Facilitating Discussion-Based Grading and Private Channels via an Integrated Forum

Submitty is an open-source course management platform for assignment submission with automated testing and grading, immediate feedback with an option for resubmission, and manual grading from course instructors and TAs. We have added an integrated discussion forum to the Submitty environment, which enables the students to communicate with their peers and have a public dialogue with the teaching staff outside of the classroom. Compared to a collection of closed-source external applications, our single-system login for distribution of course materials, assignment submission, and discussion forum participation is more convenient and accessible for students and simplifies administrative tasks. Students use the forum to ask questions about course logistics, homework help, exam review problems, and Submitty-related questions. The forum supports image and code segment posts, which facilitates targeted debugging help and sharing of additional reference material. An instructor-moderated forum is especially helpful in larger classes where students can feel it is otherwise difficult to get their questions answered. Every thread is tagged with course-specific categories and we provide full-text search of the forum. The forum becomes a curated collection of relevant frequently asked questions, which reduces the number of duplicate questions that must be answered by the staff. The forum includes customizable system and email notifications for important events such as: instructor announcement, assignment posted, team invitation, forum question answered, grades released, etc. Our current work focuses on private channels to facilitate team assignments (which can be monitored for participation by staff) and a grading interface for discussion-based assignments within the forum.