During the last academic year there have been a significant number of successful assessments submitted and marked electronically using the Moodle assignment tool. As a result of staff and student feedback there have been some changes made to both the technology and recommended practice in order to streamline and enhance the eSubmission process across the institution and ensure a consistent student experience. All the changes and enhancements listed below were approved by the University Assessment Process Support Group.

Changes and Enhancements [Staff specific]

• Significantly reduced options when setting up an eSubmission. Once the title, description and deadline of an assessment are completed, then the majority of settings after that can be left as default. The optional settings that can be changed if required are:
  • Enabling group submissions
  • Enabling Turnitin originality checking software
  • Linking the Moodle assignment to UNITe to automatically transfer grades
• New ‘media submission’ route. Students can submit video and audio files for assessment of up to 2GB
• Anonymous marking set to yes as default (this can be changed for exemptions)
• Marker allocation must be done using groups to enable tutors to bulk download only their allocated work
• To simplify anonymous marking the recommended process is to use the bulk download and upload functionality alongside an offline grading worksheet
  • Additionally we recommend that if a feedback template is going to be used then students are asked to use a copy of this template as the front sheet of their submitted assessment
• Terminology, descriptions and help text on many eSubmission options have been simplified and made clearer
• Only uncapped grades are to be entered in Moodle. The Faculty office will apply capped grades as needed
• Moodle Gradebook has been renamed Moodle Activities to prevent confusion with the terminology and grades appearing in UNITe
• External Examiners can look at all Moodle submissions, or manually search for a sample where needed, a help sheet has been created to support this
• Please remember that for group submissions student groups MUST be set-up in the user area of the Moodle course FIRST

Changes and Enhancements [Student specific]

• There is now only one method of submission. There is no longer a ‘submit’ button, all submissions will remain editable until the deadline
• Moodle Gradebook is no longer visible to students to prevent confusion with aggregated grades shown in Moodle and those shown on the statement of results

You can book on an eSubmission training session here. For those of you who have already attended the full 2 hour session there will be some shorter eSubmission refresher sessions advertised soon.Further details to follow.