M09a - Moodle Assignment

Keywords: assessment, submission, feedback, grading, marking.

Please refer to guide M09 - Digital Assessment - an Overview for the different phases of digital assessment at UCL.

What is it?

Moodle Assignment is an activity that lets you set, receive, mark, and give feedback on students' submitted work in multiple files and different file types. Moodle Assignment allows anonymous submissions. Its marking tools include highlighting, inline and summary comments, separate feedback files, and drawings. You can download original and marked submissions, and this affords offline marking.  Group work can be submitted by a single student with all marks and feedback being returned to all the members of the group. Marks and feedback, including for anonymous submissions, can be uploaded back to Moodle. Each submission is private between that student (or group of students), their marker(s), and staff in the Moodle space. Moodle has a brief, illustrated overview of Assignment.

Find out more about the differences between Moodle Assignment and Turnitin at UCL.

Why use it?

Moodle Assignment offers a sophisticated marking environment with:

• Online marking on a single screen, including feedback comments and other annotations.

• The option to bulk-download, mark offline, and bulk-upload again.

• Marking grids and rubrics (can be feedback only or numerically weighted).

• The option to combine audio, video and text based feedback.

• Any kind of file accepted.

Students can:

• See key dates.

• Upload any file type (it also enables assignments without file submissions).

• Receive a submission receipt by email.

• Receive any marks and feedback given.

• See their feedback across modules in their MyFeedback page.

• Download their marked work.

Staff can:

• Set up assessments and collect anonymised submissions.

• Display clear instructions and key dates for students.

• Set up marking criteria as grids or guide.

• Select some or all assignments to download and mark offline. 

• Manage and monitor multiple marker processes.

• Display, or hide the Grader's name from students.

• Allow students to submit as a group, and give marks and feedback as a group.

• Keep marks and feedback hidden from students until ready for release.

• Export marks and summary feedback.

• Follow up on non-submissions (even where the submissions are anonymous).

Before you start...

• As with any activity, set up some Test Student Accounts so that you can try out your assignment from a student point of view and check that your instructions communicate as you intend.

• If using a marking grid, finalise it and have it to hand.

• Have the agreed dates for deadlines and release of marks to hand.

• Think about the instructions students will need, including about engaging with their feedback.

• Organise to show other assessors how to use the assignment you set up (students are sensitive to inconsistencies of marking approach).

• If you are marking anonymously and need to keep copies of anonymous submissions for External Examiner use later, then write a calendar reminder to download these before anonymity is lifted when marks are released.

Meeting the Baseline

The UCL Connected Learning Baseline suggests the following for assessment:

• 4.1 Provide an assessment outline  with a clear description of the module assessment, including schedule, criteria and submission details. To avoid duplication, this might include a link to a module webpage.

How do I set up a Moodle assignment?

Here's a summary of the guidance on Assignment settings available from Moodle Docs.

1. Use the toggle switch to turn on Edit mode.    

2. Hover your mouse over the area of the course that you would like to add the assignment (or click on the Add an activity or resource link) and select Assignment.

3. To see all settings click the Expand all link.

4. Enter an Assignment Name 

5. Enter whether the assessment is summative or formative

6. Enter a Description (displays at the top of the Assignment page).

7. Some Settings of particular interest:

   1. Grade - The Grade type must be set to 'Point' or 'Scale' for grades to be published to students.  If set to 'None', Simple Direct Grades cannot be entered, and Marking Guide/Rubric grades and feedback will not be visible to students.   

   2. Anonymous marking - student names will be hidden until after marking (you can also mark anonymised submissions offline).

   3. Allowed attempts - Attempts are individual submissions that can receive a grade or feedback. When enabling multiple Allowed attempts, students can submit a new attempt after having received the grade and feedback of their initial attempt.  Each attempt can receive a fresh grade and feedback instance. (Allowed attempts is set to 1 by default, whereby students will receive one grade for their overall submission). For summative assignments we would expect Allowed attempts to remain set as the default of 1.

   4. Marking workflow - enable this to allow marks and feedback release to be staggered, or all released at the same time.  It can also help coordinate multiple markers.  

   5. Allow partial release of grades while marking anonymously - When enabling Use Marking Workflow on an anonymous assignment, this option is automatically set to ‘Yes’ when Use Marking Workflow is enabled, and is required in order to stagger the grade release of anonymous Moodle assignments.  With this enabled identities are not revealed at grade release.  Students can see their grade once its status is set to 'Released'. 

