Overview

The Assignment Activity lets students submit work and allows teachers to give grades and feedback in Moodle.  This document will guide you through the process of giving feedback and marks for assignments submitted online via Moodle.  Information in italics will include pointers on administrative and procedural questions that you might want to take into account.

Screenshots that highlight the information below are available to download as a PDF.

Finding the submitted work

You can access your assignments for marking from one of two locations:

* At the assignment submission point in the Topic or Week where the assignment activity was added
* In the Activities block (usually found to the left), click on Assignments to see all assignment activities for that unit

Once the Assignment Activity is open, click on View submitted assignments (top right) to go to the list of submitted work.

Marking submitted assignments:

  1. If the unit participants have been organised into groups then clicking on the separate (visible) groups dropdown list will let you choose to view only one group of students – no need to search through the whole cohort for work that needs marking.
  2. Clicking on the column headings will reorder information, so sorting by Status will separate out unmarked work.
  3. Click on file names to open a file.  If you want to save a file: right-click on the file name and select ‘Save link as’ or ‘Save target as’ (depending on your web browser) and browse for a location to save.
  4. If you have a large number of files to download you might want to use the Firefox Add On ‘DownThemAll’ to download multiple files at once.  More information on how to do this is available in the Moodle FAQs here.
  5. If you only need to add grades and comments, tick the box to Allow quick grading. Then Save preferences to move to the quick grading screen. The quick grading screen lets you grade and comment on all submitted assignments for that unit (group) in one marking session without having to save each and move to a new screen.

Using the grading screen:

There are several approaches you can take to providing grades and feedback:
* Add a grade or comment only
* Add a grade and comment
* Upload a standard feedback sheet (in Word) as a Response File
* Download the submitted work, annotate it with feedback and then re-upload as a Response File

  1. Add grades through the dropdown menu and comments in the text box. Customised Grade Scales can be created in the settings to reflect the mark scheme for the assignment.
  2. If the assignment activity has been hidden from students they will not be alerted that their work has been marked.   If the assignment has not been hidden for marking, untick Send notification emails if you don’t want students to be sent an email that links them back to their grades as the work is marked.
  3. Save and show next takes you to the next unmarked assignment.
  4. Upload a feedback sheet or annotated work as a Response file.  Note: for this response file to be visible to the student, you must have added a grade and written something in the comments.

Remember to switch back on the grade book for the unit and unhide the assignment submission point in order to make grades and feedback available to students.  Students will not now be emailed automatically to alert them to feedback at this point. However, adding a post about the return of grades in the News Forum will email this message to all participants.

Further information on using the assignment activity in Moodle

If you are thinking of setting up an Assignment Activity in Moodle, more information can be found here.

The paper ‘Factors to consider for the effective use of the Moodle assignment activity in online submission of work‘ is available on Opus.

Assignment activity FAQs are available here: http://go.bath.ac.uk/bxs6

General FAQs about using moodle.bath.ac.uk can be found at: http://moodle.bath.ac.uk/faq/

There is also support available from the Moodle community:
* Documentation on the assignment activity module: http://go.bath.ac.uk/lmoc
* FAQs about the assignment activity: http://go.bath.ac.uk/mozi
* User forum with answers to questions about the assignment activity: http://go.bath.ac.uk/dr77