"Download all assignments" - How to approach filtering and selections in mod_assign

"Download all assignments" - How to approach filtering and selections in mod_assign

by Dave Balch -
Number of replies: 9

There are a few overlapping tickets around this issue - I've tried to summarise them, so we can figure out the best way to proceed.

MDL-36150: Download only ungraded Assignment submissions

  • "It would be nice to have the option to do a batch download of only the ungraded submissions. (For example, to get files that have been submitted late, or possibly revisions -- although it's not clear to me when revisions show up as ungraded and when they don't so maybe that would be harder.)"
  • No code.


MDL-36151: Download selected Assignment submissions


MDL-36857: Implement download feedback files/templates in a zip

  • Filtering download is conflated with a new download feedback template feature
  • Patch for 2.6: https://github.com/simba909/moodle/tree/MDL-36151-add_option_to_download_selected_assign_submissions
  • Damyon Wiese comments:
    • '"downloading submissions should respect the filters" - this would seem a good idea to some, but would be horribly confusing to others. The intent of downloading the submissions, is to get all the submissions at once, mark them, and upload them all at once. The reason you might want to split it into multiple files is technical (I'm guessing it takes a long time to create the zip for large classes).'
      • I disagree, it's not technical for my group - see MDL-46176 and user stories, below.
  •    At the very least, we have a problem of ambiguous/incorrect terminology in "Download all submissions", as drafts by definition are not submissions, IMHO.
  • Greg comments:
    • 'With some of our larger topics containing around 800 students, downloading all submission files is inconvenient when multiple markers are involved. Generally a group mode is applied to the assignment and a marker will select their group of students to mark when using the 'Download all submission files' option. [Using this solution] The generated .zip file contains only the files for the cohort of students they are required to mark. Downloading an entire class worth of submission files in one go makes managing files a nightmare for the markers'


MDL-38063: Assignement activity : bulk download only new submissions. [sic]

  • 'When some of my students submit their work on the assignement activity after I have already corrected and given feedback to the other students I have to download the whole bulk of assignement and cannot only download the newer ones.'
  • Duplicate of MDL-36150.


MDL-39989: Download submissions and feedback files should respect filters

  • No code.
  • Minh-Tam Nguyen notes a usability issue of recognising whether the filters are being applied, when the UI components are separated on the page.


MDL-42052: Download assignment submissions that require grading for all assignments in course

  • Filtering download is conflated with a new download all assignments in the course feature.
  • 'Assignments in my course do not have a specific due-date, so on any given day I may have 1 or 2 submissions each in as many as 10 different assignments to grade. Each submission could have several files attached. I would like the ability to download all files for ungraded submissions for all students in all assignments. The unzipped download would constitute my work-list of assignments to be graded.'
  • Will be paritally resolved by MDL-36150.


MDL-46176: "Download all submissions" includes drafts

  • My version. (My search-foo is evidently not strong in Jira, otherwise I would have found the others before creating this one.)
  • Some of our courses have very particular regulations relating to submission of work, with penalties for lateness. The final "Submit" is regarded as the online equivalent of handing in a paper to the exams office. Assuming that draft submissions are final could end up with the wrong piece of work being marked. This also applies in some of our courses where tutors may begin marking submitted assignments before the due date - having draft submissions in the zip download risks marking incomplete work.
  • I have some code, but it's not a good solution, so won't bother adding it.
  • Greg comments:
    • 'Our academics would find it incredibly time consuming to have to download draft submissions separately. In some of our larger classes of ~800 students, around 5% of students fail to correctly submit their submissions (forgetfulness, technical difficulties, bad time management etc). Once the cut off date has elapsed, the student cannot alter their submission and markers are generally happy to mark these drafts. Making this proposed change would mean the 20 - something files would need to be manually downloaded.'


That's 7 tickets requesting some form of filter on the assignment zip download - confirmation that this feature is farily widely wanted.

From this, I see these user stories:

  1. Marker Alice wants to download just submissions that require grading, so she can grade assignments submitted after she started grading, without already graded assignments confusing her workflow.
  2. Marker Bob wants to selected and download specific submissions, as he has informally agreed with another marker that they will split grading of the group between them.
  3. Marker Claire wants to download submissions for just the students in her group, so so she can grade them without the assignments by Harry's group confusing her workflow.
  4. Marker Darren wants to download the officially submitted submissions, as drafts do not qualify in his institution's regulations and should not be graded.


Out of scope are:

  • Download feedback template.
  • Download all assignments in the course.


Key points:

  1. Should there a) be a download option in the "With selection" drop-down as well as "Grading action", or b) only have one download option? [I think b), but possibly with changing/moving the "Grading action" drop-down.]
  2. How do we indicate that the filter/ selection applies to the download?


What thoughts do you all have on this?

