Creating Assignments
Creating a QuizCreating an Assignment
An assignment allows you to have students upload a document and submit it to you. Once submitted, you can grade the assignment based on a score or use a rubric.
You can create a new assignment in both the Repository or in the Learning Path. If you do it in the Repository, make sure you are in edit mode and click on Repository at the top and then Assessment > Assignment and Add New. By creating it here, you will still need to add it to your Learning Path, so the students can view and submit the assignment.
To create it in the Learning Path, make sure you are in Edit Mode and click on the “Add” icon in the Instructional Unit you want to include the assignment.
Once you are in the add assessment area, to create a new Assignment, click on “Assignment” and then “Author New” at the bottom.
When you add an assignment, there are several settings you need to think about. You need to include a name, learning objectives and grading options. Everything else is optional. The following will take you through each section of the assignment settings:
- Name: be as descriptive as you can, so students will know what the assessment will include.
- Description: this area can provide additional information to the students on what they should expect.
- Add File: you can add a file for students to view and download.
- Meta Tags: allows you to include tags for the content you want to include. You will use commas to separate the tags if you have more than one.
DATES
Within the course, you can add visibility dates to assessments. This allows you to determine when the students can view the content. In addition to visibility, you can also add attempt dates to assessments. To apply these to any assessment, when you expand the ‘Dates’ area you will see that the assessment is always visible, always attemptable, and it is added to the student’s calendar by default.
As you see by the red asterisk, Dates are mandatory. The default for dates is “Always Visible.” If you want to apply specific visibility dates, select “Visible From.”
You can also set a specific time for your date. The default is 00:00:00, which means the resource will open at midnight.
If you add a visibility date you will automatically need to add an attempt date. Along with an attempt date, which is the first date they can submit the assessment, you also have the ability to put a due date on it. This can be the end of the semester or on a specific date.
You can also allow for late submissions. The students will never see this information, but it will tell you and the student that they submitted it late. You can set it to the end of the semester (which is the default) or offset it by so many days.
NOTE: when you are grading, if you allow the submission to be late, you will not be able to apply a bulk grade to all those who did not turn in the assignment until after that date (end of the semester or number of days after the submission date).
You also have the option to add to the student’s calendar, but the students do not see the calendar in their view, so you don’t need to worry about this option.
Now you can determine the display options and align learning objectives.
DISPLAY OPTIONS
You now have options of how the grade is displayed to students.
- You determine if you want to allow students to view their score once it is graded. They would still be able to see feedback and how they did on the assessment even if you have the score hidden.
- You can also change the name of the assignment within the grade book. Be careful with this. If the student doesn’t see the name they expect, they will ask you where their grade is. One thing you can do is shorten the name. For example, if you have Activity 1, you can shorten this to A1.
- If you don’t want students to see this column in the grade book, then you can hide it from them here.
- At this moment in the student interface, they will only be able to see numeric grades. So, for students to see their grade you must check the ‘Numeric Grade’ option and decide if you want it to be absolute value or percentage value. You can check the letter grade, if you want to see a letter grade associated with it in the grade book. If you check this, then you will need to set up your scheme.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
In the Learning Objectives settings, you will be able to determine if there are any learning objectives aligned to your assignment. This can give students great insight into how they are doing compared to the learning objectives within the course.
- Clicking on Manage will allow you to align the learning objectives that are already aligned to the course to your assignment.
- This will display all learning objectives that are aligned to your assignment.
You will need to determine how you want to grade the assignment. There are a few items you need to decide:
- Exempt From: Grades or Achievements. If you want to have this as a practice assignment and not include the grade in the final calculation, than you will exempt from Grades. The grade will still show in the grade book unless you selected for the score to be hidden. If you want it exempt from achievement, again, the student will still see how they did on the learning objectives, but it won’t take that into account when the system is determining achievement of a learning objective or outcome.
- Set Achievement Scale: you have two options “On Individual Learning Objectives” or “On Total Score.”
- On Individual Learning Objectives – this will allow you to put a value on each learning objective, which will track how the student is doing with each LO. This is recommended if you want students to understand what they know and what they still need to work on to become proficient in that outcome.
- On Total Score – this uses the full score of the assignment and places achievement level for each learning objective by the total instead of individually.
- Determine the point value and the achievement level. This area allows you to set the points and the spread of the points based on whether the student met or exceeded the learning objective on that assessment. This can be done by total score (as shown above) or by each individual learning objective.
- Grading Category: if you want to put this assessment into a category to make it easier to score within the grade book, you can add it here.
- If you want to use a Rubric, make sure you click “Apply Rubric.” If you grade by individual learning objective, you will be able to pull in the LO’s as the criteria of the rubric. If you do it by total score, you will write your own criteria.
- If you have a grading key for other assessors to use, you can upload it as a file.
When you are finished with the settings, make sure you click “Save.” This will then be added to the Learning Path within the module that you chose and a grade column will be added to Progress.
NOTE: If you created the assignment in the Repository, then you will need to go to the Learning Path and, in edit mode, click on the add tool where you want to insert the assignment, click on assignment, select “Import From” and then “Content Repository.” You will find your assignment, select it, and then click on “Add.”