What's New in the Drop Box for Students
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 students:
- You can now see the file you submitted. As soon as you submit a file to a Drop Box, there's a link to the file so you can download it if you need it right then, or at a later time.
- Drop Boxes can have multiple parts. Faculty can set up Drop Boxes so that you can submit more than one file. A Drop Box might be set up for an excercise which has two requirements: submit a Word document and an Excel file. A single Drop Box can now collect both files.
- You must have the Flash plug-in installed to submit files to a Drop Box. Students have been asking for a long time to see the progress of their files as they are uploaded to a Drop Box. In order to achieve this (and in order to manage a few more things in the new Drop Box), we have to use the Flash plug-in. While super-new Web browsers (like the latest versions of Chrome and Safari) have ways of doing this without Flash, in order to achieve the same functionality across all Web browsers — especially Internet Explorer, which is what you find in the labs and kiosks at the School — Flash was the only option.
A couple of students have asked us if it's possible to submit files to the Drop Box from an iPad or iPhone. Because iOS devices like the iPad and iPhone (and Android devices, for that matter) lack a traditional file system, you can't "browse" your iPad or iPhone (or Andriod device) for files. As such, there's no way to upload a file from your iPad into a Drop Box. While apps you buy in the App Store can do this (and mostly for photos, not so much for Word documents and the like), Safari (the Web browser) on iOS cannot do this.
As always, if you have feedback or comments about the new Drop Box in CoursePlus, please let us know!