M09a7 - Moodle Assignment - Questions & Answers

On this page:

How do I grant one or more students an extension?

Option 1: The 'Grant extension' option (Useful if the assignment is not set to anonymous/blind marking)

To grant an extension to an individual student, go to the assignment grading screen by clicking 'View all submissions', click 'Edit' alongside the relevant student and choose 'Grant extension'.

To grant an extension to multiple students, tick the top-most 'Select' tick-box at the top left of student names.  Go to the bottom of the page and expand the 'With selected...' menu then select 'Grant extension'. 

Option 2: The User or Group override option

1. Navigate to the relevant Moodle assignment
2. Select More from the menu options at the top of the screen
3. Select Overrides
4. Select either User overrides or Group overrides from the drop down list
5. Click the Add user override (or Add group override) button
6. Search for or select a student name or group
7. Define the override restrictions as needed. The details initially visible in the Override section are the original details shared by all members of the class
8. Click Save, or Save and enter another override
9. The new user override details are displayed after saving

Why shouldn't I put all the Assignments in a separate, single Moodle space?

Sometimes departments are tempted to locate 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 administrative 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 a 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 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 hinder students accessing 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 the course's own page, not on the central page. If required information is on a central page, this means it must either be duplicated for the course area, causing extra maintenance each time information 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.  In a previous year, the Digital Education 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 which students have submitted and which are yet to submit, then take measures accordingly.  Enabling blind marking/anonymity exacerbates this.
10. Inefficiencies and confusion with External Examiners, who are ideally supposed 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 don't have access to the 'submission' course.

Are students required to tick/sign a submission statement to acknowledge work as their own before uploading work to a Moodle assignment?

Yes. 

How can I give the same feedback to all or multiple students at once?

If you have feedback you want to give to an entire cohort, it is generally a good idea to give this feedback in the context of the assignment, rather than e.g. separately via a Forum. Moodle allows you to select some or all students and attach a single, common feedback file to their assignment feedback. This common feedback will appear to each student along with any other individual feedback files you have prepared for them.

Guidance on giving 'the same feedback file to multiple students' is available from Moodle Docs.

A student's submission has a page that is upside down, what can I do?

With the assignment submission open in Moodle grading view, you can rotate a submission page clockwise or anticlockwise by clicking the arrow icons pictured:

Why can't students see the grades and feedback I released?

• Did you Save your changes?

While marking work, you will be prompted to Save your changes. Ensure you do this before closing down your browser.

• Marking workflow - is the status set to ‘Released’?

If you have selected Use marking workflow in the assignment settings, ensure the status of the workflow is set to 'Released'.

• Was Anonymous/Blind marking enabled?

Grades will not feed back to the Moodle gradebook and will not be visible to students unless blind marking has been ‘lifted off’ the assignment and student names have been revealed.  Note:  Once you reveal names you cannot revert to blind marking again.  You can do the following to reveal names:  

1. Navigate to the relevant assignment and click on View all submissions.
2. Using the drop down menu at the top of the screen select ‘Reveal student identities’. A prompt will then appear asking you to confirm that you would like to reveal the names as this action CANNOT be undone. Click continue if you wish to proceed.

How can I download the inbox of submissions for offline marking and upload feedback?

Guidance on offline marking is available from Moodle Docs.