becomes important to implement an assignment management method, which can provide both instructors and students with quality educational services [1].
Along with the development of web and Common Gateway Interface (CGI) technologies, more and more web-based systems have been implemented. In such systems, users can handle their management in an extremely convenient way: they can access the systems from anywhere at any time; get responses immediately; make use of countless online resources and share their own with others. More importantly, they do not need to worry about the operating systems and different application software on either server or client side. All they need to have is a browser and the ability to get online. Presently, many assignment-management-related systems can be found easily on the Internet. Following are some of them:
1. The Blackboard System at Carnegie Mellon is a course management system, whose web site is http://www.cmu.edu/blackboard. With this system, instructors can add new courses and upload course materials (including announcements, course information, staff information, and assignments) online; while students can submit information to instructors, check course calendars and grades, manage homepages, and edit their profiles online. Furthermore, instructors and students can communicate with each other via discussion board or groups [2].
2. Edulink is an online home school system, which can be accessed at http://www.edu- link.com. In this system, parents and teachers can make assignments, review student’s lessons, access curriculum materials, which are presented in a variety of formats from illustrated text to fully interactive 3-D experiences, and utilize teaching tools to create new assignments and view student assignment information. Students can review assignments, access curriculum materials and utilize learning tools. Similar to the Blackboard System , both educators and students can communicate with each other via discussion tools [3]. 3. The Pennsylvania State University’s Angel System is another example of a course management system, which can be accessed at http://cms.psu.edu/frameIndex.html. The main features that Angel provides are: a user profile page, which lists all courses that the user is either taking or teaching; a syllabus template, which helps instructors create an HTML syllabus; a course calendar, which can be used by instructors to post events and announcements; a lessons tool, which is used to build and manage course content; drop boxes, which are used by students to submit their homework assignments; and an in touch menu, which lets users compose and read course mails, and participate in online chats and discussion [4].
This paper introduces a self-developed web-based Assignment Management System (AMS). It is not designed to compete with the above commercial systems, which cover all education activities: teaching, learning, communication, assignment management, and provide some fancy features that are more appropriate for online education. Instead, this system focuses on the assignment management part. All useful features about assignment management of other systems are included in this system and new functions that are practical in the management are added. The objective is to provide instructors and students with a convenient, efficient, and secure way to handle their assignment activities.
Figure 1. Login page
The instructor part is the most important part of the system since instructors are usually responsible for most of the assignment management. The main function bar and log out button are displayed on all pages, so that instructors can conveniently switch between different web pages. The main function bar is composed of eight submit buttons: Home , Password , Syllabus , Class List , Assignment , Submission , Grading , and Student Information (see Figure 2). They are used to perform different management tasks and are explained following.
2.1.1.1 Home
After an instructor logs onto the system, a personal home page is displayed (Figure 2). All the personal and teaching information of this instructor is shown on that page.
Figure 2. Example of an instructor home page
2.1.1.2 Password In order to change his/her password, an instructor needs to input both the old and the new passwords. First, the AMS system checks if the old password is the correct one for the current user. Then it checks the new password, which needs to be typed twice, and should be eight to twenty characters long. For valid inputs, the system automatically updates the instructor’s password and returns a success notice to the user. For invalid inputs, an error message will be displayed to prompt the user re-execute the process. Figure 3 shows such an example.
