Introduction

Assignments are activities that instructors or Superadmins ask learners to complete to assess their understanding and mastery of the course subject. Assignments help learners consolidate their learning and apply the concepts and skills they have acquired. 

Assignments can be in the form of files, screen recordings, or links to external websites (YouTube and Vimeo).

Once learners have submitted their assignments, Superadmins or instructors can evaluate them and provide feedback.

Requirements and limitations

• Assignments cannot be managed in or pushed to the Central repository. They are managed only at the course level. You cannot create this kind of training material in the Central repository, but only in a course.
• The allowed assignment file types are: 3GP, 3GP2, AVI, BMP, CSV, DOC, DOCX, EPUB, FLV, GIF, ICO, JPEG, JPG, MKV, MOV, MP3, MP4, MPEG, MPEG4, MPG, MPG2, OGG, OGM, PDF, PNG, PPSX, PPT, PPTX, SRT, TXT, VTT, WMV, XLS, XLSX, ZIP. 
• The maximum size per file for an assignment is 40 MB.

Creating an assignment

Begin by logging into your platform as the Superadmin and accessing the Admin menu from the gear icon in the top right corner. Then, in the E-learning section, select the Course management item. Now, on the main Course management page, find the course in which you want to create an assignment training material from the list of courses, click on its description and move to the Training material tab. Make sure you are enrolled in the course as a Superadmin or instructor.

Once you are in the Training Materials tab, select the Add training material button, then select Assignment from the dropdown menu. On the next page, add a title, instructions and description into the corresponding text boxes. You can edit the text as necessary for the instructions and the description. Below the description box, set whether users can upload multiple files for their assignment.

Then, in the Learner policy section, set how your learners can proceed with the course. If you select the first option, learners must wait until the instructor or the Superadmin evaluates the assignment with a passing score before they can continue on other training materials. If you select the second option, learners will have access to the rest of the course or training materials by simply submitting the assignment, without waiting for the evaluation of the assignment.

Now, you can move to the Additional Info tab, where you can add a short description of the assignment, add tags, and upload or choose a pre-selected thumbnail.

You can also add tags to your training material to improve its searchability in your platform’s global search. If the auto-tagging feature is enabled in your platform, some tags may be automatically generated based on the content of your training material, as understood by your platform using artificial intelligence (note that this only works for English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese content). You can edit or remove tags at any time, with a limit of 15 tags per training material and of 32 characters per tag (find out more about taggable content types). Please note that, for security reasons, the platform artificial intelligence does not access private content (that is, content requiring authentication to be accessed) and can thus automatically generate tags only for public content. When uploading private content, we suggest you add tags manually.

When you're finished, press Save changes. 

Screencasts as assignments for learners

In your platform, you can now add a screencast as both a formal or informal learning asset. Learners can upload assignments by recording a screencast. Please note that only administrators and course instructors (or Power Users with granted permissions) can upload screencasts as formal assets into courses, while learners in courses can add screencasts to assignments.

Learners uploading assignments

Details about how learners interact with assignments are available in the Managing assignments learner article of the knowledge base.

After a user submits an assignment, the training material status is set to In progress until the instructor or Superadmin evaluates it and gives it a passing score. 

Once an assignment is evaluated, the score becomes visible to the learner in the course view, and the training material is marked as Complete.

Evaluating submitted assignments

To evaluate the assignments that have been submitted by your learners, you first need to access the course as the instructor or Superadmin. Once you have accessed the course by clicking on its title on the Course management page, move to the Reports tab.

Select the Learner assignments tab, showing the list of assignments that users submitted for the selected course. Each row, for every assignment, displays the username and the full name of the user, the name of the assignment, the date and time of the submission, the status, the score, and the option to view or evaluate it.

If you have not evaluated the assignment yet, the status column for the assignment displays a grey checkmark, the score column will be blank, and you will see the Evaluate link in the last column. Press this link to evaluate the assignment. In the pop-up box, you can download the assignment by pressing the download icon in the top right corner. Below, you will see the information of the user and any comments written by the user.

Once you have reviewed the assignment, you can provide comments and a score in the corresponding text boxes.

Please note! The score must be a whole number. Decimal numbers are not accepted.

If you need to upload files, you can do so by pressing the Upload files button in the Attachment row. If the user did not pass the assignment, you can select the option to allow users to re-upload the assignment if they failed. Finally, press the Marked as passed or Marked as failed buttons at the bottom of the pop-up box to complete the action. As an option, if the user fails the assignment, you can select the option Allow the user to re-upload the assignment if marked as failed to allow the upload of a different file.

You will now see the score displayed in the assignment's row in the Learner Assignments tab, and the grey checkmark will be replaced with a green checkmark. Additionally, you will now see the magnifying glass icon in the View column to view the assignment and your feedback. If the assignment is marked as failed, its score is always set to zero in the User statistics tab, when you check the training material status after clicking on a username. 

After you evaluate an assignment, the learner will see your evaluation and comments in the assignment upload area, next to the assignment title.

Notifications

Three notifications are available for the management of assignments. Learn more about notification events.