Page Comparison

...

• will be checked against papers stored in Turnitin and other material on the Internet;
• but won't themselves be stored in Turnitin. 

[Back to top]

Can I put all my Assignments in a single Moodle course area?

Sometimes departments are tempted to located all Assignment submissions in a single Moodle course area. Below, we attempt to convince you not to do this. Although this may work well from an adiminstrative point of view, looking at the set-up from an assessor's and student's point of view is the best way to illustrate how this can worsen their experience.

Below is a summary of the reasons.

1. If the Assignment isn't in the course area, how will students know/remember it exists and be reminded of their deadlines? Moodle won't be able to help you remind them because there won't be link to it in the course's Activities block, or Calendar, or Upcoming Events. It will look as though there are no assignments set up for that module -  because there aren't, they're in a central area. This subverts the aspects of Moodle course areas designed to be student-friendly, and instead turns Moodle into something arcane and difficult at the student face.
2. During the submission period students' personal Moodle Calendar page (if enabled) will become bloated with irrelevant information about other students' Assignment deadlines. The page will load more slowly. Students are consequently prone to become disaffected with Moodle's Calendar and stop looking at it, missing the relevant information.
3. Students’ Gradebook - the record of their feedback and marks which ideally is available for them to feed into future work - will be similarly bloated with irrelevant information and its page will load more slowly. These things combined will militate against students actually using the feedback their markers have taken the time and effort to give them.
4. Students may be disorientated, since the information they need to succeed in their assignment (e.g. criteria, readings, notes) is likely to be on that course’s own learn.gold page, not on the central page. And if it is on the central page, that means it must either be duplicated for the course area (extra maintenance each time it changes) or there needs to be an explicit signpost to it from the course area. Students are prone to disorientation - this comes out very strongly from our evaluations.
5. Another cause of disorientation, students won't be able to use the Navigation bar to return to the front page of their course area - they will have to navigate via their My Home page.
6. Teachers’ view of the Gradebook will be inundated with irrelevant entries for other colleagues' students and assignments. It will be very slow to load, and they will spend a lot of time scrolling through the superfluous information. In addition they will not conveniently be able to see which of their students have submitted, and which haven’t. Yes, somebody could set up Groups to mitigate this - but that's an extra thing to do.
7. Many Students submitting to a single course area increases the likelihood of submitting to the wrong Assignment by mistake. If using Turnitin, it is a very time-consuming process to contact Turnitin and request that they delete the paper from their server so that it can be resubmitted to the correct place. Last year ELE Core Services team spent around 25 hours on this.
8. Many Teachers marking in a single course area increases the likelihood of mistakes e.g. if editing the grades directly in the Gradebook.
9. The shared Moodle area will have a huge cohort of students. This makes it difficult to check who has submitted against who should have submitted and take measures accordingly. Enabling blind marking / anonymity exacerbates this.
10. Inefficiences and confusion with External Examiners - who may need to take their own samples of marked work - being presented with irrelevant records in the Gradebook. 
11. It increases the possibility of enrolment errors - a student may be successfully enrolled on the 'main' course, but only find out at the last minute that they dont have access to the 'submission' course.

ELE understands the pressures on staff which make it tempting to put all Assignments in one place. But the fact remains - this doesn't work well for markers or students. Talk with ELE about alternatives which recognise that staff and students need to protect their time and balance competing needs.

[Back to top]

Plagiarism

What percentage of the originality score is sufficient to indicate plagiarism?

...