Analysis of Future Needs

In the future, we would like to have students submit homework by adding links to their homepage. The teaching assistant will then grade assignments from the student's homepage on WWW. In order to do this, several issues need to be addressed:

1. The teaching assistant or professor needs to have the capability of making comments directly on the page containing the finished assignment. These comments would then be available to the student, thus facilitating the grading process. One possible way to provide comments is through the use of annotations. However, the current method of including annotations is too restrictive. Annotations are available only to the person who authored them. Therefore, when the teaching assistant grades the homework, he or she is the only one who can see the annotations made to the page. Others and specifically the student who could benefit from homework grading are prevented from seeing these comments.

2. Annotations need to be able to be placed at any location on the page. In-line comments are helpful to students in understanding the grading of their work. Currently, annotations are always placed at the bottom of the page.

3. A certain amount of privacy needs to be enforced. While it can be helpful for students to see how other students solved a problem, there needs to be some way of managing who can see each page and the annotations to that page.

In addition to the above Web technology, we would like a way to make group annotations. With group annotations, each person would be able to see annotations made by others to a page. In this way, a study group could work together to solve a problem. Each person's annotations would be visible to others in their group.

Validating user access and limiting number of accesses by a user to a page on the WWW is somewhat cumbersome and subject to abuse. As these security issues regarding are solved, student evaluation and progress testing will also be done on the Web using forms.