I'm a TA in several modules and one thing I couldn't find yet is a system to help me manage student lab submissions. Most online collaborative tools I've seen do not allow me to, or make it quite complex to receive files from students and download all of them at once.
Note that in my university, there is not such a strict discipline, in the sense that late submissions are often tolerated; if students forget to send their files, I'd like to gently remind them to do so; etc.
So far, I use e-mail for managing student submissions, but there are several limitations:
- Students forget to send the e-mail, or send it to an incorrect address, or simply quit the course, but since I do not know in which case they are, I have to manually e-mail students from which no submission has been received;
- Students have no guarantee I actually received the email, so I have to ACK them;
- Students sometimes send an e-mail but forget the attachment, so I have to check each of them and notify the student;
- Students sometimes send multiple versions, and if there is a deadline between them, it might change the grading criteria;
So far, I have to manually open each email, download the files to a separate folder, and ACK the student. This is quite boring. Something that would help me save some time and automate things (like sending reminders, one-click download of all files, etc) would be of great help.
So far I've seen Moodle and Piazza, but none of them seem to actually help much with student file management, or I missed something. Any indications of tools for the job?