Proposed UX Updates to Assignment statuses with Feedback

Proposed UX Updates to Assignment statuses with Feedback

by Haley Koch -
Number of replies: 4

I'm fairly new to Moodle forums so I hope this fits here. We're using 3.4 and I've found the UX to be pretty awful for assignments, specifically around statuses when Grading is set to None. I've been searching around the forums and tracker and decided to propose some updates.

Overall question: should I now submit this to the Moodle Tracker? I’m not sure if it should be one issue or split up into multiple items.

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Summary of Issue

It's confusing to the Student/Educator that the Grading status will always say "Not Graded" even though it's not possible to give it a grade. In our situation, someone else is creating the courses so the Educator is not aware of and cannot edit the assignment settings, so they need the Assignment page to tell them if there’s anything they need to do or not. Both the student and the educator want to feel that the submission is 'done', so the wording needs to reflect that there is nothing left to do instead of perpetually saying Not Graded.

This is expanding on this ticket about the grading status: https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-51776

Therefore, I'm proposing the below statuses that would display depending on Assignment settings (Underlined means this is different from current Moodle).

 Grade: None, Feedback OffGrade: None, Feedback OnGrade: Points or Scale
Submission status
  •  Nothing submitted for this assignment
  • Draft (not submitted)
  • Submitted
  •  Nothing submitted for this assignment
  • Draft (not submitted)
  • Submitted
  •  Nothing submitted for this assignment
  • Draft (not submitted)
  • Submitted
Grading statusesDo not display any grading fields

Rename: Feedback status

  • Not Reviewed
  • Reviewed
  • Feedback not up-to-date

Keep: Grading status

  • Not graded
  • Graded
  • Grade not up-to-date

https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=245852 < Based on this past discussion, it seems we want the Assignment to show in the Gradebook if feedback is On so the student can look at their User Report and view that feedback, even though they'll never get a grade for it. Maybe this can be improved upon later (adding visual in Gradebook to show that Assignment has been submitted and needs review/grading).

Incorporating Feedback into the grading/review workflow

Change the submission status to just “Submitted”; “Submitted for grading” is somewhat extraneous and less universal for when Grading is off.

If grading is set to None, but feedback is turned on, that means you are using feedback as a means of review. Since Moodle assignment UI is currently centered around Grading, it is confusing to work with a feedback workflow.

The "Last modified (grade)" column should change to "Last modified (Grade/feedback)" and should update to show when the last feedback was added or grade was modified.

If you are allowing students to resubmit after viewing Educator feedback, then the status needs to change after the Educator has reviewed and the student has edited their submission (letting the Educator know that they should now re-grade/re-review).. That's why I've added the "not up-to-date" statuses. This would occur if the "Last modified (Grade/feedback)" time is before the "Last modified (submission)". 

Further, on the student view, they should see the Feedback in a similar format to the grade where it shows Date and Who Reviewed, whereas now it only shows a single line for Feedback comments.


 History of grades/feedback

If you change the grade/feedback, it would be helpful to show a history. For the student, on the assignment page under the Feedback section. For Graders, on the Grader page/pdf viewer. That way you can see how things changed after the student reviewed and resubmitted.

To prevent it from showing two items in the history when someone makes a typo and corrects it, etc., it would only create a new item AFTER the student edits their submission (i.e. feedback status = feedback not up-to-date). Then, it would save the feedback for the initial submission into the history and give a blank feedback box for the next feedback.

Summary of Change Requests

I created mockups of the various Assignment pages for Student and Educator view, please see attachments as well as the summary below. Proposed changes are colored or outlined in red.

