Problem:
In an online class, with middle school and high school students, how do you deal with due dates?
What we’re seeing
In Moodle, you can create due dates for assignments, forums, and quizzes. This has the nice feature that a big fat warning appears in front of students telling them when something is due. It also highlights it on a Moodle calendar.
But the problem is that if a student misses the due date, then the activity closes out and doesn’t allow them to submit something late (with some variation).
We thought about just having a “due date for the topic” at the end of the week. That is, let students take their own time in deciding when they wanted to do their work. The problem with this approach is that too many students would wait to try and complete all the assignments at the last day of the topic (Sunday night) and, because of the time crunch, submit less than stellar work.
What we’ve done
At least for the beginning, we put due dates in the opening class page – but not in the actual activities themselves (thereby letting kids submit stuff late). Course teachers determine how they want to penalize kids for late work (just like a brick and mortar classroom).
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Image Credit: Calsidyrose with a CC License.
