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Making the Grade with Bluebeam
University Professor achieves 60% time savings by using Revu's Tool Chest
Background
Gary Solomon is a busy professional and part-time professor at the University of Phoenix. Part of the curriculum for his online courses requires students to
submit assignments electronically as MS Word documents, which Gary must grade and return electronically on a weekly basis. As a professor, Gary is
required not only to mark assignments with a grade, but also to provide constructive feedback to students for each assignment. Prior to discovering
Bluebeam PDF Revu, Gary reviewed and graded all papers using MS Office, typing in all comments for every paper he graded.
Grading papers in MS Word became a time-consuming process. While the spelling and grammar check feature proved to be useful, Word’s inability to
store commonly used comments created extra work when Gary had to retype frequently used comments on every assignment.
Challenge
As a full-time business professional and part-time professor, Gary has a limited amount of time to grade assignments every week. With student enrollment
increasing at 66%, Gary faced even more time constraints. Wanting to devote his time to providing quality feedback, Gary began searching for a software
solution that would help him review and markup assignments in a faster, more efficient manner.
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Solution Requirements
In order to save time, Gary looked for a solution with the following features:
- Compatibility with MS Word
- Ability to add text comments and other symbols and store commonly used markups for future use
- Save the file in a universal file format that can be emailed
Gary’s search ended when he discovered Bluebeam PDF Revu Standard Edition
Making the Grade with Bluebeam
Gary switched to Bluebeam after discovering Revu’s Tool Chest. The Tool Chest allows users to store commonly used markups and add them to PDFs with
a click of the mouse. In just a few minutes, Gary used Revu’s free text annotations and callouts to create tools that he knew he would use frequently, and
stored them in Revu’s Tool Chest. He also downloaded and imported free Tool Sets from www.bluebeam.com/resources,
including the Flags Tool Set and the Proofreading Symbols Tool Set, and gave each markup a personalized comment related to grading assignments. For
example, he added the comment “needs stronger introduction” to the red flag and the comment “good introduction” to the green flag. After this quick set-up,
Gary had customized annotations that he knew would help him achieve the time-savings he needed.
Gary’s workflow has now been transformed into a quick, electronic process. When Gary receives an assignment from a student, he turns on the Track Changes
feature in MS Word and performs a spelling and grammar check. Then, Gary uses the Bluebeam plug-in in MS Word to convert the document to a PDF file. He
reviews the papers and adds comments using annotations he has stored in Revu’s Tool Chest. He adds a free text markup instructing students to hover their
cursor over each annotation to see his comments, and emails the graded assignments to his students in PDF format.
By using Bluebeam PDF Revu Standard Edition, Gary has achieved the time savings he sought. Prior to the process switch, it took him 20 minutes to review,
grade and markup each student’s assignment. That time has now been reduced to 8 minutes per assignment – a 60% time savings. An unexpected outcome
of this process change is the positive response he’s received from students. Students reported in recent professor reviews that Gary provides great,
constructive feedback on all assignments, making it easier for them to learn from each exercise and improve throughout the course.
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