Assignment due dates

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

Last term I taught a large undergraduate course. I had assignments (online) due a week after we finish a chapter. There were two minor problems with this. The first was that I had to deal with students who enrolled one, two or even three weeks into the term and gave them extensions of the first several assignments, which involved logging into the website, finding the student, setting his/her new deadline and answering the student email. Secondly for some of the chapters that take more time than others, some students would bombard me with requests for extensions. So I am thinking of adopting a different method next time. Specifically, I plan to divide the 12 chapters into 4 modules with 3 chapters in each. Each module has a deadline for all 3 chapter assignments. I am hoping this would give students more flexibility on their time management, and have a little more time working on those long assignments. It also saves me from handling those extension requests because of late registration or others. The potential peril I can think of is that some students may not start on the assignments until the last minutes and it would be very difficult to crash 3 assignments within a short time. I would appreciate other thoughts on the pros and cons of this method.