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Qualitative feedback through the assignment activity

Students can use the assignment activity to submit work in file form (e.g. pdf). These submissions can be graded by the teachers. In addition to a numerical grade, qualitative feedback is also possible. Moodle offers the necessary functionalities for this. You can use these as follows:

Preparation

“Assignment” activity
“Assignment” activity

To be able to grade the submission of an assignment, you first need the “Assignment” activity.

To do this, you must switch the course to edit mode using the “Edit” slider in the top right corner.

Then select “Edit” and “Edit settings” via the three dots next to the activity.

The following must be considered in the activity settings options:

Under “Submission types”, a tick must be placed next to each of the following:

  • “File submissions”: Allows students to upload files. How many and in which format can be specified in more detail in the corresponding sub-items.
  • “Online text”: Allows direct written editing of tasks without an external word processing programme.

    Note: The “Online text” submission type uses Moodle's internal TinyMCE text editor, which also allows the recording and subsequent uploading of audio or video files. This makes it possible to realise new, interesting tasks and creative submission formats. You can also find more information on the recording function of the TinyMCE text editor in our FAQ article Functionalities of the TinyMCE text editor (section “Recording audio and video files”).
Submission types
Submission types

Furthermore, the main focus is on the “feedback types”. We recommend ticking the following boxes:

  • “Feedback comments”: Allows commenting on the submission directly in the browser
  • “Feedback files”: Allows previously prepared documents to be uploaded for grading purposes
  • “Annotate PDF”: Allows commenting, correcting, labelling and stamping within the submitted solution directly in the browser

It is far more important to set the comment inline to “Yes”. You can find more information on the different types by clicking on the question marks next to the types in your course.

In the “Feedback types” image, you can see the points addressed highlighted.

Feedback types
Feedback types
Grading Summary
Grading Summary

After saving your settings, you have to wait until students have uploaded their assignments. As soon as a student has uploaded something, you can get a “Grading Summary” by clicking on the assignment.

Here you can see the number of participants and submitted assignments. If grades are expected, you can click on the “Grade” field highlighted in yellow and start grading the assignments.

Text input
Text input

Within the individual assessment, you have the option of assessing the text assignment on the right-hand side. You can expand the assessment view via the layout navigation at the bottom right, as shown in the “Text input” image, for a better overview. You can now use the Assessment field to assign grades directly, upload a feedback file or comment on the student's submission directly in the input field.

In the following example image “Text input”, the student has uploaded “This is my solution, a sample submission” as the solution, and the teacher has added “The text submission can be commented on directly here” and evaluated the submission with 80 out of 100 possible points.

The feedback is then displayed to the student directly in the text field of the submitted assignment.

If course participants have uploaded a .pdf, .docx or .odt file, teachers will see the submissions in a window in which they can add annotations. These annotations can be entered as comments, highlights and much more. After saving, all entries are visible to the students who have submitted the answer.

In the individual evaluation of a submission, the “Notify student” checkbox is available at the bottom. If you set this option to “Yes”, the person will be notified immediately about their assessment.