How to add an empty submission point to your Moodle course

Overview

Moodle assignments can be used for formative and summative assessments to evaluate student understanding of course material within a semester.

Sometimes assessments take place outside the DLE, such as presentations, or the submission of physical work. In order to transfer student grades to the Student Record System (SRS) you will need to record these grades within an empty submission point on the DLE.

With the introduction of the new Student Record System, this process replaces the previous process used to enter marks via Markbook to UNIT-E.

How to add an empty submission point

To add an empty submission point to your Moodle course, please follow the steps below:

1. Sign in to your Moodle account and select the course where you would like to add an empty ‘Assignment’ activity.
2. Click on the ‘Edit mode’ toggle switch and then select a section where the submission point will be located.
3. Click on the ‘Add an activity or resource’ button and then choose ‘Assignment’ from the pop-up window.
4. A new page will be shown where you can customise the settings of the activity.

How to edit the settings

General

In the ‘General’ section, you can give a useful name and description to the activity. In the ‘Description’ field, we suggest explaining to the students that this activity is used purely to upload marks, not to make submissions – this is only needed if you wish to show the marks in the DLE/Moodle too, in addition to SRS (Student Record System).

Availability

In the ‘Availability’ section, you can define the time frame for the activity.

Please note that even though your students will not submit work, you still need to select an open (’Allow submissions from’) and close date (’Due date’) for the assignment, otherwise, the grades will fail to transfer to SRS. Please also note, we highly recommend the ‘Due date’ to be a date in the far future, after the grades have been released as otherwise, the grades would have a ‘late’ tag in SRS which manually needs to be taken off. When you set up the date, we strongly suggest using a future date, for example, in three weeks time. Please do not use end dates that are on weekends or bank holidays.

Submission types

In the ‘Submission types’ section, please make sure you untick all the boxes, including ‘File submissions’, ‘Video Assignment’, and ‘Online text’ as your students will not submit their work via the DLE.

Grade

In the ‘Grade’ section, you can define the grading strategy that you have used for this particular assessment, such as numerical value, also known as ‘Points’, or ‘Scales’, such as ‘Pass/Fail’.

Please make sure you set the ‘Blind marking (Anonymous)’ setting to ‘No’ as otherwise, the student identities would be hidden from you and therefore, you will need to reveal them to be able to upload the grades to the DLE.

Common module settings

Please make sure you hide this activity from your students. For this, you will need to change the setting ‘Availability’ to ‘Hide on course page’. This is essential as otherwise students would see this submission point on their Moodle Dashboard (’Timeline’ section) and get an e-mail notification about this activity (even if making submissions have been disabled in the settings). This therefore might be confusing and so we strongly suggest hiding the activity.

In the ‘Common module settings’ section, please make sure you select an assessment placeholder from the drop-down list where it says ‘Link to UNIT-e’ currently (this will change soon to say ‘Bind to Student Record System, as shown in the screenshot below, but you may not see this new wording in your DLE courses yet). This binding is important as it ensures the grades are transferred to the correct location in the student record system once you release them to your students.

If you choose to keep the submission hidden after you have released the grades and feedback on the DLE, the transferred grades will be accessible to your students via the SRS (’My transcript of results’). You can choose to show the grades and feedback on the DLE by unhiding the submission after the grades and feedback have been released.

Last step

As the last step, please make sure you click on the ‘Save and display’ or on the ‘Save and return to course’ button to finalise your action.

How to upload grades to an empty submission point

Once you are done with the setup process, you can then enter the grades you have given to your students. You can do this by using the blue ‘Grade’ button that appears next to each student. For more information about this process, please read the following article.

Please make sure you also release the grades and the feedback you provided for your students the same way as you would do in a regular ‘Assignment’ activity, but without notifying them about these changes (if the activity needs to be kept hidden); otherwise, you can notify them about the changes. For more information about this process, please read the following article.