   6. Marking allocation - this allows allocation of markers to particular students; however, if you know in advance who will be marking whose work then it's probably easier to use Groups for this.  (Marking allocation depends on Marking workflow being enabled).  Marking allocation works differently for the Non-Editing Tutor role when groups are enabled.  As well as being allocated to students, Non-Editing Tutors will need to be added to the relevant group(s), in order to see student submissions otherwise they will not see any submissions listed on the assignment.

   7. Require students to click submit button - only use if you have a good reason, since there's a tendency for students to overlook the Submit button and assume that uploading is the same as submitting. Students can still edit submissions after the due date, although this is rare as Moodle will flag the submission as late if they do. The marker can prevent student's from editing submissions by locking submissions from the view all submission page.

   8. Turnitin plagiarism settings - you can enable Turnitin similarity checking to run within the Moodle Assignment. With this enabled marking should still be carried out using the Moodle assignment's inherent marking tools, however similarity text-match checking is available via the Turnitin Feedback Studio. When using a Moodle assignment with Turnitin enabled, use the Turnitin interface for similarity checking only. Please read the  Moodle Assignment with Turnitin integration guidance.  

   9. Hide grader identity from students  - enable this to hide the grader name from students.

   10. Students submit in groups - each group submits work in common, and the marks and feedback you give are distributed to all students in that group.

8. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save and display.

9. Hide the grades until you're ready to release - see 'Keeping grades hidden until the release date' in the Moodle Assignment guidance.

10. Please note: Students will be required to confirm the following submission statement: 'By submitting this assessment, I confirm that all the work is my own unless collaboration has been specifically authorised. I understand that any form of Academic Misconduct is strictly prohibited, including the use of essay mills, homework help sites, plagiarism, collusion, falsification, impersonation or any other action which might give me an unfair advantage. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/students/exams-and-assessments/academic-integrity .'

• Keeping marks hidden until the intended release date needs active management:

  • To keep marks hidden from students until the marking process is complete, you need to go to the Grader Report and hide the corresponding item. See Moodle Docs for guidance on hiding grades. Otherwise by default marks and feedback are revealed to students one by one, as you save them. You can also use Marking Workflow but unless you have many markers and/or fluid dates, this takes more effort.

• If you want to limit the period of late submissions, use Cut-off date and/or Grant extension - see the guidance on granting extensions at Moodle Docs.

• Avoid hiding the whole assignment, since students may need to refer back.

• When marking, remember to click Save changes before navigating to the next submission.

• Do put your instructions into the Assignment's Description - these display at the top of that Assignment's page so students are guaranteed to see them. Adding instructions there is important because students can get straight into an Assignment from their homepage without going via your Moodle course area, so are liable to miss any separate instructions.

• Multiple markers - coordinate carefully, especially if one of you is marking downloaded submissions offline with a marksheet. Before uploading those again it's very important to coordinate with any other markers. 

• Offline marking is not compatible with use of Moodle Rubrics or Marksheets, those need to be completed online (though you can always download the submissions to view offline).

• Group submissions - if this is set to Require all group members submit this means that each group member needs to be instructed to submit. This is effectively requiring each student's active approval for the submission - good in theory as long as students know they are supposed to do this. There needs to be a process in place which anticipates a few individuals not submitting, for whatever reason.  Alternatively, it may be less hassle for everyone, to not require that all group members submit.

• Be aware that in assignments which have been set to be anonymous, student identities may be revealed to tutors at any time by clicking on the Reveal student identities option found in the Grading Action drop down menu on the assignment. If this option is selected prior to any submissions being made, it will disappear from the menu giving little indication that although the assignment is set as anonymous it no longer is. If you don't see the Reveal student identities in the Grading Action drop down menu, the assignment is not anonymous.

• Uploading Grading worksheet - if you need to upload Grading Worksheets from earlier course instances which show an 'Identifier' column, please rename this column to 'Anonymous Identifier' within your .csv file prior to upload.  This is to avoid receiving an error upon Grading Worksheet upload.
  
  

• For an overview of principles of good assessment and feedback see Jisc's case studies.

• See the self-paced Hands-on with Moodle assignment training.  Here you can adopt both student and assessor roles to experience submitting work and giving and receiving marks and feedback.

• A Moodle video on setting up an Assignment.

• Giving external examiners access to assessed work

• Interested in peer assessment? M37 - Moodle Workshop.