Electronic Submission of Work through Blackboard

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Blackboard

Go to the course in blackboard.luc.edu. Go to the link to Content in the left frame. The title of the assignment is a link that takes you to the page for saving and submitting your work. It is colored black, unlike normal links, so this is easy to miss.

Any explict web link underneath that is just a link to the assignment description.

Unless otherwise mentioned, you can resubmit parts of your work using the exact same file names to replace the previous version.

Submitting an Assignment

Only one of a pair needs to submit a programming assignment through the Blackboard Assignment submission system. That student should also include a personal log, log.txt, in the Homework submission.

Whether you have a partner or not, you should submit a log. Ignore the parts That do not apply if you have no partner. Generally assignments are not counted as a positive grade until the log is submitted.

Separately the other partner should submit just a personal log, log.txt, as the homework submission.

Individual assignment might specify more for the log, but in general logs should indicate each of the following clearly:

  1. Your name and who your partner is
  2. Who helped you on what parts with what contributions (Include tutors in particular, and also the instructor.)
  3. Your hours working on the homework
  4. An assessment of your contribution
  5. An assessment of your partner's contribution
  6. More generally, how the partnership is going

Please always name the file log.txt (a plain text file). You can write a plain text file in a program editor. You can use a regular word processor, but then you must be careful when the Save dialog comes up: You must set the document/file type to plain text (.txt).

Do not save the file in the standard word processor format (for instance ending in .doc) and then change the file name outside the word processor. This does not change the file format and only garbles things.

Seeing File Formats

Students often submit the wrong file due to an unfortunate default setting in Windows. Windows does not show the file extension (.py, .txt. .doc, .cs, ...) by default. The part of the file name before the extension can match for multiple files and they can all look exactly the same in a file selection dialog. I strongly suggest Windows users adjust the file display options on their machine if you do not see file extensions:

  1. This is for Windows 7. There may be slight variations for other Windows flavors.
  2. Open a folder window.
  3. Click on Tools in the menu bar.
  4. Select "Folder Options...".
  5. Click the View tab in the dialog that appears.
  6. Under Advanced Settings, as a subheading under Files And Folders, find the line "Hide extensions for known file types". Scroll if necessary.
  7. Make sure the checkbox in front of that line is not checked. Clicking on the box should toggle between the checked and unchecked states.
  8. Click the OK button, and look for file extensions to appear in your folder window!

If this does not make sense on your version of Windows, go to Windows Help and search for "Hide extensions for known file types".


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