Development:Assignment development
Template:Moodle 2.0 This is a proposition of Assignment module development from Volgograd State Technical University. I see no reason in keeping it as a separate module thanks to truoble of backporting any fixes/improvments done in assignment. There is no reason to make it an assignment plugin, as we will need a copy of each of the current plugins (online, offline etc) for it.
Refactoring
New Features
Workgroups
One main assumption in the assignment module is need to be eliminated is "one user=one submission=one grade". The quite common practice is grouped assignments, where students can work in small groups on a task. So we need a workgroup support there. (Well, quite big work as many functions use this assumption).
Workgroup is a group of students whose work will results in one submission. Workgroups features:
- teacher can define a minimum and maximum number of students in the group
- self-organisation (with possibility of confirmation by teacher) or forced by teacher groups
- maximum date of groups membership editing
- individual grading or per-group grading
- maybe 'roles' of people in group (either teacher or student defined), that explains who will do what (not obvious in case of variable length groups)
Individual tasks
User interface - tabs
Currently assignment have only two main pages: intro/submit (view.php) and grading (submission.php), so it can go away with the link in upper right corner.
New features will require more pages, so it's better to use tabs for them:
- info/submit - as usual
- grading (teacher only) - as usual
- tasks - if individual tasks selection used, user selects, teacher can add/edit/delete tasks there
- workgroups - if individual tasks and/or workgroups used - list all existing workgroups (users if individual tasks only), their tasks and status
Plugins capabilities enhancement
- plugins can define their own tabs
- tabs can be implemented as classes
- tabs can be implemented as functions
- maybe plugins can add a columns to the grading table
maybe One user can get several tasks
That needs further discussion. It's something not very uncommon in real word teaching, but somewhat difficult to cope with "one course module=one grade" thing.
