IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS ABOUT THIS GUIDANCE PLEASE EMAIL Eden.Digital@lse.ac.uk

Important note

• Departmental staff setting up online assessments on Moodle course(s), must ensure that the Assignment submission link appears in an appropriate place on the Moodle page (where the students can easily locate and identify it).

• Departmental staff are required to configure settings, check that all students are enrolled, apply restrictions etc. and upload all the relevant information (i.e. Assessment paper, instructions to candidates etc.)

About this checklist

• This checklist is a quick reference of important actions.

• By going through this checklist, you should feel reassured that you have taken all the right steps to prepare your assessment submission links in Moodle and to support your students taking online assessments.

• Revisit the checklist once you have prepared your assessment links, for a final check-up.

Important: Students must be enrolled in the relevant Moodle course to be able to access and submit their assessments.

Note

• Moodle automatically enrols students to their relevant Moodle courses (i.e. from the information in LSE For You).

• However, you may have students who are not enrolled in LSE for You for the current year, for example, deferred, resit students etc.

• These students must either be manually enrolled in Moodle courses by departmental staff or allowed to self enrol.

Important

• It is important that students are enrolled into the correct Moodle course(s) to allow them to submit their assessments. Students who are not enrolled in the correct Moodle course(s) will not be able to submit assessments.

• You must also check that students only have either the Student or Auditing Student role. If they have any other role, it may compromise the integrity of the assessment.

Important

• Students who self enrol to courses are listed with the role Auditing student.

• Both the Student and Auditing student roles have the same permissions. The difference in titles refers only to the method by which they were enrolled on the course.

• Any student can self enrol to any course, when self enrolment is enabled (see below).

If you notice that a student has a role that they shouldn’t have (e.g. Teacher or Teacher (Editor) you should remove this role (see below).

Important

• As described above, circumstances may arise where students entitled to take an assessment are not enrolled on the corresponding Moodle course.

• To ensure all students are able to self enrol to their Moodle course(s) and access their assessments, you must enable self enrolment for a course(s).

Important

• It is very important that you clearly communicate with your students the requirements of each of their assessments.

• If you intend to communicate these through Moodle Announcements, it is vital that the right students are enrolled on the relevant Moodle course (see section above). All Moodle courses come with anAnnouncements forum which you can use to notify students of important information. Messages posted to this forum are also sent as emails to each enrolled student.

Recommendation:

Important information to communicate includes:

• what support is available, including departmental contact details

• what to do in the event of being unable to upload to Moodle

• anything else you think necessary

It is important that you communicate any information to your students as soon as possible, to minimise anxiety and confusion during their online assessment.

Information

• Departmental staff are required to create a new Assignment in an appropriate place on the course’s Moodle page.

• In preparing the Assignments link, departmental staff are required to configure the settings, check that all students are enrolled, apply restrictions etc. and upload all the relevant information (i.e. Assessment paper, instructions to candidates etc.)

The Assignment submission link should appear in an appropriate place on the Moodle page (where the students can easily locate and identify it).

Note: Provide a descriptive Assignment name, especially if you need to create a second Assignment link for a different groups of students (i.e. deferred students). The Assignment names should clearly signpost to students the assessment(s) relevant to them, i.e.

• Assessment ZZ100 - 2019/20 current year students

• Assessment ZZ100 - 2018/19 Deferred students

VERY IMPORTANT GUIDANCE FOR STUDENTS TAKING THIS TYPE OF ASSESSMENT
Students must be clearly informed of the time limit they have to complete their assessment (e.g. 48 hours), and the fact that they must submit within the time limit.

For time limited assessments with a duration of less than 24 hours, you should clearly indicate the time allocated for the assessment and the additional time granted to accommodate preparation of the submitted file(s) where required (i.e. scanned images of handwritten answers combined in a single file etc.).

For example, for an assessment with a 3 hours time limit and 30mins preparation time we recommend the following sample text in the Assignment Description.

SAMPLE TEXT – Please adapt as necessary

“You have 3.5 hours to complete and submit the assessment.

You are advised to spend no more than 3 h 0 min completing this assessment.
You have been granted an additional 30 min to prepare and upload your work on Moodle. Please use your time as instructed to avoid a late submission.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you experience any problems uploading on Moodle, please email your file (answers) to Joe Bloggs at J.Bloggs@lse.ac.uk as soon as possible.

Please note that you are subject to incurring late penalties if you submit your assessment late.

DTS Tech Support is available for general technology issues (i.e. browser issues etc), and general technical queries.

See the student guide on how to Submit/upload your assessment on Moodle (for time limited assessments starting at 12 noon (GMT) and any other assessment that isn't time limited).”

