Annotating Text and File Submissions

1 Initial Problem

At the moment it is not possible to annotate student's test answers or exercise submissions directly in the system.

Students submit tasks as plaintext or as files via the object “Exercise”. This kind of answers usually contain several paragraphs or even pages of written text. To give them feedback, teachers must either print the document to make written annotations or write comments in ILIAS or in e-mail with complicated references to lines and paragraphs in the student’s document. Also, to have more than one teacher look at the assignments you have to print or copy it several times and annotations won’t be in the same place.

ILIAS-Test allows submitting plaintext and files. Teachers grading these submissions face the same problems like submissions in an exercise.

Additionally, ILIAS-tests offer the option of essay questions. Student answers can be considerably long. Similar to the problem in exercise submissions, annotations of essays in a test, while paedagogically desirable, is currently not available in ILIAS. In fact, annotation of essay questions would make them of great use in more writing heavy subjects.

2 Conceptual Summary

Ideally, notes could be made online in the student’s document or text. The student’s file would be opened in an editor that allows annotations in the document. Changes to the document aren’t allowed, just notes tacked to the surface of the document. Teachers would be able to choose to either use comment boxes or actually write on the document using a graphic tablet or touch screen device. This way marking something as correct with a tick would be very easy and easy to understand for the student. This could also be used to highlight passages of text.

For annotations of essay questions in tests the submitted text would be transformed in a suitable file format so the originally submitted text stays untouched.
 
Immediate feedback in the submitted solution is very valuable to learning success as comments and feedback can be better related to the student’s solutions due to the feedback’s location next to the relevant text passage.

The editor should ideally:

• be able to open common file formats: pdf, txt, doc, docx, jpg…
• import text from essay question
• not affect the original file/text by annotating it
• scroll or flip through files with several pages
• allow
  • freehand annotations
  • annotations in comment form (i. e. sticky notes, comment boxes)
  • highlighting areas in the document
  • combining a highlighted area with a comment (meaning the comment is linked to the area)
  • choosing colour of annotations, comment boxes or highlighter
  • simple geometric forms like a straight line, square, circle
  • general comments next to the submitted document
  • collapsible comment boxes
  • to select single elements (like comments or drawings) to move or delete them
  • applying a time stamp to the annotated document
• save annotations (ask/prompt before closing editor)
• allow to discard/delete selected annotations
• allow to discard/delete all annotations
• send automatically generated message to student that annotations were made (check-box) if teacher chooses this option
• show meta-data of the file next to or above the editor (i. e. name of student, name of file, date when file was turned in, date when file was supposed to be turned in, feedback from separate comments)
• allow grading
• skip to the next turned in file when done
• have mouse-over/pop-up help for all options in the editor

3 User Interface Modifications

To implement this, course admins/teachers could open the new annotation editor via a button “Annotate” in relevant places. Students would be able to view annotations in the editor but without access to tools (simple view function).

3.1 List of Affected Views

1. Exercise > "Submissions and Grades"
2. Test > "Manual Grading"

3.2 User Interface Details

1. new button "Annotate" next to each submission
2. a) new button “Annotate” next to each submission of essay questions/file submissions
   b) option “show answer” > pop-up of answer > new button “Annotate” in pop-up

3.3 New User Interface Concepts

4 Technical Information

This request regards the components test/assesment as well as exercise.

A more detailed / thorough workflow can be provided in time. 

We still need to consider all details from the feature request Streamlining Grading, Marking and Commenting and hope for a collaboration.

{The maintainer has to provide necessary technical information, e.g. dependencies on other ILIAS components, necessary modifications in general services/architecture, potential security or performance issues.}

5 Contact

• Author of the Request: Grießer, Melanie [mgriesser], , 
• Maintainer: {Please add your name before applying for an initial workshop or a Jour Fixe meeting.}
• Implementation of the feature is done by: {The maintainer must add the name of the implementing developer.}

6 Funding

If you are interest in funding this feature, please add your name and institution to this list.

• ...

7 Discussion

8 Implementation

{The maintainer has to give a description of the final implementation and add screenshots if possible.}

Test Cases

Test cases completed at {date} by {user}

• {Test case number linked to Testrail} : {test case title}

Approval

Approved at {date} by {user}.