An Overview of Assignments in Moodle

Assignments in Moodle allow you to collect and evaluate student work. Managing student work using an Assignment activity gives you these benefits:

• Paperless management of student work: The Assignment activity provides a convenient database of student submissions that you can organize and manage online.
  
• Grading and feedback through Moodle: The Assignment activity includes a grading interface through which you can enter grades and provide feedback to each student.
  
• Due dates automatically appear in the Calendar: If you specify a due date for an assignment, that date will appear in the Calendar block and in the Upcoming events block. Students can see at a glance when their work will be due.
  

An Assignment activity can be configured to manage any of the following kinds of student submissions:

• Online text: Students enter content directly into a text box on the assignment submission page. Useful for short papers or brief paragraphs.
  
• File submissions: Students upload files on the submission page. Useful for longer papers or other file-based work.
  
• Both Online text and files: Students can upload files and type text online. For example, a student can upload a file containing an essay and use the online text box to write a brief cover note to the instructor.
  
• Offline work (no online submission): You can also create an assignment activity with no online submission options for students. This is useful for evaluating work such as papers you are collecting in print, classroom presentations, performances, or lab experiments. The activity can be graded in Moodle and the due date will appear in the Calendar block.
  

Step 1

Add the Assignment activity to your course

For details, see About Adding Activities to a Moodle Course.

Step 2

Configure the Assignment activity

For details on the settings involved in configuring an Assignment activity, see Add an Assignment Activity in Moodle.

You can set a start date, due date, and cut-off date for submissions; allow or prevent resubmission; and configure an Assignment activity for Groups. When working with groups, you can have each student in a group submit individually (see Assign an Activity to a Group or Grouping in Moodle), or have a group of students make a single submission (see Configure & Grade Group Assignments in Moodle).

Step 3

Grade submissions

Each assignment has a Grading page where you can review submissions, enter grades, and give feedback. You can grade an assignment with Simple direct grading, Rubric, or Grading guide, do Blind grading (student names will not be shown next to their submissions), or use Offline grading worksheet to download a spreadsheet to work on grading without being logged in to Moodle or connected to the Internet. For details, see Grade Assignments in Moodle.