Marking EP Coursework Using Electronic Communication

Electronic publishing is a practical subject and one of the most important aspects of any EP course is the coursework: exercises undertaken by the students and marked by the teachers. The aim of marking is, of course, not just to assign a number to a piece of work but to give constructive feedback so that the students’ work steadily improves. Increasingly EP involves dynamic on-line documents rather than nicely formatted pieces of paper. Even if the final goal is a paper, as it is with a DTP system, it is important how the paper was produced. For example most teachers would prefer their students to make consistent use of style sheets rather than fix details of a document so that they are next-to-impossible to change. Therefore what the teacher wants a student to hand in for marking is often not a piece of paper but a source file. In this discussion we want to concentrate on one aspect of marking: how the source file can be sent electronically to the marker and how the marker can make use of this electronic form. We will call this electronic coursework. We should emphasize that the marking itself is not electronic but is done by a human. We are a long way from the time where a computer could pass a reasonable judgement on the quality of an electronic document. Electronic coursework is widely practised, and the purpose of this paper is not to expound any revolutionary new ideas, but to relate some experiences and to present some issues for discussion.