7. Disadvantages
One major disadvantage of using a system like this is that some students do not take to it easily, and can require extensive support. During my small-scale trial, I received several documents in the wrong format; those created with PC applications I was able to open anyway, but opening Macintosh files on a PC requires special software. Sometimes essays were included in the body of e-mail messages, and I had to clean them up by running macros to strip out the hard carriage returns. Once or twice, documents seemed to disappear in transit -- backups are essential. Another technical problem that my students had was in attempting to print marked essays in our CALL laboratory. Printing documents containing colour text on the networked monochrome laser-printer resulted in garbage, and they were forced to select the whole of the text and change it to black before printing. The same documents printed well on monochrome printers in other contexts, though.
These technical glitches led to some resistance among the more computer-phobic of my students.