Title: 6.5 Student Assignments
Course: Certificate in Online Education

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:

Then you'll see the create 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.

 | Have a try creating an assignment activity and ask one of the other course participants to try submitting a file.

Assignment Types

There are several types of assignments you can create in Moodle. The descriptions below are taken from the Moodle online help file. Note that once you have created a particular type of assignment activity, you can't change it, without creating a new assignment of the correct type.

Offline activity

This is useful when the assignment is performed outside of Moodle. It could be something elsewhere on the web or face-to-face.

Students can see a description of the assignment, but can't upload files or anything. Grading works normally, and students will get notifications of their grades.

Online text

This assignment type asks users to edit a text, using the normal editing tools. Teachers can grade them online, and even add inline comments or changes.

(If you are familiar with older versions of Moodle, this Assignment type does the same thing as the old Journal module used to do.)

Upload a single file

This type of assignment allows each participant to upload a single file, of any type.

This might be a Word processor document, or an image, a zipped web site, or anything you ask them to submit.

Advanced uploading of files

This type of assignment allows each participant to upload one or more files in any format. These might be a Word processor documents, images, a zipped web site, or anything you ask them to submit.

This type also allows you to upload multiple response files. Response files can be also uploaded before submission which can be used to give each participant different file to work with.

Participants may also enter notes describing the submitted files, progress status or any other text information.

Submission of this type of assignment must be manually finalized by the participant. You can review the current status at any time, unfinished assignments are marked as Draft. You can revert any ungraded assignment back to draft status.

Grading assignments

You can view which students have submitted their assignments by going to the assignment activity whilst logged in as a teacher and you will see a link in the top right, telling you how many people have submitted:

From this example you can see that only one student has sent in their assignment so far. When you click on this link, you'll see a full list of all the assignments submitted so far:

Here you can download the files for marking and you can add the grade online. Later on we'll see how you can view a summary of the grades for all the students for all your graded course activities.

This has been a very short introduction to using assignments. Have a look at Chapter 7 in the Using Moodle book for a much more in depth look at assignments.