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Multemail: an automated emailer for
assessments and graded assignments

John Rueter

December 12, 2001

editing task -Try to put these in order that will allow faculty to decide if they want to pursue this.

editing task - put all of this in the first person, as if it were advice

editing task - insert links that give examples of forms pages and Cold Fusion scripts.

Purpose of the technology:

I used a combination of universally availalble software to create a system that helped me distribute individualized comments to each student in the class. I did this by preparing a data file that contains email address and comments that could be processed by a Perl script and would automatically send an email to each student on the list.This file and script is part of an overall process that I set up to help me develop and improve grading criteria, rubrics or comments while I am grading. Students entered their answers directly on a web-based form. I prefer getting their answers in this format because they are legible and I can read them faster. I export this file to Excel that allows me to format the text file and avoid retyping student names, addresses or comments that are sent to multiple students. The only technology requirements for the students is that they have access to the internet to do the assignment and an email address for the reply. Unlike other course management software, I don't have to set up or manage accounts.

Use of the technology in class:

I posted short written assignments to a forms page on the internet. The class only met each Thursday evening. These assignments were due Monday by midnight which gave me time to grade the assignments and respond back to the students (using Multemail) by Tuesday or Wednesday. I expected that they would have seen corrective comments before coming to class.

My grading process helped me grade more effectively. As I read each student's entry, I could write a comment in an adjoining cell in the Excel spreadsheet. I reserved another cell for the points that would be awarded. After reading about ten papers, I had usually developed a pretty good set of comments that could answer most of the subsequent papers (I had about 40 students in this section). If the comment was going to be short, all I had to do was make sure that the starting characters in the phrase were unique, such as "Good comparison but you didn't use that in your analysis", compared to "you just gave a list without comparing". As I would start typing these comments into the cell, Excel would finish the phrase for me, and I accepted that phrase just by hitting return. For more complicated answers that contained multiple phrases I either set up more cells, one for each comment I might want to make, or I named cells that contained the strings. I concatenated the strings from the specified named cells to form the final comment text. For example, I might have had a cell named "good" that contained the string "good comparison" and another cell named "no_analysis" that contained the phrase, "but you didn't use that comparison in your analysis", then I could concatenate these into the total phrase, or I could construct other individualized answers using other named cells. The response to each student also serves as a record of which comments they got, not just the score.

Benefits:

I was able to able to improve my grading effectiveness by providing more information to students in a more timely manner and with less time for me.

It was just as easy to give encouraging comments to good students as it was to give corrective advice to struggling students.

I was able to improve my answer that I sent to students as I went through the grading. Often my first answer was very simple, but with grading more papers, I had a better idea of either the root cause of their misunderstanding or I had figured out a better way to say it.

Given the amount of time that I had to polish each answer, this process made me seem more clever than I really am. On the internet nobody knows that your not Disraeli.

Once I downloaded the file with the answers, I could do the rest of the grading off-line on my laptop and all I needed was to be able to send in the small text file at the end.

Students didn't have to have secure accounts, such as WebCT, to get the response.

I didn't have to deal with setting up courseware, such as WebCT.

The full implementation only requires commonly available software, except for Cold Fusion. Cold Fusion could be replaced by PHP-MySQL combination.

The entire process is text-based, requiring very little bandwidth except for the downloading of the Access database.

The records that accumulate in the Excel spreadsheet could be used for assessment.

Disadvantages:

There are quite a few steps to posting a quiz question, getting the response and eventually mailing the responses. Each stepon its own is short and simple, but it gets complex when so many steps are needed. There are many places for errors to creep in.

I am dependent on OIT for setting up Cold Fusion connections to an Access database.

Discussion:

This project could be implemented with a totally text based system and at extremely low bandwidth requirements for faculty and students. This would allow this to be used with WAP or PDA on wireless networks. The only step that requires high bandwidth, downloading and uploading the Access database, should probably engineered out anyway, by substituting queries to get the student data. The database and middleware could be PHP-MySQL rather than Cold Fusion - Access.

