The increased use of Internet technologies in education has in the past, been primarily focused on the student’s needs. Very little research and development has looked at the course management and administrative needs of the teacher. It is usually the case that when learning management systems (LMS) are introduced into a course, the teacher’s work load is increased. The assessment critiquing tool (Classmate) discussed in this paper has been developed with the teacher in mind. The tool manages the distribution, critiquing, mark recording, feedback generation and final grading of electronically submitted assignments through an online environment designed to marry with existing LMS technology. This paper will investigate the architecture of Classmate, illustrate its use and discuss the advantages of the systems use.
Glossary. As it is common for different Universities to refer to the same entities using differing terminology, for clarity we will precede the content of this paper with the language used herein. A single class in which a student is enrolled will be referred to as a course, the manager of this course will be called an examiner and a marker is a person that evaluates a student’s work. The term marking is defined as a process undertaken by a marker in which a student’s work is critiqued for the purpose of determining a grade.