IMPORTANT INFORMATION: DTS Tech Support DOES NOT, by default, support online assessment periods.

Recommendation

• Do not enable a cut-off date, to allow for late student submissions. Moodle will time and date stamp each submission and any late submission will be flagged appropriately.

• However, when you are ready to start marking you should use Lock submissions from within Submissions table. This will prevent further editing of the submissions you are about to mark.

Information: We have disabled “Always show description”, so that any information (general instructions and assessment questions) will not be available until the Allow submissions from date and time you have specified in the Availability section above.

Important:

If you are enabling Turnitin to check for similarity, it’s worth noting that it can generate reports for all submitted files that are in a compatible file format. Students can, therefore, submit separate files if required. Therefore, you can choose between two options:

• Require students to upload one single file that combines all required files.

or

• Require students to upload any required files as separate files. This option will save you having to exclude matches based on the coversheet from Turnitin similarity reports.

NOTE: Turnitin cannot handle image files, so if students will submit these (e.g. in quantitative subjects) do not enable Turnitin.

Information: We have locked “Require that students accept the submission statement” to ‘Yes’. Students must accept the School’s Academic Integrity Statement (below).

Important: Enable Turnitin.

• Turnitin cannot handle image files, so if students will submit these (e.g. in quantitative subjects) do not enable Turnitin.

• Visit How to enable Turnitin similarity reports within Moodle assignment activities for information on how to enable Turnitin.

• Before configuring the settings for Turnitin, you should familiarise yourself with the LSE policy on the use of Turnitin and your departmental policy on the use of Turnitin.

Important: The above settings are necessary, particularly for those departments intending to mark online and/or who wish to release grades via Moodle.

Recommendation: Because it acts as safeguard against any accidental release of grades and/or feedback to students, we recommend that you keep ‘Use marking workflow’ enabled, irrespective of whether you intend to mark online/offline. Please see our guide, Use Marking workflow for Assignments, for more on this.

Important:

• Until you have completed the Restrict access settings below, you need to keep the Availability setting below to Hide from students

• This hides the Assignment link from the course’s homepage and students cannot access it.

Important:

• Students who are automatically enrolled on a Moodle course through the integration with LSE for You are also allocated to the appropriate seminar groups on Moodle.

• However, manually enrolled students, or self enrolled students, will need to be added groups manually.

IMPORTANT: To ensure that the Assessment paper file is not accidentally released to students prior to the release time, and that it remains hidden from the students up until then, we highly recommend that you add this additional security criterion (i.e. restrict access until that date and time).

Note:

• The eye icon to the left of the Date information is a toggle with two states: the eye is either open (as above) or appears with a strikethrough.

• With the eye open (recommended), the Assignment link will be shown as greyed out on the course’s home page but students will not be able to access the link until the date restrictions allow. It may be reassuring to students to be able to locate their assessments within the Moodle courses in advance (similar to how students might locate an exam hall in advance of an exam).

• If you toggle the eye icon so it appears with a strikethrough (not recommended), it will completely hide the Assignment link from the course’s homepage until the date restrictions allow.

• Whichever option you choose, the link will become fully visible and accessible as soon as the date restriction criterion is met.

Note: Now that you have completed the Restrict Access section it is safe to make the Assignment visible to students. While visible, it will remain unavailable to students (i.e. they cannot access it until the release date).

Note: If you have students who have deferred or are resitting and who are required to answer a different paper than current year students, you must create a different Assignment link for these students.

Some departments choose to to create Assignment links for deferred students on separate Moodle courses (e.g. a dedicated Departmental page). If you choose to do this, DO NOT forget to enrol the deferred students. Automatic enrolments only apply to current year teaching courses.

Note: If you have students with CEAs taking 24-hour assessments, 48-hour assessments, 72-hour assessments, One-week assessments, Two-week assessments, Three-week assessment or Longer coursework pieces type of assessments, you don't have to do anything. The School has agreed that the above types of assessments already cover CEAs. Therefore, no adjustment will be necessary for these students.

For Time limited assessments with a common start/finish time for all students and Time limited assessments to be taken at any time within a 24-hour window (delivered using the Quiz activity) you need to apply additional time where required. Please email the Student Services team if you have queries in advance of any assessment.

Recommendation:

• We highly recommend that you set up an Assignment to replicate exactly how your students will access and take their assessment.

• From the students' perspective this will give them the opportunity to practise taking the Assignment and follow the necessary steps (e.g. create and submit a requested file format, produce a single file in a specific format (if required), practice embedding images (if required)).

• It will reduce anxiety and help students identify any problems/questions they may have prior to the real submission.

• It may also help you identify any gaps in your instructions.