The University of Sheffield
Department of Computer Science

Intranet > Staff > Teaching > Module Boxes

What is a Module Box? What to put in your electronic Module Box:

A Module Box is a repository where lecturers leave copies of every piece of material that forms part of the module they teach. Module Boxes are made available for external examiners to view, for BCS accreditation visits and are essential for business continuity should an emergency situation arise (e.g. if you are asked to teach a new module at short notice).

Material held in Blackboard does not need to be stored in a module box, since it is archived centrally in Blackboard.

From June 2021, files held in \\deptstore.dcs.shef.ac.uk\modulebox\ will be moved to the X Drive and held as an archive.

Module boxes will continue to be managed in the shared Google Drive called "COM Module Boxes" (in use since 2018/19). From June 2021, staff will no longer be able to save module box files in the directory on deptstore.

Any material used on the course (that isn't already available on Blackboard), e.g:

  • lecture slides,
  • additional paper handouts,
  • assignments you give out,
  • lecturer's module web pages,
  • ancillary materials,
  • reading lists...;

The departmental module description web-page and examination papers are archived separately and Blackboard is archived by the University.

Examination papers and specimen solutions are stored via a secure mechanism by the Admin Team.   You should NOT keep electronic versions of examinations and solutions on DCS fileservers as students have been known to crack staff logins.

Exam papers/solutions should NOT be added to the Module Box. 

Similarily, student work/submissions should NOT be saved in the Module Box but rather stored in Blackboard (or a similar repository).  

How to organise your electronic Module Box: When to put files in your electronic Module Box:

The standard structure of the Module Boxes is to have a folder for each academic year and for modules to be divided into one of three folders, "Autumn", "Spring" and "Academic Year" depending upon when the module runs.  There are then subfolders for "Coursework" and "Materials" within each module folder. 

Beyond that you can organise the internal structure of your box in any sensible fashion which allows the content of your course changes to be tracked over time. If you are teaching the course for the first time, it is a good idea to include your initials in the name of the sub-directory e.g. "COM1001 - KEB" so that it is easy to see when a change of lecturer has taken place.

Within the "Coursework" subdirectory, please include any assignment briefs/marking scheme/s, so that the external examiner can easily find them. These will not be sent to the external examiners. Instead, they are given access to view them via the module box. It is therefore essential that they can be found quickly and easily to somebody viewing the file structure for the first time.

Module Boxes must be kept up to date retrospectively, i.e. the latest contents of the box should be the version of the course you have just taught or are currently teaching.

A call will be issued towards the end of each semester to remind lecturers to populate their module boxes with all the material used in the module that has just been taught.