If you assign written essays for a course, one of the challenges is figuring out how students will submit those essays to you. You could have the students submit paper copies, but then you need to keep track of when the students submitted the essays to you, and you need to remember to bring the physical copies with you when you want to grade the essays. You could ask students to email their completed essays to you, which will provide a clear time stamp of when each essay was submitted. However, you have to find those messages in your inbox and then download each student essay, one at a time. One of the activities that you can add to a Moodle course – the Assignment activity – simplifies the process of receiving essays from students. Here is the typical process when using the Assignment activity in Moodle:
- You create the Assignment in your Moodle course, adding the relevant information (assignment name and description, due date, etc.)
- Students click on the Assignment link to get instructions for the assignment and to submit their essay to you. Moodle time-stamps each essay as the student submits it.
- You click on the link for the Assignment to download all the submitted essays as a single compressed (Zip) file.
- If you want (and if you have enabled feedback files), you can upload a commented version of each essay back into Moodle, you can add a final textual comment within Moodle, and/or you can put a grade for the essay in Moodle, for students to view.
You can find directions on how to add an Assignment activity to a Moodle course here