 Designing assessments that have open-ended solutions, or more than one solution, means that there is no one correct answer, so it encourages students to be individual and to avoid breaches of academic integrity. When there is no one correct answer, it is very difficult for a student to source someone else's work. Instead, students can approach their assessment in an individual and creative way. Combining this approach with the provision of formative feedback can be particularly useful as students can receive guidance on how to develop their individual open-ended solution. Let's look at how you might do this by taking DCU's virtual learning environment loop as an example. There are a number of activities in loop that allow students to create content that teachers can review and comment upon. You could use a forum or the glossary activity, but we're going to look at the database activity and how you can use it to provide formative feedback on an open-ended assessment. The database activity allows teachers and students to build, display, and search a bank of entries on a certain topic or for a certain purpose. These entries can include files, images, links, text, and more. They can be moderated before approval, comment upon, and rated. In this way, we can ask students to create an entry in the database about their approach to the open-ended assessment, and the teacher can rate it and comment on it to give feedback. On your loop course page, click Turn Editing On, Add an Activity or Resource, and select Database. Use the name and description fields to give a title for this activity and instructions to students as to what they should do. There are a number of settings in the Entries area. In the Approval Required drop-down menu, you can choose whether or not to moderate or approve entries before they become visible to all students or whether they are visible to all automatically once created. If you set this to Yes and then never actually approve the entries, they will stay private between the student and teacher. That's the approach I'm going to take. I'm also going to allow comments on entries. If entries were visible to all students, you could require a student to engage with a certain number of entries before creating their own. You can also limit the number of entries a student can create. In this case, I'm going to limit it to one. In the Availability area, you can choose to restrict access to the database to a certain period. In Ratings, I want to enable the rating of database entries so I can indicate to students how well developed their open-ended assessment is. I'm going to select Average of Ratings, and I'm going to use a grading scale rather than a numerical mark to give to students. One of the scales available to me is acceptable, good, very good. You can also use activity completion to indicate to students that they are deemed to have completed this task if they either view the activity, receive a grade from the activity, and create at least one entry. Click Save and return to course when finished. The database is now available on the course page, but there is no structure within it. We need to define certain fields within the database so that students can add entries. You can choose a set of predefined fields if you have some already prepared, but let's create some fields from scratch. From the Create a New Field drop-down menu, there are a number of different types of fields. Let's choose Text Input first. Let's have students use this field as the title of their entry. Give the field a name in Field Name. Ticking the checkbox next to Required Field means students will have to complete this part of the entry. Click Add when finished. Let's create another field, this time Text Area. Let's have students use this field to type in the body of their database entry. Give it a name in Field Name. Let's make it a Required Field as well. Click Add when finished. Let's create a third field, this time URL. Let's have students use this field to enter a hyperlink to a key journal article that supports their open-ended assessment. Give it a name in Field Name. I'm not going to make this a Required Field, but I am going to tick the checkbox to make sure that the URL opens in a new browser window. Click Add when finished. Now we have a database with three fields that students will use to create their entries. Let's look at Templates now to see how we can settle the appearance of entries in the database. An advanced user can customize the appearance of the database through CSS and JavaScript, but we're going to focus on some simple customizations of the single template and the list template. The single template defines how database entries look when you are viewing them one at a time. The list template defines how database entries look when you are viewing multiple entries in a list. The editor for the single template is currently displaying its default view. On the left-hand side, the field names show, and on the right-hand side, the content that students create will show. I want to bold the field names, and I can do that by selecting each one and clicking Bold on the formatting toolbar. At the bottom of the template, there are a number of actions that will display on a database entry, including Edit, Delete, Approve, and so on. I'm going to add some more options here, so I need to click into the table within the editor and start a new line. Looking to the available tags panel on the left of the page, I can see what is available to me. I want to add the time-added user and user picture to the templates so that when I am viewing a student's entry, I can see the time they added it, their name, and their profile picture. To add these, I simply type them directly into the editor, making sure to put space between each one. When finished, click Save Template. You can customize the list template in much the same way, but now let's look at the database from the lecturer point of view after students have added some entries. By default, when you click into the database, you view all entries in the list view, but I want to view them one at a time, so I'm going to select View Single. I can see my first entry here, and at the bottom of the entry is the name of the student, their picture, and the time they created the entry. I'm not going to click the Check Mark button to approve the entry because doing so would make it visible to all students, and in this case, I want to keep it private between myself and the student. I do, however, want to give a rating and leave a comment. I do that by selecting a rating from the drop-down menu and clicking the Comments link to type in the comment field and clicking Save Comments. I can move to the next entry by clicking the Next link at the bottom of the page. Providing formative feedback to students as they develop their assessment that has no one correct solution is a great way to encourage them to adhere to academic integrity standards. It also links to Principles 5, 6, and 10.