Assignment

From Totara:

The assignment activity module enables a teacher to communicate tasks, collect work and provide grades and feedback.

Students can submit any digital content (files), such as word-processed documents, spreadsheets, images, or audio and video clips. Alternatively, or in addition, the assignment may require students to type text directly into the text editor. An assignment can also be used to remind students of ‘real-world’ assignments they need to complete offline, such as art work, and thus not require any digital content. Students can submit work individually or as a member of a group.

When reviewing assignments, teachers can leave feedback comments and upload files, such as marked-up student submissions, documents with comments or spoken audio feedback. Assignments can be graded using a numerical or custom scale or an advanced grading method such as a rubric. Final grades are recorded in the grade book.

When using the Assignment activity, it should primarily be used in courses that have a synchronous element, since this activity is meant to have a trainer interaction and it is implied in the activity that the content will be collected and evaluated. This activity is intended for a student to be able to provide a variety of file types in response to a prompt.

Possibly a good place for an assignment is where a group of learners are working together on a project and there will be multiple pieces that they need to turn in separately.

In place of files, or in addition to, you can provide a place for them to write online text as their submission. However, this online text cannot be evaluated and graded automatically for content the way a question inside of a “quiz” activity can.

A case where you may use this in an asynchronous way is to collect a filled out form from a group of learners. In the instructions, you need to be clear what the wait time on feedback will be if the submission isn’t graded on a simple basis like “student submits work.”