Figure 1 : Information Flow
Mark A Gregory BEng. (Elec)(Hons) MEng., Senior Lecturer, Department of Communication and Electronic Engineering, RMIT University, m.gregory@rmit.edu.au
April Weiss, DLS Development Project Manager, Learning Technology Services, RMIT University, april.weiss@rmit.edu.au
RMIT University [HREF1] has implemented an Online Distributed Learning System (DLS) [HREF2]. The purpose of the DLS is to support online teaching and learning for the RMIT University community.ŹThe second revision of the DLS is now online and will provide enhanced facilities in 2000. ESubmit is a part of the revised DLS. ESubmit is a facility for students to upload course reports and other documents over the Internet and for the documents to be delivered to the course coordinator automatically. ESubmit notifies the course coordinators of new documents by email. Students are provided with a receipt number for the successful submission of the document.
The Distributed Learning System (DLS) Team was set up in September 1998 to implement a range of recommendations of the Education & Training I.T. Alignment Project and to assist teaching teams to develop a more student-centred approach to teaching and learning using appropriate combinations of conventional campus-based approaches and online technologies.
The DLS Team was asked to build an infrastructure that would allow teaching teams to locally develop and deliver cost-effective and educationally sound online subjects and courses that could then be distributed across the University. To achieve this goal, the Team was asked to investigate online practices at other contemporary universities and to investigate and evaluate a range of online tools and applications that could be used in the DLS. (These tools and applications were judged against a design specification prepared after consultation with key stakeholder groups across RMIT.) [HREF 3].
During Semester 1, 1999 a trial version of ESubmit was built with the aim of using ESubmit for coursework submissions during Semester 2 1999. The course to be used in the trial was aptly named "Internet Communication Engineering".
This paper will report on the development of ESubmit, where ESubmit is used and the lessons learnt through the initial use of ESubmit.
The DLS has been built using a range of technologies and applications. A few of the major applications used are, CourseInfo - Blackboard [HREF4], WebBoard - Webboard [HREF5], Collabatory - BSCW [HREF6], Critique ö Perception [HREF7] and WebLearn.
The power of the applications chosen for the DLS ensure that there is a common approach for Academics to use when trying to put course material online, how students use the DLS and the expected material to be found for each course. However, it was quickly found that not all courses would be able to be moulded into a form that would easily fit with the applications being used on the DLS. Another issue was that many Academics had moved forward with online material over the last 10 years and for many of these it would take some considerable time and effort to move the course to the DLS.
Blackboard has a file submission facility, but several issues are that the files are held on the DLS servers until the academic deletes them, this product does not automatically virus check the files and does not impose a restriction on file size. Also Blackboard has numerous other excellent features, but they can get in the way for those staff members interested in purely file submission. Webboard does not have a file submission facility although a students/staff member can post a file to a discussion area for all to see. These files are also held on the DLS servers, and tend to accumulate as part of the discussion lists.
The collabatory product may be reviewed as the DLS team are finding the BSCW product difficult to administer and to provide guidance to staff on its operation. The DLS team are constantly searching for new and improved applications to utilise for the major applications on the RMIT Online.
A need was identified for an application that could be added to the DLS to provide a backup report submission system and a report submission system for those courses not covered by the integrated DLS course environment. ESubmit fulfils this need and was therefore added to the DLS.
Another reason for using Esubmit was that the DLS Team was interested in funding student development activity around the university.
The DLS group has sought to include RMIT developed applications in the RMIT Online system. WebLearn is one such major application developed within the Faculty of Applied Science. WebLearn provides online quizzing and an assessment facility.
ESubmit was developed to run on a Microsoft IIS 4.0TM web server utilising ASP pages and Microsoft SQL 6.5TM. To enable users to select and upload a file a component called Infomentum ActiveFile [HREF8] was used. An information flow model is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1 : Information Flow
The student connects to the DLS site, enters login details and then navigates to the ESubmit page. On the ESubmit page the student selects the course number and enters details of the file to be uploaded. The student starts the file upload process. When the file upload completes the script on the ASP page deposits the file in a temporary upload directory on the web server. The ASP page script passes the upload details to the SQL server and the upload details are put into an SQL table with a time date stamp affixed. A receipt number is returned from the SQL server to the web server and finally to the web browser. The student is required to make a note of the receipt number for any future action regarding the file upload. The ASP page script then sends email to the course coordinator with details of the file. Finally, the ASP page script checks the file for viruses using a standard virus checking program and then moves the file from the temporary file upload directory to the appropriate Faculty server.
The Faculty is responsible for moving the files from the Faculty server to the Department server for easy access by the course coordinator. This process can be automated with the use of scripts that are run periodically during the day.
Initially, students could upload reports using a number of file formats. These were common file formats such as .doc, .xls, and others. Students were uploading documents that contained viruses and were very large (greater than 10 MegBytes). It was decided to limit student uploads to 7 MegByte ZIP files.
It was decided that the first priority was to limit the possible damage caused by viruses. For this reason all files uploaded are put through a virus check and cleaned if necessary.
The size of the uploaded documents was the next concern. After considering the alternatives, it was decided that only zipped files with a .zip extension would be uploaded. The result of this was for uploaded files to be significantly smaller, however, there was the need to educate students on the use of a zip compression program.
Whilst it may not appear to be difficult to educate students on how to zip files into a compressed zip file, it was found that many students had no idea what to do. What made matters worse is that this problem extended to many Academics. A program to educate Academics who wished to use ESubmit was put into place for Semester 1 2000.
It was calculated that the potential size of file uploads would be very significant during a Semester. For this reason, there was a need to move the files down the chain to the Departmentās computing facilities as quickly as possible. A methodology to move the files to the Faculty servers was put in place. The onus of moving files from the Faculty server to the Department server was left as a Faculty responsibility, as the DLS is not in a position to extend to working on Faculty machines.
Esubmit is to be evaluated as part of the ongoing DLS review process. The review will include an analysis of student use and to see what percentage of students designated to upload reports using Esubmit do so and find the process satisfactory. An additional measure will be to consider the Academics viewpoint.
The ESubmit application was developed for the RMIT University DLS to provide a means for a backup file submission system and to permit courses that did not integrate with the DLS course environment to have access to an online file submission system.
ESubmit has been tested and found to be effective. A further analysis of ESubmit will be carried out after ESubmit has been used for a larger number of courses over a longer time period.
ESubmit was built using simple components and scripts that can be built by most web developers. The major cost in the system was access to a Microsoft SQL ServerTM.
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