Review of e-submission and e-marking to provide quality feedback and minimise turn around times for external students

Abstract

With the advent of widespread use of Course Management Systems such as Moodle; and dedicated online submission systems for assessments, there are compelling drivers to instigate a completely digital assessment and marking work-flow. Advantages include: very fast turnaround times, submission logs, permanent records, the absence of manual paper handling and the ability to instigate common feedback methods for reoccurring student mistakes. In a completely electronic environment, assignments are submitted, assessed and returned to students as electronic files only. This paper presents an overview of eSubmission and eMarking to help the novice to get a better understanding of current technologies. It clarifies differences between electronic submission and electronic marking. It outlines a framework for online marking, addressing work-flow and software solutions that help to streamline the assessment of electronic documents. This work shows that online marking is possible in simple environments, without the use of costly hardware or software.