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What it does

This tool allows you to create online assignments for delivery via a web interface to your students. You can include multiple question types in an assignment, including ones that require your students to upload files. You then can choose how to organize, deliver, and collect that assignment. You can choose to scramble questions so that they appear in a different order for each student. Questions can be organized into question pools, allowing you to re-use questions. You can also import previously created assignments.

Most grading is done automatically, and grades can be posted automatically to an online gradebook.

By configuring an assignment's settings, you can control a wide range of conditions for taking an assignment. For example, to specify locations for taking an assignment you can indicate a range of IP addresses. Via the settings, you can determine when an assignment will become available, set time limits, determine how many times a student can take an assignment, and indicate whether or not late submissions will be allowed.

Key concepts

Creating an assignment: When you click Create on the Assignments page, you are naming and setting up the assignment, and entering the assignment editor. From here, you can go on to create the assignment content, including questions and the parts (i.e., sections) that will contain them.

Question editor: Within the question editor, you not only create the question and its possible answers, but you can assign the question to a part or a question pool, add feedback and metadata, and choose whether or not to require a rationale.

Parts: Every assignment must contain at least one part (i.e., section). Each new assignment will include an automatically created part called "Default". If you do not change the "Default" part's name, its heading (i.e., gray divider) will not appear on your assignment. Any questions or images you place in this part will appear; only the heading will be hidden.

Settings: From the Assignments page, you can view and modify the settings for all your assignments. Within the settings, you can create an introduction for your assignment, determine its delivery dates and to whom it will be released, set security levels, specify time limits and the number of submissions allowed, add graphics, feedback, and metadata, and determine how the assignment will be graded.

Question Pools: You can organize questions into question pools so that you can reuse them in other assignments. You can subdivide question pools into subpools to organize questions by subject matter, section number, question type, or any other criteria desired. For example, an instructor can create a question pool called "Biology 105", and then create subpools called "Basic concepts", "Cell biology", and "Genetics".

Things to consider

• It can take a few tries for students to feel comfortable taking online assignments. Consider setting up a practice run in a lab environment.
• Assume all the issues concerning take-home exams also apply to online assignments.
• The feedback settings for your assignment can be important. The tool can grade only true/false, multiple choice, numeric response, matching and fill-in-the-blank question types; it can't grade short answer/essay, file upload, or audio recording questions at all. If your assignment includes questions that you'll need to grade by hand, you might prefer that your students not see the results of their automatically graded questions until you have reviewed the whole assignment.

  Note: You should not use the feedback option in assignments when assessing learning, as it may provide information students can use to correct their answers before submitting a assignment.