Electronic Assignment Submission Guide for students 2013.docx
How to submit your assignment online:2013 guide for students in the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences
Overview 1
Getting to your online assignment dropbox 1
Are your assignment dropboxes plain Blackboard assignments, or Turnitin assignments? 4
Submitting a plain Blackboard assignment 5
Submitting a Turnitin assignment 6
Overview
Some (but not all!) units of study have online assignment dropboxes. Your lecturer may decide to have you submit some or all assignments online. This usually means submitting a copy of your assignment via the University’s learning management system (LMS), Blackboard.
You might have to use either a plain Blackboard assignment dropbox, or a Turnitin assignment dropbox. The submission procedure is a bit different for the two types of dropboxes. This guide will show you how to tell which type is being used for your assignment, and what steps to go through to submit your paper.
Getting to your online assignment dropbox
First, log on to the elearning system, either by going directly to the elearning login page at https://elearning.sydney.edu.au/, or by browsing there from the uni main page at http://sydney.edu.au/ as follows:
At the uni main page, click on the “Current students” heading. / On the Current Students page, look over on the upper right-hand side for shortcuts to major systems for students. Click on “Learning Management System (LMS)”.This will take you to the elearning login page, where you can login with your unikey username and password.
Then in your list of available sites, click on the name of the unit of study for which you want to submit your assignment.
Once your site opens, look in the course menu on the left hand side of the site. Assignment dropboxes are usually under a heading called something like “Assessments”, “Assessment area”, “Assignments”, or similar. Sometimes they are on the unit home page. You may need to hunt around the site a bit, or ask your classmates, tutor, or lecturer if you can’t find the dropbox.
The assessments page usually has several dropboxes. Sometimes they are not visible until near the due date of the assignment. Often, you may be required to complete an Academic Honesty declaration in order for the assignment dropboxes to be displayed. If you can’t see anything labeled “Academic Honesty declaration” or similar, you can skip ahead to the step where we look at the actual dropboxes.
Here is an assignments page with two dropboxes hidden behind academic honesty declarations. At the moment, the declarations have not been completed, so the dropboxes are not yet visible.
To complete the academic honesty declaration, click on its title, and a short 3-item quiz will open.
Click on “Begin” to begin the test. When you have chosen your answers, click on “Submit” to complete the test. You will need to score 100% in order to get access to the assignment dropbox. If you can’t see the dropbox after submitting the test, you will need to re-do the academic honesty declaration.
If you don’t understand the academic honesty quiz, you should contact your tutor or lecturer as soon as possible and talk it through. This may mean submitting your assignment late, but it is better to lose some marks to lateness than to submit an assignment in which you may have breached academic honesty requirements, which could mean disciplinary proceedings. Alternatively, you may like to go through the Library’s excellent short video resource on academic honesty and plagiarism (http://sydney.edu.au/library/elearning/learn/plagiarism/index.php), and how to reference (http://sydney.edu.au/library/elearning/learn/referencing/index.php).
Once you have completed the academic honesty declaration for your assignment(s), you should see the assignment dropboxes appear.
Are your assignment dropboxes plain Blackboard assignments, or Turnitin assignments?
The image above shows two assignment dropboxes. The icons let you see what type of assignment they are:
· The first is a plain Blackboard assignment. Its icon looks like a piece of paper being drawn on with a pencil and ruler. Here, you usually just upload a file for marking.
· The second is a Turnitin assignment. Its icon is blue and red and looks like a piece of paper with an arrow swishing around it. Here, you will upload a file for marking, and it may be compared to a database of other essays and internet sources, as one means of checking for academic honesty and plagiarism.
Determine what sort of assignment you need to submit by checking its icon, then follow the appropriate set of instructions below.
Submitting a plain Blackboard assignment
To submit a plain Blackboard assignment, first click on the assignment title.
This will open the assignment dropbox page. Look at section 2, “Assignment materials”.
This is where you can either paste your assignment into the submission field, or attach it as a file. Most lecturers will expect you to attach a file.
To attach a file, click the “Browse my computer” button and select your file.
Once you have attached it, you should see the file name listed under “Attached files”. You can add more files by clicking the “Browse my computer” button again. You can remove any attached file at this stage by clicking its “Do not attach” link on the right hand side.
Once you have attached your file, scroll down to section 3 and hit the “Submit” button.
A page will open confirming that you have submitted your file. Check under section 2, “Review submission history”, to make sure that you have submitted the right file. If not, use the “Start new submission” button at the bottom right of the page to submit a different file. If everything looks OK, you can click the OK button at the bottom right.
You’re done!
Submitting a Turnitin assignment
To submit a Turnitin assignment, first click on the “View / Complete” link under the essay title.
This will open a Turnitin submission page. The first thing you see may be a user agreement like the one below. In order to submit the assignment, you must accept the user agreement.
Then you reach the upload page.
Put the name of your assignment in the “Submission title” field.
Under “Browse for the file to upload”, click the Browse button and select your assignment file from your computer.
Once this is done, click the “Upload” button. You may need to scroll down for this button to be visible.
You will be shown a preview of your paper so that you can check you’ve attached the right one. All formatting is temporarily removed in the preview, but don’t worry – it is still present in the submitted paper.
If you don’t see the right file in the preview, click the “Return to upload page” link and choose the correct file. If you have chosen the right file, click the Submit button.
Next you will see a Turnitin “receipt” page letting you know that you have successfully submitted your assignment. It will email you a receipt at your university address, too.
You’re done!
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