What's New in the Drop Box for Faculty and Editors

November 12, 2011 | 2 Minute Read

On Saturday, August 21, 2011, we rolled out a new version of the Drop Box in CoursePlus. Here's a summary of what's new for faculty and editors of CoursePlus sites:

• Multiple assignment parts per Drop Box. You can now collect up to five (5) files from each student in a single Drop Box. If you have an activity or lab that requires students to submit both a Word document and an Excel file, you can set up a single Drop Box with two parts: one for the Word document and one for the Excel file.
• Submit files on behalf of a student. Faculty and editors can now submit a file to a Drop Box on behalf of a student. This is very useful when a student can't submit their file in the regular fashion, but you want to take full advantage of the organizational capabilities of the Drop Box.
• See who downloaded files, and when. Each student file in a Drop Box now shows if the file has been downloaded by a faculty or editor, and when that person downloaded the file.
• See a history of student submissions to a Drop Box. If the Drop Box is set up to allow multiple submissions, you can see a history of all submissions by the student to that Drop Box. Note: Multiple versions of the files are not stored. Only the history of when students submitted a file to that Drop Box is displayed.
• Let students see other student submissions. You can set up a Drop Box so that once files are submitted, students can see everyone else's submissions. This is useful when students need to evaluate or critique other student papers, projects, or assignments.
• Get notified when students submit files to a Drop Box. You can optionally turn on notifications so that every time a student submits a file to a Drop Box, an email is sent to the specified address.
• See a full list of students who have not submitted a file to a Drop Box. Previously, you could only see the email addresses of students who had not submitted a file to a Drop Box, and only when you started to send a reminder email. Now you see the full list of students who have not submitted a file to a Drop Box on the main page for each Drop Box.

We hope that you find these updates to be useful. This is the same version of the Drop Box that's been used in online courses for the past few years, so it's been thoroughly tested and faculty and TA feedback on the tool has been great. 

If you do have comments or suggestions on the new Drop Box, please let us know!