Course Editing Guide
Create Activities (give tasks to students)
Creating an assignment and settings
With assignments, you do not have to search for submitted essays scattered in your mailbox. Students can upload them to Moodle and you can check, grade and comment on them in one place (submitted papers are not visible for other students). If you enable Turnitin, an originality report will be created for all upload submissions as well.Creating an assignment
You can open the activity chooser with the
menu and select assignment.
You just need to change the title, add a description, and a due date and Save - but if you would like to use other options it is recommended to read the details.
Due date is the most important setting. It is shown at students calendar and also notifications are sent to students by default 2 days before this as a reminder (new in 4.5).
Note: the default Moodle behaviour is changed for better user experience. Students can submit after the due date as well for the first time (as a late submission), but cannot modify. You can manually enable a student to modify later.
If the assignment does not have a due date, it may be useful to set a notification for yourself of student submissions and/or enable a submit button for students so they can mark their work finished. (It is not recommended to do this if a due date is set) See the settings below.
Optional settings which may be used for specific reasons are listed below. In general, do not change settings, unless you know what you would like to accomplish (especially settings not listed below). All available settings and more detail can be found in the Moodle docs.
- Allow submissions from: The students will not be able to start / submit their work before the first date (default – they can start immediately). This can be useful for a timed assignment (where students can start at the same time).
- Enable Turnitin - plagiarism detection - If you enable, reports will be created for submissions automatically. You can read more information here.
- Submission types (default: file submissions)
You can select more than one method (change the number of max. files), or deselect all.
- Online text format: can be used for students to write text directly in the Moodle text editor. This can be useful to see word count, enable students to link external content or to give feedback inline after submissions.
- Offline assignment: If you disable the file submission method (deselect all), you can create an “offline” assignment. Students do not need to provide anything online, but you can still provide them the description and deadline and mark them in Moodle.
- Restrict file type: You can ask for specific file types here, separated by semicolons. E.g. .docx, .pdf
- Grade: You can assign any point value to the work of individual students from 0 to 100. You can change the maximum to a lower value. Using scales are not recommended as it breaks the automatic final grade calculation. Moodle grades are not connected to SITS.
You can read more about Grading in here.
Advanced grading methods
These can be used instead of "simple direct grading". It is not recommended to use for most cases as this is super complicated to set up and pilot without issues. Rubrics / marking guide can be used for criteria-based assessment.
More information about advanced grading methods
- Anonymous submissions: Blind marking hides the identity of students to markers. Blind marking settings will be locked once a submission or grade has been made in relation to this assignment. If you use this option, you will need to “reveal student identities” after the marking is finished.
You can read more details here. - Use marking workflow: When set to Yes, teachers will be able to specify the stage they are at in their grading of individual assignments (as in the screenshot).
One advantage of using marking workflow is that the grades can be hidden from students until they are set to 'Released', and the others can be useful if a paper will be marked by the cooperation of two or more markers. Note: Their own grades are immediately available for students by default if Marking workflow is not used. Group submission settings > Students submit in groups:
If you separate students for different activities into different groups in the course, you need to use "groupings" as well (under show more).
If you enable this,
students will have a "shared dropbox" in the assignment, only one of them submits and all of them will see the feedback, share the grades.
Important: before you use this setting, set up the groups in the course, or ALL students will belong to one group and share the submission.
- Common module settings > group mode > separate groups
If you use this setting, students submit individually, but it will be possible to distribute students among teachers. For this you need to add the graders with "non-editing teacher" role to the course or change the permissions on the assignment for other teaching roles and assign the instructors and students in groups.After this, the instructors will see only their own students. This may be useful for example for thesis supervisors.
- Restrict access: make the activity available for a selected set of students only. Details about this.
- Submission notifications:
Moodle allows teachers to receive notifications when students submit assignments, when they submit assignments late, or for both cases. This feature alerts graders about new submissions or reminds them to check assignments submitted after the due date. These options can be configured under the “Notifications” menu:
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Notify graders about submissions – sends a notification for all submissions.
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Notify graders about late submissions – sends a notification only for assignments submitted after the due date.
By default, students receive a notification when they submit an assignment and when it has been graded.
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