Assignment/Draft Features/Marker Allocation

Marker Allocation

This is a proposal for an additional feature to only allow 1 marker at a time to mark a student submission.

Goals and rationale

The main goals of this feature are to :

Prevent multiple markers from marking the same student submission at the same time and overwriting each others grades and feedback.

Overview

Currently in the assignment module, when dealing with large class sizes it is desirable to share the workload of marking among multiple markers. The current methods for doing this rely on process outside of Moodle (e.g. spreadsheet) to allocate students to markers to ensure that multiple markers do not mark the same piece of work.

The feature would add an option in the grading interface so that markers can "Take" a submission for marking. Once a submission is "Taken", only the person who is allocated the submission can provide grades/feedback. When they have finished marking, they can choose "Finish marking" the submission which will allow other markers to "Take" the submission.

Status

The feature is currently only a proposal

Design

Changes to assignment settings

An additional setting would be added to the module settings page: "Enable marking allocation" [Yes/No] (Default No) "If enabled this setting requires that graders either manually or automatically "Take" submissions before they will be able to provide grades and feedback. This feature will prevent multiple markers from marking the same student submission concurrently and overwriting each others grades and feedback. When a grader has completed their marking process they can choose "Finish marking" in which will allow other graders to "Take" the submission and give more feedback/grades. An editing teacher by default has the permission to assign a submission to any grader or to automatically assign submissions to graders"

Changes to the grading table

An additional action would be available from the submission menu and the batch operations menu "Take" for all submissions that are not currently checked out.

An additional column would be added to the grading table to show which assignments are "Taken" and who has taken them. This column would show either "Not allocated" or "Taken by XXX".

If the current submission is taken by someone who is not the current user, the grade action would not be displayed and this row would be read only for quick-grading/offline marking.

If the current submission is taken by the current user, or the current user has a special "assign:allocatemarkers" capability, an additional action would be available in the submission menu and the batch operations menu to "Finish marking" a submission.

If the current user has "assign:allocatemarkers" capability they would have to ability to allocate a submission to any grader.

Submissions that are not allocated can be taken by anyone with grade permission.

If the current user has "assign:allocatemarkers" capability they would have an additional grading action to "Allocate unassigned submissions". This would take them to a separate page with options for different algorithms to allocate the markers - see automated groups/grouping page as a starting point.

Overlap with proposed feature: Assignment/Draft_Features/Marking_workflow

If the marking workflow feature is also implemented, the actions of "Taking" a submission or "Finish marking" for a submission could trigger transitions to the grading workflow status.

Not Allocated + Take => In Marking
In Marking + Finish Marking => Marking completed
Not Allocated + Marking completed => In review/In marking (could be either - should ask)
In Review + Finish Marking => Ready for release

This would require the user has the correct capability to perform the workflow transition in order to be able to "Take" a submission.

Capabilities

An additional capability "assign:allocatemarkers" would be added to allow a manager/editing teacher to allocate submissions to graders.

User Interface mockups

To be written

Database changes