The Moodle Assignments tool is a great way to have students submit their work to you. It will free up space in your email inbox, store all student submissions in a consistent location, and allow you to give students feedback online. It can also help mitigate issues where large files get “stuck” in student’s email outboxes and arrive in your inbox late (Moodle records detailed submission time information, and usually uploads files faster than they can be emailed). You can give the students ‘template’ files, and also accept short text submissions (rather than full files) or audio/video recordings. There’s also a variety of feedback types you can provide, including annotated PDFs and audio responses.
- Go to the Moodle course you want the assignment to appear in and turn editing on.
- In the week or topic you want the assignment to appear, click “Add an Activity or Resource”
- Choose “Assignment” from the list of activities
- The Assignment configuration screen will appear.
There are many, many options on this screen. The Using Assignment documentation on Moodle’s support site goes through all the possible scenarios, but here are the basic settings you will want to pay attention to:
- Assignment Name and Description are required. In the Description field, you can include images, audio and video.
- The Availability sections allows you to set dates when assignments can begin submitting assignments, when they are due, and when they can no longer submit. Be sure these dates match the expectations in your syllabus. If you want students to be able to submit assignments at any time, be sure that the check box next to “Enable” is unchecked.
- The most common Submission Type will be File submission. Use this option if you want students to submit a Word doc, pdf etc. However, if you want students to submit online text, you can select that option. This will present students with a text box where they can type or copy/paste their work. This assignment type works best for shorter submissions. If you want students to submit audio or video files, select “Online PoodLL.”
- If you want to give students feedback online, make sure the Feedback type is specified. The most common type of feedback is “Feedback comments” (which is checked by default). Other options include a Feedback file (which can be annotated) and feedback audio (by selecting Feedback PoodLL). The feedback file option is useful if you would like to open the students file and add comments or edits using the reviewing feature in Word.
That’s the basic settings you need to be concerned about when setting up an assignment, although you should look at the Submission settings, Notifications, Grade and Restrict access settings to see if you want to change any of the default settings in that category. The Using Assignment documentation on Moodle’s support site has lots of information about these settings.