 This topic is about the Assignment Grading Interface, so this was a new interface that we added for Moodle 3.1. The whole goal when we did this new interface was about trying to make it easier and less clicks for teachers when they're marking a long list of students and also giving them one single interface where they could see all of the information when they're doing the grading as opposed to like a little row of just summary information in a table, so when they're, the reasoning behind that is when they're making the decisions about the grade you really want to be showing them, they want to be seeing the submission, they want to be seeing all the comments and all the feedback and not have anything hidden away just because of the the complexities of a table or a lot of the the way that the old assignment was laid out. So when we started we were working off some designs which were sent to us from Flinders University, so we were working with them, they were initially thinking about sponsoring this development because they really wanted it internally. Assignments are really important to Flinders University, they switched a few years ago so they have a requirement across the university that all their assessments be submitted digitally so quite a few years ago I worked with them in writing the rewrite of assignment for assignment 2.3, this was quite a few years ago but and they're still been involved and we're helping us with this specification. So it was really good to see their thoughts and get their feedback and this was just the initial mock-up that we came so the final one doesn't look quite like this but it does look pretty close so as we test things we change things as we develop them. So first it's a good idea just to see how the workflow for the assignment works currently this is why everybody will be familiar with when they're grading assignments in all the versions before 3.1. So you come in and you have this grading summary which tells you how many participants there are, how many have submitted and how many need grading but then if I'm a teacher and I'm coming in and I want to grade the only option I have is then to go to the view grade all submissions page which is a big table listing all of the students in the course and then you just get this very brief summary information whether they have a grade whether they have submitted and if they have submitted text you'll see a very shortened version of that text but you can't see all the information from here. So then you have to have a second click where you click on this tiny little icon to get to actually grade a student and see all of the information and then this page where you're grading a student looks like this which is a very long list of metadata about the submission. Again if they have a lot of text submitted you have to expand it out to be able to see all the text if they're using a rubric again you just have to keep scrolling down this is all in one page I'm scrolling down here but so we're still scrolling down this is still the old assignment even though you were distracted but we're still going and then we finally get to the bottom and if I had made any changes above this point in the page I would still have to go all the way to the bottom to save my changes on this page so just that one long page with a long listing of form elements and complexity is not very usable for teachers. What I also can't see is any kind of information about where I'm up to so how many more assignments have I got to mark and my halfway through maybe I only want to see the assignments that are actually need grading and I don't want to keep seeing the ones that I've already graded all of this stuff we can't actually do with the old interface so in the new assignment we still have the button to go to view all submissions which goes to the same place as the old one did if we go to the that old the grading table it still looks pretty similar but we made obviously the grade button really much more obvious so it's easier to find and click on if you want to go in that way and that will take you directly to grade a student the other thing that we're pointing out here is a lot of people use that the edit PDF feature or annotate PDF where you can mark up over a submission that previously only worked if the students were submitting PDF files but there's now a process that will run on the server that will try and convert word documents and other office document formats to PDF automatically so students can submit in a range of different formats and that will happen in the background there is some server work involved for server admins to set that up but they can they can read through the release notes and find out how to do that so we back on the first page if we had a just wanted to start grading straight away we could have just hit this big button on the front page and skip that grading table completely then we get to the new interface which like I said we tried to design it around making it faster load fast to do the common things that we want to do and this is roughly what the new one looks like so coming from the top we have the information about the course we can jump to the assignment settings using that little settings icon we can see all the information about who I'm grading right at the top so it's obvious and then on the top right we have a user selector so if I start typing a student's name in there it will auto complete based on more than just their first and last name but any of their user fields so I can quickly find a specific user there's also a filter icon there if I click that I can change the apply some filters to the list of users that I'm stepping through so I might want to only see submissions that need grading or students that have submitted something and that way I can quickly step through only those users then the most of the page is filled up with these two panels so we have the actual annotation interface which is the same as the old one but it comes up straight away now and because we support more document types a lot of the time that will come straight up with their submission even it was a Word document we made that editing interface work better on things like tablets so before it was very hard to scroll around if the page was large or if I was on a small tablet so now there's a specific tool just for scrolling so if I'm on a touchscreen I can use this hand icon and then scroll around in my PDF and be able to see all the content and then all of the the actual form that was in the old interface is in this left hand right hand grading panel so if I was using special plugins for my assignment and they were showing additional things in that grading form they'll still show up in this new interface but they'll be down the right hand side in that panel and it's done in a backwards compatible way so even if the plugin that you're using hasn't been updated for 3.1 it should still work nicely with this new interface so this is showing you how you can easily select from a long list of users this will work quickly even if you've got a thousand users in the course or ten thousand users it's quite efficient it doesn't fetch more information than it needs to so it feels quite snappy the other thing that we can do because that right hand panel is quite narrow we can pop out sections of the panel and make them bigger and put them in the middle of the page so this is showing you a rubric so it works for rubrics marking guides and also uploading files and and those advanced things so we can just pop that out and put it back as we need to while we're grading it works for giving us more room to type out our feedback comments as well we can do that the looking down at the footer now what we can see is that we will always see those save changes buttons without having to scroll when we come in here so soon as we've made some changes we can save them straight away without having to scroll to the bottom of the page the other interesting thing that wasn't in the first release of 3.1 but we we added because we got a lot of feedback is big people wanted more control over this layout so you don't always have a document that you want to put annotations on in which case you might want to just show the the right hand panel and not show the left hand panel or you might not be using the right hand panel for much so you want more room to do your annotations so this little three buttons down the bottom gives us three layout options that we can use to rearrange this grading interface as we need to so we can get rid of the annotations and we can just have more room for putting in our comments and giving our grades or we can go the other way and have full width for the for the annotations okay thank you are there any questions yes yep it you can get rid of things if you've made a mistake you there's a little arrow icon that lets you select things and move them around once you've selected something there's a little trash can icon that comes up on it and that's how you delete so you have to click select it and then delete yes it has been suggested and it's a good idea I know there's some similar things in other tools we one thing that we do is we have these weeks at Moodle where we have a project week where all the Moodle developers are free to kind of work on different things that they they want to that they think might be useful and because it's kind of there's no scope to what they can work on then we get more interesting ideas and improvements one of the things that one of our developers has been working on was a native HTML5 audio recording repository so you could easily just record things straight in the browser using HTML5 and that might be something that we use in future to add that kind of capability yes thanks if you've got a very long course name or a very long like we had one with 101 characters or a very long activity name the annotation part panel covers over the text hide some of the text like you can't see the Dubai date if you've got a Dubai date up there as well okay well that's good feedback for us I'll make a tracker issue for and that'll be something we can easily put a maximum length on the how many characters we display out there sorry it's just for auditing purposes that the tapes need to have the actual whole name there so the text was smaller and it's better that would be perfect yep yeah I'll make a tracker issue and we'll work through it and try and come up with something that works well yes yes the grading history because right now the previous grade for us getting deleted for some reason so it maintains a record of the previous grading history yeah so it still works with attempts like the old one used to where you can allow the student another attempt and that will create a new record for the submission and feedback and when you're doing that it shows at the bottom right hand in that in the right hand panel at the very bottom you can choose from previous attempts and then that will update all the panels to be showing you the previous one I think I did see a bug reported that the annotations was we're not showing the older version when you do that so we'll be fixing that as soon as we can but the feature is still there and the functionality will work soon