The Assignment module is a summative assessment that allows you to ask open-ended questions requiring a short answer response from your learners. You can also require your learners to upload forms, documents, or videos in their submission.

An Assignment is a standalone module that is constructed from one or more open-ended questions. There’s no limit to the number of questions you add to an Assignment. Each question can have a score assigned to it and is graded on an individual question level.

Assignments are not automatically graded by the platform—they require a trainer to grade the submission before a learner can receive a score or pass the assessment. Trainers can also leave detailed feedback on each assignment question.

You should use an Assignment when you need to ask your learner an open-ended question or want them to reflect on your subject matter. Assignments can be placed at the end of a Course or series of Courses to serve as a summative assessment or can be intermingled between Lessons to ask learners to reflect on topics immediately after covering them.

Apart from formal assessment or essay-style responses, Assignments are essentially just open-ended questions and can be repurposed and utilized for:

The above list is just an example of other use cases for the Assignment module and not different assignment types; how you create and manage assignments will be the same regardless of your use case.

*Assignments are graded so even if you are repurposing the Assignment module you will still need to have a trainer mark each submission as complete.

Every Assignment module has an Assignment overview screen. Here, you can introduce the Assignment and add a banner image. If the Assignment is based around a stem, this is the perfect place to include the stem material.

Your Assignment is made up of at least one question but can have a series of questions. To add a question, simply click 'Add question' in the Assignment module.

Max grade: Each question requires you to set a max score/grade. If you are not planning on utilizing graded Assignments you can just set the score/grade as ‘0’.

Word limit: If you are asking learners to type a response, you might want to switch on the word limit to guide learners as to the expected length of their answer.

Upload limit: If you are asking learners to submit a video, document or other attachment, you will want to turn the Upload limit on and set a minimum upload limit of 1. If you are only asking for one attachment, we suggest setting the maximum upload limit as 1 as well, to prevent multiple uploads from learners.

You can configure your Assignments to control when learners must submit, whether they can go back and edit their submissions, and whether they must receive a passing grade for each question to pass the Assignment.

To adjust the Assignment settings (including the Passing grade and whether learners can edit a submission), select the three dots next to the Assignment module name in the sidebar. From here, you can also adjust the Assignment settings for different Groups enrolled in the Course.

The grading screen displays all learner submissions broken down by Assignments, the date submitted, and the status of the Assignment. A full rundown of grading assignments can be found here.

Learners are presented with each question individually and can compose their responses using the text editor or by copying and pasting their responses into the text editor. They can save their responses as drafts or submit them before moving on to the next question. Once submitted, the module will show as waiting for feedback until a trainer has gone through and manually marked or graded the Assignment.

🔑 Key Takeaway: Assignments are your go-to for open-ended style responses. You can get creative with how and why you use this module, but it is important to remember that if you’re not assigning grades, you will still need to mark the submission as complete or configure your assignment to not require learners to receive a passing grade for each response.