Online assignment management system for distance learning programming courses

S C Ng, S O Choy, R Kwan and Y C Tsang
The Open University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong SAR, China

The introduction of web technology in distance learning course delivery in the Open University of Hong Kong has been demonstrated to be useful and effective.

OUHK uses an online learning environment (OLE) to provide students with a flexible way to obtain course materials. It also enables students to communicate effectively with teaching staff through discussion forums. The OLE provides a platform for easy access to course materials and for timely information delivery to distance learners. For assignment handling, students can submit their assignments electronically, apply for an extension of a deadline, enquire about the status of their submitted assignments, and receive feedback on assignments from the teaching staff. The online system can keep track of both the students' work and the marked scripts. In other words, the online system provides a repository for the students and the markers to keep and store their work.

Specific to handling programming-type assignments, there are a number of practical problems that teaching staff face in OUHK. Traditionally, markers have to assess and evaluate each individual's work, test and run the programs with a set of test cases, which is a time-consuming and error-prone task. Another serious problem is plagiarism, and detecting it is very difficult if a marker is responsible for marking only some of the scripts. The situation becomes worse in distance learning as some students are allowed to submit assignments after the due dates and markers may have to mark assignments over quite a long period of time. They might forget 'similar' scripts that they marked some time before.

In this paper, we introduce an integrated assignment submission and management system to replace the traditional paper-and-pen work. The web-based assignment submission system allows students to submit programming assignments electronically, and to receive instant feedback about their submitted programs. The assignment management system provides multiple features to aid in the effective marking and grading of assignments, such as plagiarism detection, automatic program testing, and student's performance statistics. The aim of these features is to relieve the burden of teaching staff and provide an alternative way to paper-based marking.

Our online assessment management system will be composed of two components -- Assignment Submission Agent and Assignment Management Agent. The Assignment Submission Agent includes modules such as 'File Submission', 'Submission Feedback' and 'Submission Status Monitoring'. The Assignment Management Agent includes modules like 'Plagiarism Detection', 'Edit Program Code/Add comments', 'Marking Criteria Administration', 'Grading and Feedback', 'Automatic Program Testing' and 'Performance Statistics'. The system prepares an online environment for marking programming assignments in an efficient and accurate way.