What options are available for submitting large or media files?

Submission methods

The majority of student work generated electronically can be submitted online through Blackboard. However files that are over 250MB cannot be submitted directly as attachments to Blackboard. There are alternative methods to allow students to submit large or medial files electronically for marking.

Media files

Panopto can be used for the submission of popular media file formats. This has the benefit of uploading files to a central publishing point and delivered back as streaming media, automatically tanscoding content to work across a wide range of devices from with Blackboard, and accessing submitted work via the Grade Centre enabling staff to view or listen to student video or audio assignments and provide feedback without leaving Blackboard.

Alternative Student Shared Drive (Q:) solution

Where it is known that students will be unable to compress individual (or multiple) files sufficiently below 250MB, or that files are to be submitted in a format that is not supported by Panopto, staff can request access to the Student Shared Drive (Q:) by contacting IT Help no later than two weeks prior to work being set to the students or as mitigation where students flag that their work cannot be compressed below 250MB and an alternative solution for submission outside of Blackboard is required.

Staff will be provided with a folder for their assignment within their relevant Faculty folder on the Student Shared Drive (Q:). Each student will be given a folder with their usercode as the name. Students can only see their own folder and upload the files that they need to submit; they can’t see any other students’ folders. The member of staff, however, can see all folders and access the files within them. There is no restriction on uploading files on-campus, however, it is important to note that when accessed off-campus there is an upload restriction of a maximum of four files totalling 2GB.

3rd Party cloud based solutions

Other mechanisms using Google Drive, Drop Box or ZendTo are also available where the nature of the assessment requires large digital files to be created. Contact your the Digital Learnning Team or IT Help for further advice.

Physical submission of large/media files

Physical hand in of a USB or equivalent storage device containing large files is also acceptable, where none of the above solutions are deemed suitable.