Set Assignments for Specific Groups

Set Assignments for Specific Groups

by Daniel Smith -
Number of replies: 19

Dear All

It would be really useful if it was possible to set assignments for specific groups within a course.

For example, we may have one course for Year 7 Geography, but there may be 4 classes of 30 students all enrolled on that course. Each class will have a different teacher and all the students of each class are enrolled into separate groups within Moodle.

Each teacher would benefit from the ability to set assignments for their group only. It would be useful for each group to see assignments relevant to their group only too, including through the My Assignments web part within SLK.

Am I correct in thinking it's not yet possible to do this? If so, does anyone know if this will be coming in future upgrades?

Thanks

Daniel

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In reply to Daniel Smith

Re: Set Assignments for Specific Groups

by Mary Cooch -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators
Hi Daniel smile It was the "year 7 geography" that drew me here - I do some of that along with MFL up here in Preston. I can't help with My Assignments webpart within SLK because I don't know what that is but as for groups seeing only their on work have a look in the docs for groups v groupings and also here:



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In reply to Mary Cooch

Re: Set Assignments for Specific Groups

by Daniel Smith -

Thanks for introducing me to "Groupings". I think they will do it for us but I have just one more question about them.

When a parent logs into Moodle (with the parent role permission) and they look at their child's assignments, does that list reflect "Groupings". We only want parents to see the assignments which specifically relate to their child (i.e. their grouping) and not all the other assignments which may or may not be on the course.

Many thanks

Daniel

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In reply to Daniel Smith

Re: Set Assignments for Specific Groups

by ben reynolds -
I don't have an answer for this, but it is a very good question to ask.
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In reply to ben reynolds

Re: Set Assignments for Specific Groups

by Mary Cooch -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators

Daniel - parents using the parent role shouldn't be in the course seeing assignments anyway - they just get to see the tab on their child's profile showing the grades their child has - and so if their child is in a grouping then they will just see the grades he got in that grouping. (Hi Ben!wink )

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In reply to Mary Cooch

Re: Set Assignments for Specific Groups

by Daniel Smith -

Mary, when a parent logs into Moodle, clicks on their child's name from the Mentees block, then clicks on a course, they can see all the activities for their child listed.

They can't get into them to see more detail, however, it will be confusing if this screen does not take into account the groupings because it will show that their child has to do multiple assignments when actually only the ones for their grouping will apply to them.

If no-one knows the answer, I'll experiment after Christmas to see how it goes.

Many thanks

Daniel

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In reply to Daniel Smith

Re: Set Assignments for Specific Groups

by ben reynolds -
I'm just following along behind Mary to ask whether you really want to put all 4 classes of Year 7 Geog into one classroom.

The advantage of having all 4 groups in one classroom is if you plan or may decide to have them all doing an activity together.

If, as I suspect, your 4 instructors are going to create 4 different sets of assignments, etc, then separate classrooms might be more useful, especially if you plan to replicate classrooms on a yearly basis. Separate classrooms allow instructors to customize entirely to their liking.
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In reply to ben reynolds

Re: Set Assignments for Specific Groups

by Mary Cooch -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators
ooh -and I'm following Ben to say think carefully about how you want your Moodle courses set up smile It is perfectly possible for a department - geography - to have 4 teachers in it and those 4 have their own courses for their own classes - all works fine but they never share/co-operate/collaborate - and if a child moves sets then they have to go to a completely different course to which they are unfamiliar.. on the other hand, have a course page "Year 7 geography" shared by the 4 teachers - have communal resources (because after all you should be using the same scheme of work) but personalise it for each teacher, maybe giving them a topic section each for their own class or using my suggestion of groupings - everyone works on the same course but not necessarily using the same resources. I think it creates a better atmosphere of collaboration while still retaining space for individual teachers' activities.
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In reply to Mary Cooch

Re: Set Assignments for Specific Groups

by ben reynolds -
Daniel,
You might notice that Ms. Mary and I like to follow each other.

It's always nice to plunge into Moodle -- we certainly did here at my institution -- but I think the real message you're hearing from the Mary & Ben show is that you want to think a year down the road before you start plunging.

At my institution, we came to Moodle after 5 years of WebCT, so our biggest problem was to reconcile what we knew we wanted from WebCT with what we saw as better possibilities from Moodle.

We have ended up with (in my division) 2 kinds of classrooms.
  1. Sections (individual classrooms) for the same course. A classroom for each teacher of Crafting the Essay or of Writing Analysis & Persuasion. Each new term, we make new classrooms (sections) for each course.
  2. Classrooms with groups/groupings within the same course. In this case, we have a Music Theory course with 3 or 4 instructors, each working a different 9-month section (a group/grouping), meaning each 9-month term starts on a different date. By putting all the Music students in one classroom, we can allow not only short-term substitutes but also total changes of instructor or total redistributions of students to the other instructors. This is key: without the agony of moving a student's total record to another classroom.
So, I think Mary & Ben are urging you to think, plan, ask questions about possibilities before committing your institution to a structure that may not work down the road.

