Two New Drop Box Features: Automatic Reminders and an Honor Pledge
We've added two new features which we hope will make the CoursePlus Drop Box even more useful to faculty and TAs.
First: automatic reminders. You can now schedule automatic reminders that will be sent to students who have not yet turned in a file to a Drop Box that the Drop Box due date is approaching. You specify the number of days before the due date of the Drop Box that you want the reminder to be sent, and it is automatically sent to students who have not yet turned in a file for that Drop Box. This is the generic message that is always sent:
This email message is to remind you that you have not submitted [Name of Course] [Name of Drop Box].
Due Date: [Due date for Drop Box]
Second: an honor pledge indicator. You can now opt to require that students click a checkbox next to a statement about completing work in compliance with the School's policy and procedure memorandum pertaining academic ethics before they can submit a file to a Drop Box. While clicking a checkbox cannot literally enforce that students complete their work in an appropriate manner, it does help to serve as a reminder to all students of their obligations when it comes to academic ethics.
The honor pledge, written by the Associate Dean for Academic Integrity, reads:
I have completed this assignment in accordance with the School's Policies and Procedures Memorandum Students-1 pertaining to Academic Ethics.
One other change that we made to the Drop Box was to limit the size of submitted Microsoft Word or PDF files. In the first academic term, there were a handful of students who submitted Word documents or PDF files that were over 300MB in size. That's fairly huge for a Word document or PDF file, especially as the vast majority of students submit files that are less than 10MB in size. The problem with these large files was that they'd take a longer than normal time for faculty or TAs to download, and would significantly slow the creation of the ZIP files for all files submitted to a Drop Box. In order to improve the overall experience for everyone, we've limited the maximum file size of Word and PDF files that can be submitted to a Drop Box to 50MB. Students who have files larger than 50MB can use any number of techniques to reduce the file size, and can seek asssitance for doing this from the CTL Help team.