If I am understanding you correctly, I respectfully disagree with your position that grading and commenting should be separated. As an instructor, I can't very well separate giving a student a grade and telling him or her why the grade was assigned. In my institution, we use tablets. This means that we markup student submissions and would like to return them to the students electronically. It is much better to be able to return the graded file as part of the assignment. Students and instructors both will see this as natural. I was pleased when the new gradebook allowed for decimal points on grade input (as opposed to the integer only drop down box in the assignment grading interface). I was not pleased to find the text window so tiny that I could only see about 5 characters of text! Maybe this is a US grading practice, but I find that many of my instructors who are new to moodle don't even realize they CAN grade in the assignment interface. They naturally gravitate to the gradebook. Perhaps the whole workflow really needs to be examined closely. Are there differences in different countries? Or can one model fit all? I think it is not that easy!! But I am very interested in this development.
A. T. Wyatt 11:24, 7 December 2008 (CST) There may be some misunderstanding. I'm not in mind to separate grade and a comment, this is usual Moodle practice. I just don't seen an examples of using files for comments. If you institution is the case, and there really isn't a better solution, it may well be keeped. Can you explain more thorougly you system with comments in files? What kind of files students upload (i.e. text, office documents, pictures etc), and what kind of comments you make in them (or you add you own files)? Is there a need for separate storage of student's and teacher's files, or teacher file with comments can replace student's file?
If you are interested in this development, feel free to comment there. We have to make new module - Task, not develop an assignment. It will be available shortly in contrib, and I can give you test access if you want it. Any useful suggestions is welcome. There is also discussion if General Developers Forum about this, which you can join.--Oleg Sychev 16:30, 12 December 2008 (CST)
