Moodle Assignment feedback guide

Moodle has a range of options to provide feedback to your students. The following options require you to complete marking and feedback online:

• Quick grading
• Online comments
• Marking record
• Rubric
• Grading screen

To complete grading offline, you can bulk download the assignments and Grading worksheet and then upload your completed grades and feedback to the Moodle assignment for moderation and release to students.

You do not need to read this guide in its entirety.

Start with Hide grades and feedback and navigate to either Online feedback and grading, Offline feedback and grading or Group Assignment feedback and grading and review the relevant guide. Finally review Release grades and feedback.

There is also a guidance page on Marking workflow. This is an optional workflow. You only need to review this page if you are using this method to pass marking through its different stages.

Whichever method of marking that you use you must always hide the assignment grade item from students while the marking and moderation process is underway. This ensures that feedback and grades are released to all students at the same time and that students only view their final moderated grade.

You must also hide the assignment grade item when undertaking anonymous marking. Before you reveal student identities, grades are not available but students can view any feedback files attached to their assignments unless the grade items is hidden.

• If you decide to mark Moodle assignments via Feedback Studio, you must select each student assignment from the Moodle assignment interface and not use the navigation between papers in Feedback Studio. Using Feedback Studio's internal navigation can result in you marking multiple drafts of the same submission.
• There is no way to control the Turnitin post date on Moodle assignments with the Turnitin plugin enabled.  You must use Moodle's mechanisms for hiding the grade item prior to beginning marking.
• If you have not selected to enable the Turnitin plugin before you receive submissions, there is not way to turn it on retrospectively. You can submit assignments on behalf of students via the Turnitin web version if you need a similarity report in this circumstance.

When a student submits a file to a Moodle assignment with Turnitin enabled, they may receive an error message that prevents their submission from uploading successfully to Turnitin.
Some of the errors such as file exceeds maximum allowed size and user has not accepted end user agreement are clear to understand and easily rectifiable by following the guidelines set in the Submit Turnitin Assignment Guide.

There are other errors that are not so clear to understand such as:

• problem creating the module in Turnitin (see API logs) 
• problem editing the module settings in Turnitin (see API logs) 
• no accessible content in the file pool 
• XML response could not be parsed 

To rectify these errors, please try the following:

Note: If students were required to click the submit button you will need to revert their submission to a draft. If the cut-off date in the past you will need to give students an extension to a future time to enable them to resubmit.

1. Ask student(s) to change their file name if it is over 40 characters and resubmit the file.
2. If the file name is short but students converted the assignment file from Word to PDF, we have found changing the file name and resubmitting the assignment works.
3. If the file name has any punctuation apart from underscores, ask the students to remove punctuation and resubmit.
4. If the file name & file name conventions is OK, sometimes, simply changing the file name helps push the paper through to Turnitin. 

Alternatively, a staff member with the programme admin role can log in as the student to resubmit on their behalf:

1. Log in as the student for whom you want to resubmit.
2. Access the Assignment.
3. Select Edit submission.
4. Select the file from the File submissions field. An overlay window will open
5. In the Name field, update the title of the submission (any change is sufficient)
6. Select Update.

   

7. Go through all the other steps (academic integrity statements & submit & continue buttons to resubmit the file)

Turnitin are currently investigating an issue where the Last modified (grade) column in the Moodle Assignment grading table is being updated to the date/time on which the student closes their feedback after reviewing it in Turnitin Feedback Studio for at least 30 seconds. Please be assured that the grade has not been modified.  

This is only impacting on Moodle Assignment activities where Turnitin has been enabled and marking has been completed via Turnitin Feedback Studio. 

• Impact on staff: The Last modified (grade) column in the Moodle assignment grading table may display an incorrect date. 
• Impact on students: On the Moodle assignment submission status screen, the Graded by name is updated to the student’s name rather than the marker’s after the student reviews their feedback in Feedback Studio for at least 30 seconds.

Hide grader identity from students

There is a work round for this issue. You can hide the grader's identify from students. You will find this in the Assignment settings.

1. Open the Assignment
2. Select Settings from the contextual navigation menu
3. Scroll down to Grade settings
4. Set Hide grader identity from students to Yes
5. Scroll down and select Save and display.

Now no grader identities are visible to students