All setting options

  1.  Submission status – change “Submitted for Grading” to “Submitted”
    1. View All Submissions page
    2. Change "Last modified (grade)" to "Last modified (Grade/feedback)"

When Grading is Off and Feedback is Off - Mockup of Process Flow

  1. Assignment page
    1. Remove “Grading status” and “Needs grading” row
  2.  View All Submissions page
    1. Remove “Grade”, “Final grade”, “Last modified (graded)” columns
    2.  Under Edit, remove “Update grade” option
    3. Under filters, remove “Requires grading” option

When Grading is Off, but Feedback is On - Mockup of Process Flow

  1. Assignment page
    1. Student: Change “Grading status” to “Feedback status”
    2. Educator: Change “Needs grading” to “Needs review” and “Grade” button to “Review” button
  2. View All Submissions page
    1. Remove “Grade” and “Final grade” columns
    2. Add “Review” button to column “Last modified (grade/feedback)”.
    3. Add feedback status to “Status” column below Submission status (does this when Graded)
  3.  Feedback status – 3 separate statuses for feedback workflow
  4.  Grader
    1. Remove Grade section/wording
    2. Show Feedback status at top
    3.  Add Feedback History column

When Grading is On

1.     Grading status – add “Grade not up-to-date” option


Average of ratings: Useful (2)
In reply to Haley Koch

Re: Proposed UX Updates to Assignment statuses with Feedback

by Velson Horie -

I  support the need to revisit the flow for students submitting assignments.

1. There needs to be a formal distinction in the Assignment design made between "marking" (the adding of annotations, marks, to the submitted script), "feedback" (automatic supply of help files as for quizzes), and "grading" (the allocation of a grade to the piece of work). 

2. Many of my students have never done an online course before, and may never do another.

A considerable number of these do not notice the need to submit twice. Their submissions get lost in the system as the tutor does not get notification, they are not available for marking. Everyone involved with the course has extra work finding and sorting out late and missing submissions. It should be possible to choose between two buttons, one for saving a draft and and another to submit. Ideally, it should be possible for the course designer to remove the save draft option from assignments, and have only the submit button. It would certainly make my life easier.

3. The discomfort of new students is compounded by not being able to see a list of their work submitted.  Is  the system, the internet, the tutor doing their job?  What stage in the system has the submission reached?

Thank you


Average of ratings: -
In reply to Velson Horie

Re: Proposed UX Updates to Assignment statuses with Feedback

by Haley Koch -

Thanks so much for your reply!

1. This makes a lot of sense since there should be flexibility in how you want to review submissions. The "feedback" should include both Feedback comments and files

2. That does sound like a headache, it really needs to be as simple as possible for the student. I'm not sure if you've seen this setting, but a course designer can remove the option to save a draft and so students only have to click once. In Assignment settings, under Submission settings, you can set "Require that students accept the submission statement" to No. This works for us on Moodle 3.4

3. Do you mean see a list of assignment submissions across multiple assignments and courses? We also have this problem, where students/teachers have to go into every individual assignment to check status because there is no way to see all your assignments in one place and whether there's a submission waiting. We haven't found a good report to show more than one assignment at a time.


Average of ratings: -
In reply to Haley Koch

Re: Proposed UX Updates to Assignment statuses with Feedback

by Acqua Alta -
Hi Haley,
Regarding item no. 3, and assignments in a course, Moodle supports this natively. Go the the following page in a course:

MOODLE_SERVER/mod/assign/index.php?id=COURSE_INTERNAL_ID_NUMBER

And both as a teacher and a student, you'll see the status (from the point of view of the role) of the assignments in the course. A student could see the due date, the status (Submitted or not) and even the mark if exists.
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Acqua Alta

Re: Proposed UX Updates to Assignment statuses with Feedback

by Haley Koch -

Acqua, thank you for the reply! I was not aware of that page although I'm not sure how to get to it without a direct URL. Perhaps that page will help Velson. We have a special use case where we have many courses and need to see an assignment report across many courses, not just one.

My intention with this is to point out that all Assignment reporting is revolving around the Grade and does not include Feedback comments or markups. However, it is possible to set an Assignment to No Grade and only instruct Educators to leave feedback comments, but this does not trigger the Assignment to change statuses nor display the feedback easily. The page you mentioned does not show Feedback comments, and if an Educator leaves feedback, the student still sees the status "Submitted" and not "Feedback received". 

I have thought through the workflow for receiving feedback and even resubmitting and getting updated feedback, laid out in my original post.

Attachment Assignment feedback lacks status change.png
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