This data flow diagram illustrates the how students and teachers would interact in a distributed LMS to carry out the traditional graded assignment workflow.
A frequent use of courseware is to assign work to students, collect that work from students, assess the work and release the grades to students. In most
courseware systems, this is all done in one tool. The Assignment tool (or the assignment and gradebook tools) "live" in a course. The design of courseware is
mainly to facilitate the instructor's ability to manage the course.
An alternative approach would be to distribute the various transactions between two systems, the courseware system and a learner centered platform. Each set of tools would be designed and configured with the primary user's interest in mind.
The student would receive a message in their "inbox" with the assignment instructions, learning outcomes and rubric for the assignment.
The student would then do the work, saving their "drafts" in their own system and eventually sending back a response to the assignment with their work
attached. Note that a copy is sent to the instructor, with the original content still on the student system.
The teacher would receive the student work in her "inbox" and (assuming that there is to be no formative feedback) evaluate the work against the rubric and
releasethe grades back to all of the students.
There is a lot of duplicated data in a system like this which may end up causing issues for storage. However, this does allow each learner to retain a record
of all of the assignments, work and assessment data that occurred in their classes...forever if they wish to. Similarly, this frees the institution from
maintaining the course indefinitely "just in case" students need access to their data.
An important assumption is that a system that can engage in this sort of messaging becomes standardized, allowing students to remix and reuse their content in
multiple classes at multiple institutions.
