The Assignment activity in Moodle is a place for your students to submit their work for instructor review. Students can submit documents, videos, Internet links, images, and presentation slides. The instructor then reviews the submission, gives a grade, and leaves feedback directly in Moodle, which is then automatically shared with students. For more information, visit our article on Creating an assignment in Moodle. For information beyond this article, visit Moodle documentation here.
What can I use the Assignment activity for?
- Written assignments: Students submit a Word document or Presentation file.
- You can grade assignments in Moodle to quickly distribute grades and feedback to students. See our section of articles on grading here.
- Journals or brief writing tasks: Students type their submission directly into Moodle.
- Turn on Online Text under Submission types when setting up the Moodle Assignment.
- Multimedia assignments: Students submit a video recording
- Kaltura allows students to record videos of themselves and upload it Moodle. See our section of articles on Kaltura here.
- Please note: You must turn on Online Text under Submission types to give students a place to submit a video through Kaltura.
What are good practices when setting up Assignments?
- Include the instructions and expectations. When setting up the assignment, use the description and instructions text boxes to explain the directions and expectations of their submission.
- If you already have the assignment directions written in a Word document, upload the document directly onto the Moodle Assignment when creating the assignment.
- Include due dates on Moodle assignment. This will make it clear to the students when the assignment is due without having to dig through a syllabus. Please include due dates at least in the description, if not the title itself.
- Consider skipping file attachments for short writing assignments. If the writing assignment is brief, informal, and formatting is not important, have students type their assignment directly into a Moodle textbox. This makes grading quicker and doesn’t require downloading files.
- Consider grading assignments directly in Moodle. The Moodle grading feature allows you to write overall feedback and to annotate the student's submission to leave feedback within the context of their paper. Students see the feedback by clicking on the assignment link and scrolling down to the grading section. See our section of articles on grading here.
- If you prefer to give feedback by tracking changes in a Word document, you’ll need to turn on Feedback files in your assignment settings. Visit our article on enabling feedback files here.
- Consider leaving audio or video feedback on some Moodle assignments. Students seeing and/or hearing you talk about their assignment can create a personal connection between you and the student. Visit our article on leaving audio or video feedback files here.
- The Moodle Gradebook. Assignments created in Moodle are automatically added to the Moodle Gradebook and helps make grading more transparent. Both the grade and the overall feedback appear in the gradebook. See our section of articles on grading here.
- Extended deadlines for students with accommodations. Moodle allows you to give unique deadlines to specific students who need extra time. Visit our article on extending submission deadlines here.