Ms. Mary, I think you are up a little late on a school night, if you answer this before tomorrow. big grin
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In reply to ben reynolds

Re: Set Assignments for Specific Groups

by Mary Cooch -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators
I am not up, Ben; I am in bedsmile And I survive on around 6 hours sleep...
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In reply to ben reynolds

Re: Set Assignments for Specific Groups

by Rick Barnes -
We use one course and one shared grade book for all pupils in a year group. Where needed by using groupings we can allow pupils to see an equivalent submission point with different deadlines and allow staff to add specific resources for their classes (often these get adopted by more than one teacher and get added to the Scheme of work)
If a pupil moves from one class to another, eg to an accelerated class then the marks that they have already achieved are available without any extra work (just open or hide sections in gradebook)

Where we have other departments experimenting with Moodle, then one teacher sets up the resources they want (based on their departments Scheme of work) and then other staff often say I'd like to do that....


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In reply to Rick Barnes

Re: Set Assignments for Specific Groups

by Daniel Smith -

Thank you for all of your feedback.

I didn't mean to suggest that we're new to Moodle. We've had it for many years and have about 400 courses (a course for every subject we study in each year group).

We have chosen to have one course per subject per year so that teachers can use the same teaching resources and therefore share the 'burden' of having to produce lesson material.

The only trouble as I mentioned before is that as assignments can not be allocated to any particular group, it can be difficult for students to determine which ones relate to their class and which ones relate to other classes. Generally, students in each class will do the same assignments but will usually have different start and end dates.

When I refer to the SLK, I actually meant the Moodle web parts for SharePoint and in particular the web part that lists 'My assignments'. Rather than pull out every single assignment from every course, it would be really useful for us if it only showed the assignments relevant to the particular student.

I will have a look at groups vs groupings... I've not heard of 'groupings' before.

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In reply to Daniel Smith

Re: Set Assignments for Specific Groups

by Marius Pretorius -
Another way that you could go about this is to have a one shared course - it could be a meta course (in Moodle terms) - for all the classes of the same year group. All common resources could be kept here, including forums where you want the whole group to collaborate.

You can then have the other classes in separate courses. You might have a problem with the gradebook if a learner moves from one "group" to another.

Alternatively, having read your latest response, you might want to keep them all in one course and have a database module activity keeping all the assignments. In that case you will divide them in groups and set the database to group mode. If you have a 'dummy' participant per group, you can enter all the assignments for that group using that dummy participant. When the learners access the assignments database they will only see the assignments pertaining to their group. You can also have a date field in the database and set that to the default sort field so that they can keep track of the dates.

As to where you 'keep' the activities - I haven't thought that one through - but it might be in a hidden section so that the only way they can access it will be through the assignment database activity that you have created.

I have tried it out in principle and this works quite well.

Greetings
Marius
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In reply to Marius Pretorius

Re: Set Assignments for Specific Groups

by Daniel Smith -

Thank you for your feedback Marius. The distinct advantage over using the Assignment feature is that they show up as assignments in our SharePoint platform through the SLK and Moodle web parts. Putting them into the database module will prevent this from being possible and may make marking/tracking them/using the gradebook more difficult.

I do appreciate the concept of having courses for shared resources and courses for individual groups but I'd really rather students weren't having to navigate in and out of courses so much, especially for the same subject. It is much easier for them is all their resources are in one place as it's not really relevant to them who produced the resource.

The groupings function definitely looks interesting. That could help a lot! Unfortunately I don't think that will be picked up in the web part though. It seems there are a number of solutions that are *almost* there but none that do exactly what we need. smile I'll keep searching.

Thanks again

Daniel

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In reply to Daniel Smith

Re: Set Assignments for Specific Groups

by Marius Pretorius -
Hello Daniel

>Putting them into the database module will prevent this from being possible and may make marking/tracking them/using the gradebook more difficult

You only link to the activities/assignments from the database module - they are still accessible from all the other areas of Moodle. However, you won't get the same effect in those areas that you want, i.e. showing only relevant activities/assignments.

The idea with linking to them from a database activity is that you can then let each student only see the activities relevant to their group - when they open the database for example in list view.

I do appreciate that this is maybe not the solution that you are looking for - I am only stating it here for the record smile.

Greetings
Marius
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In reply to Marius Pretorius

Re: Set Assignments for Specific Groups

by Daniel Smith -
Aaah I see what you mean... that's definitely another way to look at it - thank you :D
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In reply to Daniel Smith

Re: Set Assignments for Specific Groups

by Marius Pretorius -
I'm glad you understand what I'm getting at big grin. Then at least you can evaluate it to see if it will accomplish what you need.

Also see this thread http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=135630

Greetings
Marius
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In reply to Marius Pretorius

Re: Set Assignments for Specific Groups

by ben reynolds -
I'm just me-tooing Marius's post. I don't have a use for this clever idea yet, but it IS a clever idea.
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In reply to Daniel Smith

Re: Set Assignments for Specific Groups

by Colin Matheson -
I made a feature request in tracker to allow for an assignment to be created and assigned only to a specific group or groups. This would allow a course with multiple teachers to have common resources and assignments and yet still allow for an individual teacher to have some flexibility. Vote for it if you think it is worthwhile http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-20944

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