Why Use Blackboard: Assignment Manager

If you have your students submit their written assignments on paper, you need to keep track of who submitted those assignments on time, and what students, if any, submitted late assignments (and how late those submissions were). You also need to keep track of all the paper copies, as well as to carry them with you from work to home, if you do your grading in more than one place. You then need to grade the assignments on paper, enter grades in a gradebook, and return the essays to the students in class. The more students you have in your courses, the more that process can become burdensome.

Several years ago, Blackboard introduced an Assignment Manager process that allows you to create an assignment in Blackboard, while automatically adding a column for the assignment in your Grade Center. Students read about the assignment via your Blackboard course, and they click on the same link when they are ready to upload their file(s). Each student submission becomes part of your Blackboard course, and the submission is also time-stamped, so you know exactly when the finished work was uploaded into your course. When all the students have submitted their work, you can download all the assignments as a single, compressed *.ZIP file, and you can then "unzip" that file to save all the submissions on your computer. If you "misplace" a student assignment, you can just download another copy from your Blackboard course. You can print out the assignments (if you like to grade on paper), or you can grade them electronically by adding inline comments. If you grade electronically, you can save your commented version of their assignment within the Blackboard course, which students can see when they view their grades. Whether you grade on paper or electronically, you can add a summary comment within Blackboard, which students can see using the "My Grades" tool. You can also enter the assignment grade in the Grade Center, so students can see what grade they received even before they come to class.

For information how to create an assignment using this Assignment Manager process, see Creating an Assignment.


Written by Leslie Harris, originally for the Office of Instructional Technology at the University of Scranton. Revised with permission and adapted to the Bucknell University Blackboard environment. Last revised August 14, 2008.  Please send questions or comments to itec@bucknell.edu.