Complete description of implementation:

Set up - these steps are required before use:

Access database set up in a server and connected to Cold Fusion. I had a database named ESR355 set up on Brain.

Multemail.pl uploaded to appropriate directory. I put this into public_html/cgi-bin/

This is the code for multemail.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl
# multemail.pl
# works with multemail.dat file created in Excel with the following columns delineated by |
# to from subject message
# September 17, 2001 John Rueter

$mailprog = '/usr/lib/sendmail';
open(INF,"multemail.dat");
@ary = ;
foreach $line (@ary) { chomp($line);
($to, $from, $subject, $message) = split(/\|/, $line);
open (MAIL, "|$mailprog -t");
print MAIL "To: $to\n";
print MAIL "Reply-to: $from\n";
print MAIL "Subject: $subject\n\n";
print MAIL "$message\n";
close(MAIL);
close(INF); }

Steps in using Multemail for one assignment:

A. Set up the assignment page

1.Add a table to the database that contains fields for name, email, answer, and submit. The answer field should be set to "comment" to allow for long text answers.

2. Upload the modified database to the Cold Fusion/Access server.

3. Write the html page with questions and text input boxes that are named the same as the fields. The action line in the form has to call the cold fusion script. For an example of one of these pages, see ******.

4. Write the Cold Fusion script. For an example of the script that goes with this page see *****.

5. Modify the student navigation pages to point to the html forms page. I put all student navigation on the index page for the course.

6. Upload the html pages to the course website. Upload the Cold Fusion script to the database server.

B. Verify that the page works

7. Call up the forms page and enter some text into each field. Submit it.

8. Download the database and verify that the data went into the correct fields.

C. Students do the assignment

8. During the days that they are doing the assignment, you can follow their activity with a very simple Cold Fusion query. (See this for an example of this query).

9. Monitor student activity. Sometimes I submit answers myself just to time stamp the database.

D. Grade the assignment

10. Download that Access database to your desktop.

11. Paste the table for this assignment into a sheet in your Excel workbook. This is sometimes problematic with large text files.

12. Grade each response as described above, either by typing unique starting text or setting up named cells. The named cells method takes more time to set up, but it provides an easier record to a student's answer and it is easier to modify the answer during the grading process itself.

13. Place score and comments in columns in the Excel worksheet.

14. Insert first and last records that contain your own email - this will be used to verify that the entire file was sent.

15. Set up a column of cells that uses the concatenate function in Excel to create a simple text merge of all the appropriate information that will be needed in the multemail.dat text file.

An example of this concatenate function is

=CONCATENATE(D2,"|rueterj@pdx.edu|ESR355-values4| Dear ",B2,", *** There was a problem with the previous email, I got your name wrong.I did received your assignment and you got 1 point.",E2)

You can see how the pipes |, are coded into the text in quotes. The cell references call the students email address (D2), the student's first name (B2) and the comment (E2). In this particular assessment assignment, anyone who did the assignment got one point. Otherwise there would be appropriate text and a cell that contains the score.

16. Cut out this column and paste it into a text only editor, such as notepad. Don't use Word or any other word processor that thinks it's smarter than you are.

17. Name the text file "multemail.dat". This file will overwrite the multemail.dat file from previous assignments.

18. Upload multemail.dat to the same directory as multemail.pl. In my case that was my cgi-bin (public_html/cgi-bin).

19. Open a telnet connection to your webserver (using Telnet) and at the command line change directories (cd public_html/cgi-bin), then run the program by typing multemail.pl.

20 Go to your own email account (I use Pine mail) and verify that the first and the last records were sent to you.

You will probably get undeliverable errors for some students, because they routinely enter their email addresses incorrectly.

I usually look these over for an obvious error on their part, such as leaving out the .com etc. and simply forward that message to my guess at their address.