Group Assignments
The Assignment activity enables students to provide solutions to assignments that teachers evaluate and give feedback on. In addition to individual submissions, group submissions are also possible. These allow students to work together on a submission. When grading, the graders can choose whether to give a common grade and feedback for all students in the group or to grade each group member individually. In the submission summary, all group members are listed individually. However, the "Groups" column will indicate which group they belong to.
Group submissions in RWTHmoodle require more configuration effort compared to individual submissions and offer a number of pitfalls. This manual will guide you through the essential settings.
Table of contents:
- Step 1: Creating the submission groups
- Step 2: Creating the assignment
- Step 3: Grading group submissions
- Step 4: Dealing with group changes
Step 1: Creating the submission groups
- Before students can submit in groups, the (submission) groups must first be created and students assigned to them as group members. Several options exist for both creating the groups (manual, automated, import) and assigning members (manual, automated, import, first-come-first-served principle, optimized distribution based on priority information). These are summarized in the Group creation instructions.
- Once you have created the (submission) groups, combine them into a grouping. For this step, it does not matter if the groups are still empty or if the group members have already been assigned. Be sure to assign only those groups to the grouping that will be used for the assignment.
Note
The grouping should always be completed before the start of the submission phase in order to prevent, for example, "submission theft" by briefly switching to other submission groups.
Also, make sure that all students are in exactly one assignment group within the grouping. Within the course room, however, they may be in several groups, for example, in an LV group transferred from RWTHonline and in a submission group.
Step 2: Creating the assignment
Now create an assignment. Select the following settings under "Group submission settings":
- "Students submit in groups": Yes
- "Require group to make submission": Yes
- "Grouping for student groups": Select the grouping created in step 1 here. Only the groups of this grouping will be considered when working on the assignment. All other groups, such as LV groups, will be disregarded.
- "Common module settings": Select the option "Separate groups" for "Group mode" and the grouping created in step 1 for "Grouping". With these settings, you activate a filter in the submission overview that allows you to filter the submissions by all groups from the selected grouping.
- "Restrict access": Optionally add here as a restriction that only the grouping created in step 1 has access to the assignment.
Note
The setting "Require all group members submit" will only appear if the setting "Require students to click the submit button" was previously enabled.
If set to No:
- All group members have the ability to create a submission on behalf of the group.
- All group members can edit and change the submission at any time.
- After the submission deadline (= cut-off date), the submission is automatically considered accepted by each group member.
If set to Yes:
- All members of the group have the ability to create a submission on behalf of the group.
- Each group member can edit the submission and make changes until they click the "Submit assignment" button.
- The submission remains in draft status until each group member has clicked the "Submit assignment" button to confirm that this is the final version of the submission. Only then is it considered submitted for evaluation.
- All group members will see which members have not yet submitted and may still need to contribute.
Step 3: Grading group submissions
To grade, the group submissions, open the assignment and click "View all submissions". Here you will see a tabular overview of all students and their submissions. The group affiliation is listed in a separate column. To start grading a submission, click on "Grade".
When grading, graders can choose to assign a common grade and feedback for all students in the group or to grade each group member individually. Read more in the Grading Assignments instruction.
Step 4: Dealing with group changes
Over the period of a course, students may want to change submission groups, or individual groups may dissolve and need to be reconstituted. This is problematic in that Moodle assigns assessments on assignments to groups, not individual group members. Therefore, if a student changes from group A to group B, she loses access to the assignments that have already been submitted with group A. Instead, she gains access to all Group B submissions. The grades of the submissions from group A are basically retained, but can easily be overwritten automatically by mistake. Therefore, in the case that no new groups are created when changing groups, the affected assessments should in any case be locked in the grader report to prevent an (accidental) overwrite.
Note
All (submission) groups with which submissions have already been made must always remain unchanged. Never make changes to the members of such groups! If students want to change the group, completely recreate all groups affected by the change. If possible, make sure that no submissions can be made for an assignment during this phase! Combine all groups not affected by the member change and the newly created groups into a new grouping. Then use the new grouping when configuring the next assignments.
If students withdraw from the course and are removed from the course room, these steps are not necessary. In this case, their submissions and grades will simply be dropped.
