Changes to the Drop Box in Online Courses
On Tuesday, March 22, the Center rolled out a number of changes to the online course system, including two not-so-small changes to the Drop Box in online courses. The changes are:
- Limit the type of file that a Drop Box will accept. This has existed in CoursePlus for some time, but not in online courses. Now, when you set up a Drop Box, you can limit the kinds of files that the Drop Box will accept. Students will not be able to submit a file of a different type that the one specified. Options include:
- Any file type
- PDF files
- Word files (.doc, .docx, .rtf, .txt)
- PowerPoint files (.ppt, .pptx)
- Excel files (.xls, .xlsx)
- Stata files (.do, .dta, .log)
- R files (.r, .RNw)
- Plain text files (.txt)
- See a history of student submissions to a Drop Box. If a students submits a file to a Drop Box more than once, you can see a history of all those submission events. If a faculty or TA submits on behalf of the student, that too is recorded in the history. Note that we do not store all the copies of all the files submitted — only the history of submissions.
As always, if you have questions about these changes, or suggestions for changes to make in the future, we welcome them!