Structured feedback

Assignment feedbacks ::: assignfeedback_structured
Maintained by Tony Butler, Ruslan Kabalin
An assignment subplugin that enables teachers to provide individual feedback comments on any number of configurable criteria.
Latest release:
318 sites
178 downloads
29 fans
Current versions available: 4

The structured feedback plugin enables teachers to define any number of criteria on which to provide individual feedback comments for a student's assignment submission. Criteria are configured in a dedicated 'Feedback criteria' section of the standard assignment config form, and the plugin is enable/disabled automatically depending on whether any criteria have been defined.

The configured 'criteria set' can then be saved for easy reuse in other assignments. Given the appropriate permissions the teacher can also choose to share their saved criteria sets with other teachers within the same Moodle site. A simple AJAX interface is provided for teachers to manage their saved criteria sets, all accessed from within the assignment config form.

Screenshots

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Contributors

Tony Butler (Lead maintainer)
Ruslan Kabalin: Maintainer
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  • Ken Farrimond
    Thu, 9 Jul 2020, 6:53 PM
    Hi Tony
    We really like this plugin and are looking at using it within a UK HE context. Do you have plans for a 3.9 release? Would you be interested in any partnership in developing this?
    Ken
  • Tony Butler
    Thu, 9 Jul 2020, 7:38 PM
    Thanks Ken.
    I've tested the existing 3.5.1 version of the plugin in Moodle 3.8 and 3.9, and it seems to work fine, so I'm going to update the plugin details here to reflect that it supports these releases. If you do find any bugs (with any Moodle release) please report them at https://github.com/lucisgit/moodle-assignfeedback_structured/issues and I'll fix them as soon as I can.
    Tony
  • Ken Farrimond
    Thu, 9 Jul 2020, 7:41 PM
    Thanks Tony, and thanks also for the really quick response to the question.
    Ken
  • Christoph Piel
    Sun, 12 Jul 2020, 12:59 AM
    Hi Tony again,

    your plugin still really helps a lot to keep track of our students. With my previous issue, I am not quite sure if it was really an issue of your plugin or moodle itself. If I (now) understand correctly, by the time a feedback is given, moodle pushes this feedback to the gradebook. With the feedback_plugin_for_gradebook switch set to "structured feedback" all the following gradebook entries will be made with the structured feedback, however, older feedbacks remain with "classic" contents.
    My intention is to have both feedbacks (text feedback and structured) displayed in one gradebook. However, I doubt moodle is able to provide this, correct? I already started to get into the gradebook code to collect both data sources, maybe you have a clue where to start or how to modify the grade_report_user class... If not, I will get into this and provide any successful result here if wanted wink
  • Tony Butler
    Mon, 13 Jul 2020, 6:40 PM
    Hi Christoph,
    Yes, it is a limitation of Moodle core that you can only select one feedback plugin to push data to the gradebook, and this can only be set on a site-wide basis via the feedback_plugin_for_gradebook setting, as far as I'm aware. However, a possible workaround for your case would be to simply create an additional criterion in the structured feedback plugin called 'General comments' and disable the default 'Feedback comments' plugin. That wouldn't help with your existing assignments though.
    I haven't done any work on the core gradebook code so can't offer any help there I'm afraid.
    Tony
  • Christoph Piel
    Sun, 26 Jul 2020, 10:49 PM
    Hi Tony,

    THAT's actually the easiest way... Thanks for the heads up. Although it was a bunch of work to go through 30 assignments, duplicate them, modify the categories and re-grade all students manually, this came out as the best solution to my problem. Many thanks!! Sometimes it needs pragmatic solutions wink
    Chris
  • Tony Butler
    Mon, 27 Jul 2020, 3:17 AM
    No problem Chris, glad you got it sorted.
    Tony
  • Wazza
    Tue, 17 Aug 2021, 8:03 PM
    What is the difference between this plugin and the Rubric/Marking guide option?
  • Tony Butler
    Wed, 18 Aug 2021, 12:30 AM
    Hi Richard,
    The main difference is that those are advanced grading plugins -- so there's some kind of grade calculation involved -- whereas this is just a feedback plugin which can be used with simple grading. Our academic staff wanted the functionality to provide individual feedback comments on bespoke criteria, while also retaining the flexibility of being able to award a single overall grade. A lot of them were also put off by the (perceived) complexity of configuring an advanced grading plugin, using its own separate interface, so it was important that the feedback criteria for this plugin could be defined using a simple interface that actually sits within the assignment config form.
    So really this is all about keeping things straightforward and familiar.
    Tony
  • Pieter Rousseau
    Fri, 19 Aug 2022, 4:55 PM
    Dear Tony! Thank you so much for this plugin... it was almost exactly what we were thinking of during a recent brainstorming time to improve and simplify our feedback during grading. What we had in mind, however, was exactly this idea but to make it a bit more efficient, for it to be similar to the rubric grading where instead of a text box there is a rubric-like option to select for each criteria (or maybe even just a tickbox). Is this something you would consider expanding the features on for this plugin?
  • Tony Butler
    Fri, 9 Sep 2022, 9:59 PM
    Hi Pieter, thanks for your comments and I'm glad you find the plugin useful. We developed this plugin because our academic staff needed to be able to give their students feedback in a scaffolded fashion, but without necessarily having to award a grade at the same time (which happens in a separate system here). This is something neither the rubric nor the other built-in advanced grading method (marking guide) were able to support at the time (and they still don't, as far as I'm aware). Another important requirement was that it could be configured very simply within the main assignment instance config form, rather than in a separate interface as is the case with the advanced grading methods. Although I can see how making it more rubric-like in the way you suggest could be very useful in many ways, I do also feel that it could make the configuration too complicated for our needs. If I have time in the future I'll certainly look into the possibility of including the additional functionality in a way that would be acceptable, but in the meantime please feel free to fork the repository and tailor the plugin to your own needs. I'm also happy to accept contributions of course, but in this case I think the new functionality would have to be implemented in a way that could at least be disabled at the site level, to maintain the existing simplicity.
  • Gary Prosser
    Fri, 25 Nov 2022, 3:12 AM
    Hi Tony - Thanks for this very helpful plugin. Can you help me understand why one assignment grader (via system - manager role) sees the structured feedback text as an htmlarea while another with the same role and viewing the same assignment sees feedback not in an htmlarea ?

    I can provide screenshots if helpful. Thank you.
    Gary
  • Tony Butler
    Fri, 25 Nov 2022, 3:52 AM
    Thanks Gary, I'm glad you like it. How is the feedback displayed to the second grader? Is it just in a plain text area (but still editable) or can it not be edited at all? And on which page is this: the grading table or individual grading pages?
  • Xuan An
    Mon, 3 Apr 2023, 8:19 PM
    Hi Tony, is there a way to force markers have to leave feedback for all criteria before saving mark?
  • Tony Butler
    Mon, 3 Apr 2023, 9:17 PM
    Hi Xuan, I don't think there is, unfortunately. I'm not sure it's possible to make HTML editor fields mandatory at all, as they often seem to be created with default HTML formatting elements, which I guess would be regarded as content.
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