Assignments

The assignment module provides a repository for students to upload work to faculty for review, grading, and feedback.

Which submission type suits you best?

Read below for examples

You want students to type shorter or longer responses directly online
  • Set Online text to Yes.
    • Advantage – quick for the student to get started; no need to use a word-processing program and upload the file.
    • Disadvantage – potential worries that if the internet goes down, the work students have typed in and not yet saved might be lost. If the word count is expected to be large, setting Online text to No and File submission to Yes might be a better option.
You want students to submit work you can download in a specified program
  • Set File submission to Yes, set the number of files you will allow using the Maximum number of uploaded files setting and the file sizes by using the Maximum submission size setting.
    • Advantage – better than students emailing work as the whole class’s work is collated in one space on your course. Graders can provide comments directly on the student work.
    • Advantage – with “Attempts reopened” enabled, teachers can see the progression through various drafts of a student’s work.
    • Disadvantage – assignments must downloaded to be viewed (but they can be downloaded in bulk) and the teacher needs the appropriate program to open them.
You want students to submit files at different times for a project
  • Set File submission to Yes, and use Maximum number of uploaded files to set the maximum number of separate files they can upload
    • Advantage – all project files are in one assignment area for grading so they get a single grade.
    • Disadvantage – all project files are in one assignment area for grading – so they can only have a single grade!
  • Use Turnitin and create two separate parts with different dates for submission – to read more about this, see Turnitin.
You want students to write a response to a video/sound file/image
  • Set up an assignment allowing online text and Poodll submission options for students to use add video/sound/image files.
You want students to answer a series of questions on a video/sound file/image
  • Investigate the Quiz module with Poodll. Assignments are really just for a single question.
You want to grade work students have done offline
  • Uncheck the submission types when setting up the assignment. Students won’t be required to do anything but you can use the assignment to grade them for work done outside of Moodle.
You want students to send you a comment or note along with their uploaded work
  • In the settings, set Submission comments to Yes.
You want to allow students to redraft and decide when to submit the work
  • In the settings set Require students click submit button to Yes. Students can then control when their draft work is submitted to the teacher.
You want students to keep an ongoing journal or do an iterative assignment
  • In the settings set Require students click submit button to No. Students can continue to make changes to their assignment and at no point do they ‘submit’. If the work will be graded at some point it is recommended that either Prevent late submissions is set to Yes to ensure that no changes can be made after the due date, or all submissions are locked when grading commences to ensure that the work is not altered during grading. (Also consider the Journal activity)
    • Advantage: the work remains in one place and is constantly improved, graded (if needed) and improved again.
    • Disadvantage: there is no record/history of previous attempts (such as with the Wiki). The online text assignment does not replicate the display of a journal or blog where each new entry is additional to the previous ones.
You want students to submit work in groups
  • In the settings, set “Students submit in groups” to Yes. If you just do this, then once one student has submitted, the assignment will be flagged as submitted even if the others haven’t contributed. If you want to ensure everyone has an input, set “Require students click submit button” to Yes and then change “Require all group members to submit” to Yes. The assignment will only be classed as submitted when each member has contributed, and once one student has submitted, the remaining members’s names will be displayed for the group to see who still needs to add their input.
You want to grade students’ work anonymously
  • In the settings, choose “Blind grading”. When students submit assignments, their names will be replaced by randomly generated participant numbers so you will not know who is who. Note that to push grades to the gradebook, you must choose reveal student identities in the assignment settings after grading.
You want to read and grade student assignments offline
  • In the settings, choose “Offline grading worksheet”. When students have submitted, click “View all submissions” and you can download their assignments from the link “Download all submissions” and download the grading sheet from the link “Download grading worksheet”. You can then edit grades and re-upload the grading worksheet. You can also upload multiple feedback files in a zip from this drop down menu. See Assignment settings for an explanation of how to use the “upload multiple feedback files as zip” feature.
You want to hide students’ grades until a time of your choosing.

Use ‘grading workflow’ as explained in Assignment settings

You want to moderate other colleagues’ grading or allocate certain teachers to certain students

Use ‘grading allocation’ as explained in Assignment settings