DyKnow

Yes, another of the new features in DyKnow 5.3 is an upgrade to File Transfer to additionally allow students to send files to the moderator.  Since DyKnow 5.1, Monitor has provided the ability for you to send a file or files to your entire class.  Not only are you able to distribute files to your students, but also you can have the files automatically open in whatever the default application may be.  You can let Monitor worrying about the details of passing out files and bringing them up on students' machines while you're getting started with class.  This is great for passing out worksheets, but getting the worksheets back has still required a shared drive or email communication.  

Now in 5.3, you can choose to have your students send you files.  Students will choose which files to send, and then all the students files will be automatically downloaded and organized into a special folder for your assessment and/or critique.  You'll also see all the student submitted files as they come in and the progress of each of the downloads (speaking of which, there are some upper limits on the amount of data students can send, so you won't be stuck waiting forever), though you can easily minimize this window and continue on with class.

While this is a huge win for collecting documents and projects, the real magic is still in Vision's Panel Retrieval and Return Panels features.  After you've graded student work in Vision, you're able to click the Return Panels button (on the Authoring tab) and DyKnow will automagically return the graded student panels to each of the student's class folder on the server.  The File Transfer family in Monitor isn't yet that sophisticated, but for quick two way file transfers Monitor 5.3 is going to be great.

Though perhaps not obvious to those outside the DyKnow development team, student file transfer as well as chat has been a unique step for Monitor as students now are beginning to require elements of a user interface.  Features such as Url Filtering and Application Blocking are really behind-the-scenes types of features, but students need some way to choose what files to send you.  We've gone through several iterations already, and things are bound to change more once we start getting feedback from our Beta customers, but we are narrowing in on a fairly simple design for the student interaction pieces.  

So I hope you're getting as excited about 5.3 as I am.  Feel free to ask any questions you might have about any of the features I've talked about so far, and stay tuned because there's tons more to talk about still.