Assignment Activity in Moodle

What is the Assignment Activity?

The Assignment Activity allows students to submit work for teachers to grade and give feedback on. Student submissions appear on one screen together, and you can require that they submit one or several files. Assignments can have deadlines and cut-off dates.

How do I create an assignment activity?

1. Select the “Edit Mode” toggle in the upper right to begin editing the course site.
2. Choose the section where you want to add the assignment and click Add an activity or resource.
3. Select the Assignment activity at the very top of the list.
4. Name the assignment and add a description, as well as set the availability of the assignment, the submission types, and the grade settings.
5. Click the [Save and return to course] button.

How do I grade assignments?

Various grading methods and grading feedback can be added to an assignment in both the Feedback types and Grade section of the Assignment settings.

Feedback types

• Feedback comments: The grader is able to leave written feedback for assignment submissions including recorded audio or video.
  • Record RTC: allows for up to two minutes of recorded audio or video
  • Panopto: record audio or video of any length
    
• Annotate PDF: allows the grader to annotate a PDF by adding comments or drawings directly on the student’s submission. For information about annotating, including using an iPad, see Annotating Moodle Assignment Files.
• Feedback files: The grader can upload feedback files, including marked-up student submissions (see Batch Export/Import of Assignment Submissions), documents with comments, or other types of files.
• Offline grading worksheet: The grader will be able to download and upload a worksheet with students’ grades while grading submissions.
• Comment inline: submission text is copied into the comments box, allowing for inline comments or editing the original text.

Grading methods

• Simple direct grading (default): The grader enters a grade either a point or scale value based on the grade settings.
• Grading Guide: The grader uses a grading guide (similar to a rubric) to create a set of criteria for grading as well as point value for each criterion and comment (see Grading with Grading Guides in Moodle).
• Rubric: The grader creates a rubric consisting of a set of criteria with several descriptive levels for each criterion. A numerical grade is assigned to each level and the rubric score is used to calculate the student submission grade (see Grading with Rubrics in Moodle).

Multiple Submissions

Sometimes, an instructor may want students to submit more than one file for the same Moodle assignment. For example, you might want students to hand in a rough draft to get feedback before they turn in their final paper. Or, you might want to collect several different documents for one large project over a few weeks. See Allow Multiple Submissions to Moodle Assignment for step-by-step instructions.

Blank Submissions

If you are grading and see an error message when opening a student’s file, or if the file shows up completely blank, the problem is usually caused by a setting on the student’s computer.

When saving their work, the student likely turned on a setting for an “editable PDF.” To fix this, ask the student to turn off or uncheck that setting. Then ask them to download the file from their device again and re-upload it to Moodle. If that doesn’t resolve the issue, please contact the Help Desk at help@lafayette.edu.

Conditional access to resources and activities

The Restricted Access setting works for all class files and assignments. It lets teachers hide items from students until they finish a specific task. You can lock items based on a future date, a student’s grade, or whether they finished an earlier activity. For example, a teacher could post a quiz and then add an extra credit assignment that stays locked until the student finishes that quiz.

Show Activity Date

Instructors can display the due date on activities on the course page by enabling “Show activity dates” in the course settings. For more information on enabling Show Activity date and how to set the activity date for an assignment, see Show Activity Dates in Moodle.