One prime example of why this is a bad idea happened this quarter. My group for a class project a few weeks ago turned in our assignment in to the A-V Share as directed. The instructor even said he saw our work in there, but the following week, all that work was gone. This is because anyone on one of the mac computers at the school can delete whatever he or she wants off of the A-V Share. Luckily, the student who put the project in the folder saved a copy on to his hard drive.
(This is what the folder looks like, and right clicking on any of these folders and/or objects and choosing "Move to Trash" could easily delete everyone's work)
I have heard other students complain about their work being taken off the A-V Share and sometimes even used by other students for assignments. I was in a class where I was told by two students that they would just wait for me to turn in my assignment to there because I took the time to make excel spreadsheets and word documents and they could just make them their own...but the instructor encouraged these actions, which kind of made me mad because I spent all that time doing the work
Another crazy tidbit is how many students use the "I put it in the A-V Share and someone deleted it!" excuse. Students know that it isn't a safe place to keep their work, but they use it as a primary. There are students who will maliciously go and delete other students' work they don't like. I also know of at least one instructor who will just delete stuff in there if his students need room to turn stuff in. Doesn't really seem fair to me.
The two solutions to this are not only simple, but rarely used. I have only had one instructor utilize the Faculty Drive. It was password protected so only he could get in to it. This prevented anyone else taking work that wasn't his/hers. However, this seems like it would be too much work for everyone, both student and faculty alike.
The second way is the drop box in the school's eCompanion website. However, it isn't very dependable and many instructors have complained about how old and buggy the system is. Uploads don't upload all the time, especially when uploads start pushing to higher file sizes.
(The Drop Box - Something that doesn't seem to work well for many people)
The final way, of course, would be to require students to turn in thumb drives/hard drives with all the work on it. This way is utilized sometimes. However, to require someone to turn in 50 Gigabytes of work on a thumb drive is just too much. The school doesn't supply thumb drives or hard drives in that capacity, nor do I feel the instructors would want to carry around up to 25 hard drives. They don't supply anything to any capacity when it comes to storage (unless you count buying them in the Student Store).
List of all the posts I have about my experiences at AILV
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