Figure 4. Example of a syllabus displaying page
Figure 5. Example of an editing syllabus page
2.1.1.4 Class List
Before a semester begins, an instructor needs to create a class list for each course he/she is going to teach. The Class List feature is used to perform this task. First, the instructor selects the required course from the given course list, which contains all courses the instructor is going to teach. Then the current class list is displayed with each student’s student ID, name, user ID, Penn State email address, and semester status. Student Names are shown as HTML links which link to the corresponding Penn State Directories. An example is shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6. Example of a class list page
In this web page, an instructor can update/add class list by file, add by hand, and edit/delete current records. Since information input is time consuming and boring, we decided to make use of the available information resources to avoid such repetitive work. The Penn State University’s Elion System provides instructors an electronic version of their class lists, which are sent to the instructors’ Penn State access account email addresses. There are two different data forms available: Spreadsheet and Email Distribution. The Spreadsheet format contains more detailed student information and it is the one used in this AMS system. AMS automatically checks the format of the selected class list file, and if any mismatch is found, an error message is displayed and the modification process is terminated. For a valid class list file, this system also checks the information in each record. Only valid records are modified according to the file input. All invalid records are listed in an error message to help the user check errors later. This is very useful for batch processing cases.
Sometimes, the instructor may need to add a single or just a few student records. In this case, the Add By Hand function can be used (Figure 7). The instructor simply fills out the HTML form and chooses either add or cancel. Then the work is done. For both batch
Figure 9. Example of an assignment page
To add a new assignment, an instructor needs to input all the required information. For an electronic assignment, dialogue windows are displayed repeatedly until all assignment files are uploaded. If there is no file for uploading, a new assignment record is added to the database. This covers the case of handout assignments. Error checking of date, time and file names is executed before real database modification and uploading.
In front of each item of the current assignment list, there is a radio button, which can be used to modify or delete a selected assignment. The Modify Selected Assignment function provides the instructor with a clear and easy-to-use way to change assignment information, which is shown in Figure 10. First, current settings are displayed. Then the instructor types in a new points value, a new due date, and a new due time if necessary. Third, for each assignment and answer file (if it exists), the instructor can simply select expected operations (keep, delete, or replace), and select a new file if replace is selected. Then, the instructor can select a new assignment and a new answer file in the following file fields, which provide users a convenient way to select needed files from local storage. Last, the instructor can decide either to save or to cancel the changes.
Figure 10. Example of an assignment modification page
To delete an assignment, this system will output a warning message to let the instructor be sure of his/her operation.
2.1.1.6 Submission
The Submission function is useful when an instructor needs to monitor or modify the submission status. After an instructor selects a course name from all courses he/she is teaching, an assignment list is displayed. The instructor needs to select an assignment name, after which its current submission status is displayed. In this page, all students names, student IDs, user IDs, submission time, statuses that indicate if the submissions are on time or late according to the due times, and all uploaded files are displayed. Files are also shown in HTML links to let the instructor easily save or open them. An example of the submission page is shown in Figure 11. When students submit their assignments online, the submission time and assignment files are recorded by the AMS system.
Figure 12. Example of a different submission status page
Figure 13. Example of a same submission status page
2.1.1.7 Grading Another important function the AMS system provides instructors is related to grades. An instructor can grade assignments online, check class academic status, and even view statistic reports. To do this, the instructor needs to select the course again. This time, not only are all of his/her teaching courses listed, but one more item is added to the list: Total Grades (see Figure 14). By selecting any item except Total Grades , the instructor can check class grades of this assignment and change grades for all students. First, the due time and the total points for this assignment are displayed. All students’ current grades are listed with their personal information, submission status, and assignment file links. Then the instructor can press Change Grades button to enter the grading page (see Figure 15). Grading work is very easy - simply input new grades for students and choose to save updates then it is done. The system automatically checks all grades, which have to be numeric type and cannot be greater than the total points of this assignment. A new grade list will be displayed to indicate the changes.
Figure 14. Example of a grade list Figure 15. Example of a grading page
The Total Grades function is different from the others, and can be used to view class grades for not just one assignment but also all the assignments having been assigned. Displayed information includes student personal information, grades for each assignment, and final grades that are calculated according to the grading criteria. If no syllabus is set up for this course, the final grade for each student will be the sum of all his/her assignment grades. All student records are listed in the order of final grades, from the highest to the lowest. Under the list is a statistic report about the class grades. Minimum grade, average grade, standard deviation, and maximum grade for each item are displayed. Figure 16 is an example of class grades report page.
