Itamar Tzadok

And hence it is never an issue. Or as Berkeley put it: "We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see."

What I would learn from your experience is to redefine composition assignments to require effective blending of existing paragraphs (for a given well-defined purpose) and not bother my students with the unrealistic requirement of generating original compositions/ideas until they start working on their doctoral research.

With respect to students and parents, I'd recommend taking a positive pragmatic approach. Consider that some parents find joy in doing their child's homework and they're doing it for they own sake, not for "cheating". Consider also that some parents take pride in their child's homeschooling, and that some of those may need some direction in that. And there are further important considerations. So instead of signing unnecessary documents of little value, give the parents their own homework in which they could describe how they helped their child to do his/her homework. And give them constructive feedback. That may encourage them to do more helping than doing on behalf, help them learn how to help more effectively and make the whole experience more enjoying for both parents and students.

Of course, if they are not found out and most of them won't be, such approach will only reinforce submission of "borrowed" work as a viable strategy.

I haven't checked if that is possible in the assignment module and how, but I can tell you how we can do that with the Dataform module. If you have a predefined timeline for the activity you can use a view access rule to prevent access to the submission view after submission is due. If you want to lock the submission per grading of that submission, you can use an entry access rule that prevents editing of a submission entry if the entry contains a grade. There probably are other ways to achieve same or similar behavior in the Dataform. The Dataform is a contributed module. If it is a viable option for you and you wish to explore it further, you can continue the discussion in the Dataform forum.

On a related note, being unable to uninstall a set (last time I checked; please correct if wrong) is quite annoying when there are quite a few dependents. Uninstall should allow uninstalling a set in one go. It can warn that there are dependents and ask for confirmation.

It works on Moodle 2.8. Moreover you can simplify your view templates by entering the formulas in the template of a text field and then add to the view template the field template pattern. If you need further assistance with the Dataform, please post your question in the Dataform forum at https://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=8192. hth