The Assignment activity is an essential feature of Moodle. It is the most widely used assessment tool, and UbiCast's solutions allow you to integrate the uploading or creation of media for your students as an answer to the Assignment. In this article, we will review the prerequisites for using this feature, the configuration of the Moodle activity when it is created, the different stages of submission from the student's point of view, and the management of media after submission.
Table of contents
2/ Creating an Assignment activity
3/ How to submit an assignment
Prerequisites
Before you can use the Assignment submission feature with the Nudgis tools, you need to install three UbiCast plugins for Moodle. The three plugins in question are absolutely essential for assignment submission, but we strongly recommend that you install all the plugins for optimum use of our solutions on Moodle.
Activities plugin : Download
Installing this module is a prerequisite before installing the other UbiCast plugins for Moodle
Allows you to add videos hosted on your Nudgis directly from Moodle:
TinyMCE button plugin : Download
Adds a new button in the TinyMCE toolbar that makes it easy to add a Nudgis video to a text field (if you are using a version of Moodle prior to 5.0, you can also use the Atto text editor button) :
Ad-Hoc filter plugin for the TinyMCE or Atto button plugin: Download
Enables the activation of three functions linked to Nudgis content added with the UbiCast button on the TinyMCE or Atto toolbar: assignment submission, playlist creation and course duplication:
Assignment submission
Playlists creation
Course duplication
To find out more about the other UbiCast plugins for Moodle, how to configure and how to use them, we recommend that you read the articles in the Moodle section of our Help Center
Creating an Assignment activity
Once the plugins have been installed and configured, go to your Moodle course and select ‘Add an activity or resource’, then ‘Assignment’:
Once you are on the activity page, give your assignment a title, then open the ‘Submission types’ section and tick the ‘Online text’ option:
This step is essential to be able to use the text field to answer the Assignment, and therefore to be able to use the TinyMCE button
You can also give the Assignment a description and/or instructions, make other settings, but only the title and activation of the ‘Online text’ option are required to be able to use the TinyMCE button.
Once your activity has been set up, click on ‘Save and display’ to check the rendering:
Your Assignment activity is now ready to be used with the TinyMCE button to allow your students to record or add a video response to the topic. Let's look at how to do this from the student's point of view.
How to submit an assignment
When the student clicks on “Add submission”, they are taken to the assignment submission area:
Using the button, students can either attach a file from their workstation, record a video using WebStudio or upload one from Nudgis :
The media is then added as a text character in the editable field. All the student has to do is save to submit the assignment:
Once submitted, the student can edit the video, i.e. cut it out, rename it, add or remove slides, etc... They can also delete or modify their work. These last two options are inherent to Moodle and cannot be modified by UbiCast:
Deleting destroys the submitted assignment and allows the student to add a new one. Modifying allows the student to re-enter the assignment and change some or all of the answer elements. For example, the student can delete the video inserted in the text field and select a new one. These two options disappear once the assignment deadline has been reached.
It is possible to lock editing of the video (and editing only), using the ‘Remove editing permission after inserting media’ option in the permissions profile of the relevant LTI role in Nudgis.
This option is only available in Nudgis version 13.2.0 and later. New portals will have the option ticked by default, but it will need to be activated for other platforms
To do this, go to the LTI profile permissions page by following Admin->Authentication Settings and Services->LTI, and scroll down the page to the ‘Permissions profiles for LTI roles’ section, then click ‘permissions profiles edition’. You will be redirected to the "Profiles for : LTI Roles". Each permissions profile associated with each role can be accessed by clicking on ‘Edit’. It is in the profile that you can activate the ‘Remove editing permission after inserting media’ option, which prevents a role from retouching its media once it has been submitted. Typically, this option is reserved for the Student, or Learner, role:
If the option is enabled, the student will see a pop-up window displaying their media in the Nudgis player at the time of selection, will be able to edit it, and then check the rendering before submitting it:
When the student presses the ‘Submit’ button, a message appears informing them that the submission is final and that they will no longer be able to modify their work:
Once submitted, the video can no longer be edited by the student:
Deletion and modification are always possible until the time limit for the assignment has expired. If a student deletes an assignment and submits a new one, or modifies their assignment to remove their video from the text field and add a new one, the previous assignment will be overwritten in Moodle and only the latest submission will be available. However, in Nudgis, all videos submitted by the student will be visible in the dedicated repository channel.
After submission
Once the first submission has been made, the corresponding video is sent to a channel created automatically for the course. A parent channel appears at the root called ‘LTI assignments’, which contains sub-channels corresponding to the different courses in which assignments have been set up using UbiCast tools:
If several assignments are created in the same course, the videos will all be redirected to the sub-channel corresponding to the course. The results should be sorted using the search filters
Each piece of work submitted can be examined and assessed by the teacher from Moodle :
By clicking on ‘View all submissions’, the examiner can see all the work submitted via a summary table giving a range of information:
The user can retrieve the ID of each submitter for each assignment, find out the status, the date submitted/last modified, grade each assignment, filter them by status and various other options, as well as perform a series of actions for multiple selection, ranging from blocking the submission of assignments to granting an extension. To find out more about the Assignment features in Moodle, you can consult this tutorial
Posted videos can be viewed from the list, and all the features of the Nudgis rich media player are available, as well as media editing:
You can also open each submissions individually, again with access to editing and the player's features:
This table is more a summary of the submissions than anything, although you can assess the work from this page. However, starting from the assignment page, the “Grade” button allows you to grade each submission one after the other, in the order in which they were submitted.
On the Nudgis side, as we explained in the previous chapter, a channel is created for each course containing at least one Assignment activity. The channel is automatically created when the first submission is made, but, as we saw above, if two Assignments are placed in the same course, the answers for both will be redirected to the same channel.
When a video is submitted, it is actually created in the student's personal channel. The one posted in the channel corresponding to the assignment is a copy of this “original” media. Resources are shared between the two videos, which saves storage space. The media corresponding to the assignments submitted, i.e. the copies of the ‘originals’, will display this symbol in their title:
To ensure that the process runs smoothly and is well managed, it is essential that students have the right to have a personal channel
If a student submits several videos for the same assignment, for example by deleting their first submission in the activity to record a new answer, the latest media will replace the previous one in Moodle. In Nudgis, however, all the videos submitted will be present in the assignment channel. Duplicates, as well as any obsolete videos, will have to be cleaned up by a user with deletion rights, such as the teacher, or an administrator. An Nudgis API script "mass delete" can be used to delete media "en masse" if necessary.
The teacher who created the assignment has access and editing rights to the corresponding channel, and full rights to the media contained in it
This brings us to the end of this article, which we hope will have enabled you to discover all the subtleties of Moodle assignment submission using UbiCast tools. Don't hesitate to test your version of the workflow presented to adapt it to your needs, to ask us for assistance on our support platform in case of difficulty, and to share your impressions or ideas for improvement with us on community.ubicast.eu!
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