Recently I was asked in a course I am undertaking to submit my assignment in the Dropbox. This was a
little confusing as "Dropbox" is a US file sharing service and I did not
understand why we would be using that service for submitting assignments. But
I then found that "dropbox" is a generic term in North America
for a physical box into which items are deposited. It appears that the
Dropbox service was named for this and the term is also used generically
for the electronic equivalent.
In Australia students put their paper assignments in an "assignment box" or "assignment deposit box". There generally is no term used for
the electronic equivalent, with students "uploading" or "submitting" the
assignment. The term "drop box" (two words) is used by some Australian universities, but "dropbox" (one word), relatively rarely.
Such are the complexities of international education.
And here I was clicking through because using Dropbox for assignment submission sounded like a good idea!
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