A poster explaining a project to allow undergraduate students to submit work online while out on placement.

1. Online Submissions for
Student on Placements
F. Pedreschi PhD, School of Physics
C. Mc Donnell PGDE, Dept of Optometry
Project Aim
The aim of this project was to set a system up online whereby BSc
Optometry undergraduates could submit work while out on
practice placement.
Problems with the existing system
The submissions are by hard copy and so there are issues with
students losing their work, not getting them posted by the
deadline and all the submissions arriving at once, leaving DIT
supervisors with a heavy marking load and very little opportunity
to give the students formative feedback.
Students must be signed off on 35 competencies across their
final year in DIT and their time on placement. The record of these
competencies is in a hard copy log book and there are enormous
difficulties if the student loses that log book. DIT supervisors have
to regularly contact the student to ask them how many
competencies they have left to be signed off on.
Placement supervisors are supposed to post a hard copy
supervisor’s report into DIT once a month. It is difficult to get
supervisors to do this.
How online submissions should solve these problems
It is very difficult for students to lose their submissions. Work
can be submitted as the student completes the work. DIT
supervisors can access the work as it is submitted. This means the
marking workload is spread more evenly and DIT supervisors can
give formative feedback. The electronic submission system forces
the student to correct any basic errors in their submissions so the
students also get some feedback immediately.
It is very difficult for students to lose their competency records
when the records are held online. It is also easy for the DIT
supervisor to regularly check students’ progress with attaining
competencies without having to ring or email the student.
If placement supervisors just have to fill out an online form
instead of a hard copy form that needs to be posted they may be
more likely to fill in the monthly supervisor’s report.
Choice of platform
The online system needed to perform the following main
functions:
• Centrally and securely store the users data
•
Distinguish between different categories of user: student,
external supervisor, and DIT staff member.
•
Authenticate users, so that each student or supervisor only
sees their own information.
There are many ways of accomplishing these goals, but most share
the common trait that managing user authentication and security
can be very difficult and time consuming.
Google App Script
It was decided therefore to use the Google App Script (GAS)
service, provided by Google to users of Google Drive (formerly
Google Docs). This service allows users to use a Google Docs
document or JSON database to store data, and to
programmatically control access to the document and data using
the Javascript programming language.
A web interface can then created using the same system and
served up to end users. In this project, the interface provides for
the submission of several types of form data (dispensing forms,
competencies and supervisor reports), with automatically
generated feedback where possible.
If user sign in is needed, the standard Google sign in system will
suffice for that. The only limitation here is that if authenticated
use is needed, the users must have Gmail addresses. Fortunately,
all DIT email addresses are now Gmail addresses. Having Google
manage the sign in and encryption of the website data is a
significant advantage.
Figure 1. The web interface that students and supervisors use to
enter and grade submissions.
In order to use Google App Script in this way, knowledge of
HTML, CSS and Javascript is required. More information can be
found at:
https://developers.google.com/apps-script/
Project Evaluation
Users of the system will be asked to fill out a questionaire at the
end of the placement period, and their feedback will be used to
refine the system for future groups.