G’day everyone,
Moodle 5.0 landed with a brilliant enhancement: a core late-submission penalty framework with it being applied to Assignments. For many of us this promises to replace spreadsheets and manual grade tweaks with a single, transparent workflow – a win for academics and students alike.
But the feature was described as stage 1 of a broader framework. The moment we look beyond Assignments we run into familiar roadblocks:
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Most other activities expose only one “Close” date (or none at all), so they can’t record an “accepted-but-late” state.
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Naming conventions for time fields differ between modules, and new plugins keep inventing their own.
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Without consistent data, cross-activity tools – late penalties now, other frameworks tomorrow – have nowhere stable to plug in.
Where to next?
Rather than patch each module ad-hoc, could we take a more strategic path and standardise the way every Moodle activity handles time-based states?
Is “Due Date” + “Cut-off Date” (Assignment’s pattern) sufficient for all activities, would that mean we could potentially retire the "expected completion date"?
Keen to hear your thoughts, experiences and any existing Tracker links we can rally around. Is this work already underway?
Cheers,
Trev