6.5 Student Assignments

Overview
Allowing your students to submit their assignments online can help you to organise your marking, see at a glance who has and hasn't submitted yet and automatically create lists of students grades (for example, to submit to the registrar). It helps students as it means they don't need to pay to print out their submissions and they can send in their work from anywhere they have an internet connection. Plus it may reduce the chances of students assignments getting lost or misplaced.

Moodle has several different types of assignment activity which we'll look at on the next page, but the creation of each is very similar. Probably the most commonly used assignment types is 'upload a single file', which, as it's name suggests, allows students to upload one file as their assignment submission.

Here's how you can create an assignment activity.

Select the the type of assignment you'd like to create from the 'add an activity' drop down list:

Add new assignment

Then you'll see the create assignment form:

Creat assignment form

Add in a name (title) for your assignment and a brief description of what you'd like the students to do.

You can then select what type of grading system you'd like to use and whether students will be restricted in the dates when they can submit their assignment. To allow students to be free to submit whenever they like, tick the 'disable' checkboxes next to the dates.

Depending on how strict you'd like to be, you can stop students being able to send in their assignments late (the 'prevent late submissions' selection box). You can also decide whether or not to allow students to resubmit and whether you'd like to receive an email when a student sends in their assignment.
Exercise
Have a try creating an assignment activity and ask one of the other course participants to try submitting a file.