The Moodle Assignment module lets you collect student assignments—including research papers, spreadsheets, presentations, photographs, and short audio or video recordings—online. The video below is a great resource for seeing how to add an assignment and to understand many of the most useful options. A text version of the information, along with some specific recommendations for Haverford faculty follows the video.
OPTIONAL: Next, you will see an Availability section. Use this to give your students due dates. Date information from your assignments will flow to the Moodle calendar. Students can see upcoming assignments on their Moodle dashboard.
You can also set a “remind me to grade by” date; this will appear on your dashboard.
OPTIONAL: In the Submission types area, determine what your students will be submitting. If you leave the defaults, students will submit one file, up to 5 MB in size. This works for many types of assignments. However, if you have any of the scenarios below, you will want to change the defaults.
Do you want students to submit a short reading response, or other short entry, directly into the assignment text area?
Check the “online text” box.
Do you want to set a word limit for online submissions?
In addition to checking the “online text” box, enable and set a “Word limit.”
Do you want student to submit draft copies of their submission?
Increase the “maximum number of uploaded files.”
Will students submit documents over 20MB in size? 20MB is a pretty large file. Hopefully, students will be uploading files much smaller, to avoid taxing our system resources. If 20MB is not large enough, contact hc-techlearn@haverford.edu and see if there is a better tool for your needs.
Do you want students to submit assignments in a particular format, such as a PDF, Microsoft Word format, Microsoft Excel, MP3 audio file, etc.?
Click the “Choose” button and select your desired file type for student submissions or type the file extension name into the box. Require PDFs (“.pdf”) if you want to mark up assignments directly in the Moodle gradebook.
OPTIONAL: In the Feedback types area, state what type of feedback you will give students–and how you will give that feedback. All options should be checked by default. However, if any options are unchecked that may prevent you from delivering feedback in your preferred way.
Check the “Feedback comments” box to give comments on each submission.
Check the “Offline grading worksheet” box, if you want to enter grades in Excel and upload them to Moodle.
Check the “Feedback files” box, if you want to return student submissions with your markups, or submit other types of feedback files such as voice comments.
Set “Comment inline” to yes, for an easy way to comment on text students submit directly into the assignment tool. This is only useful if you enable the “Online Text” submission type.
In addition to the settings above, many other options are available. A few options:
Once you have the desired settings, click the button to save and return to course.
Once you have created your assignment activity and students have submitted work, you will want to collect and grade student submissions. You can either download all the assignments, grade them offline, and then upload feedback files with comments or mark papers directly in Moodle.
The Moodle Assignment module lets you bulk downloaded student submissions for organization and offline grading. This can be helpful in a number of situations:
It’s not hard to use the offline grading option, but it has a number of steps both within Moodle and your local computer operating system. Watch this video on off-line marking for more information.