Average of ratings: Useful (8)
In reply to Dave Balch

Re: "Download all assignments" - How to approach filtering and selections in mod_assign

by Gregory Faller -

Hi Dave,

Thanks for the concise summary; I think you have captured the majority of user stories here. Another suggested user story is:

  • A marker has downloaded a group of students submissions before the assignment cut off date. Several students submit between this date and the assignment cut off date. The marker needs a way of downloading selected submissions. (probably solved under MDL-39989 and MDL-36151)

In answer to your questions raised in the key points section:

  1. I can see the confusion that arises from having multiple areas to download submissions (Grading actions and With selected dropdown lists), but think that each of these menus serves a different purpose. The grading actions menu interacts with the entire assignment submission table (or the current filtered view) whereas the With selected menu requires user intervention to select specific students. I can definitely see some UX improvements could be made to the relationship between filters and the Grading actions menu. Something that springs to mind is the great work that was done to the filters in enrol/users.php:Enrol users filters
  2. We've yet to make any improvements on how to indicate to staff what filter / section of the submission table is going to be downloaded - a simple improvement to MDL-39989 would be passing through the label of the current filter to better describe what files would be downloaded.

At our university, we currently have implemented MDL-36857, MDL-39989 with some improvements to filters MDL-44579 which seems to cover the majority of our requirements.

Regards,

Greg

Average of ratings: Useful (2)
In reply to Gregory Faller

Re: "Download all assignments" - How to approach filtering and selections in mod_assign

by Dave Balch -

Hi Greg, thanks for the additional info.

I imagine that a UI/UX revamp incorporating the approach used in the Enrolled users filter would work pretty well.

Not sure when I'll have time to work on a proper solution though sad

Cheers,
Dave.

Average of ratings: Useful (1)
In reply to Dave Balch

Re: "Download all assignments" - How to approach filtering and selections in mod_assign

by Marcus Green -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

I could not see any structure for Unit tests for bulk assignment download or filtering for that. Has anyone done anything on that or can anyone think of another module that has Unit tests that could be the basis for that?

If you are considering download assignment issues it might be worth also considering 

https://github.com/robhogg/moodle/compare/moodle:MOODLE_25_STABLE...MDL-43815-downloadall-fixes

Which is about setting a maximum file size. This came about as downloading a large number of big assignments can kill performance.


Average of ratings: Useful (1)
In reply to Marcus Green

Re: "Download all assignments" - How to approach filtering and selections in mod_assign

by Dave Balch -
It's worth being aware of MDL-43815 - but really that's a workaround for a problem whilst processing the download, rather than an issue of how the user gets to select what to download.
If we can come up with a good solution to filtering the download it will help MDL-43815 (by giving users ways of selecting only the files they're interested in), but I don't think download size should influence this filtering/selecting issue much.
Average of ratings: Useful (1)
In reply to Dave Balch

Re: "Download all assignments" - How to approach filtering and selections in mod_assign

by Marcus Green -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

I was rather surprised there was not some way of at least selecting for bulk download (i.e. a bunch of checkboxes). 

Filtering for size might be very useful from the point of view It's mid-day the system is busy, I will download all the small ones now and do the bigger ones later when it will not bring the whole system to a halt.

Average of ratings: Useful (1)
In reply to Marcus Green

Re: "Download all assignments" - How to approach filtering and selections in mod_assign

by Gregory Faller -

Hi Marcus,

Part of the proposed changes in MDL-36857 implements a 'Download selected submissions' feature in the 'With selected' dropdown list (https://github.com/tlock/moodle/commit/5d7573106826b0218a1dd317568e78ad65507865). This is used in conjunction with the checkboxes within the assignment submission table. We've used these changes for over 7 months and the feedback from academic staff has been positive.

Download selected submissions

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In reply to Gregory Faller

Re: "Download all assignments" - How to approach filtering and selections in mod_assign

by Pavel Sokolov -

Your suggestion to implement 'Download selected submissions..' instead of using filters and top link has been implemented by Simon Jarbrant under MDL-36151 (https://github.com/simba909/moodle/commit/68c8ce3f1c807fa544e56f280de8e4017602bab1). That fix is extremely clean and simple -- it uses built-in function for downloading the submission, but passes an array of selected submissions to it. I fail to see how this can be done more efficiently smile

Average of ratings: Useful (2)
In reply to Pavel Sokolov

Re: "Download all assignments" - How to approach filtering and selections in mod_assign

by Przemek Kaszubski -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers

Meanwhile, a bit of a workaround is to divide students into groups, and switch to group display when grading. The "download all assignments" function will only download that group's files.

In reply to Przemek Kaszubski

Re: "Download all assignments" - How to approach filtering and selections in mod_assign

by Fernanda F. Ricou -

GREAT workaround, Przemek!

Just solved my problem.

Still, it would be very useful to have the possibility of downloading submissions based on the Students selected (by the tick marks).

TY!

Fernanda Ricou