Collect It is a Web-based tool that can be used to collect online students' assignments and organize them. With Collect It instructors can easily receive, access, track, download, and store students' assignments. Students can submit their homework over the Web outside of class time and from off-campus locations.

Collect It offers considerable advantages over having homework submitted via email attachments. Since Collect It is set up for each course and uses a class list, the documents will be automatically organized by class and can be tracked and displayed by assignment or student. No longer will assignments need to be sorted from your personal email account. Moreover, Collect It allows teaching assistants and graders to access papers directly online, without the need to forward attachments.

In addition to providing a Web-based method for turning in documents, Collect It:

• allows instructors to view documents online or download and print them;
• manages due dates for assignments;
• creates automatically compressed archives of files for easy downloading;
• creates digital receipts and access histories for students;
• allows students to edit their work until the due date.

Before adopting Collect It for your classes, you should consider the following:

• User access to technology
• The types of documents to be submitted
• Who should have access to submitted documents
• The size of the submitted documents
• How you will return documents

Consider user access to technology

Because Collect It is Web-based, students need to have access to the Web to use it. Keep in mind the different computing environments of your students: home connections may be at slower speeds. Although one may not notice a difference connecting on campus, students connecting from home via modem might have to wait considerably longer to turn-in large documents.

Consider the types of document to be submitted

Collect It supports the most common document types. If you plan on having your students submit specialized document formats you should contact Catalyst to arrange for new document types to be added to the system.

Consider who should have access to the submitted documents

By default, Collect It allows only the instructor to view and download the submitted documents. However, you can choose to have your teaching assistants and graders access the documents as well. All you need is to enter their UW NetIDs when you create your Collect It dropbox.

Consider the size of the submitted documents

Participants have a limit of 1 MB of disk space per dropbox area. If you plan on having your participants submit larger files you should plan ahead and contact the Catalyst team so that we can allocate the necessary disk space.

Consider how you will return documents

Collect It allows students to turn in their homework. However, it provides no direct way for you to return it to your students. You may return assignments using email attachments.
If you prefer not to receive email attachments in your mailbox, you may want to consider using Portfolio, a Catalyst tool that allows you to provide feedback online to your students. Alternatively, you can use Catalyst GoPost, which allows participants to attach documents to message in an online discussion.