It is important to keep in mind the following points when creating an assignment:
- Describe the assignments as clear and specific as possible. Give additional remarks, where necessary;
- Try to be careful when assessing the difficulty of the assignment. Ideally, the assignment should be difficult enough to challenge a learner and check the understanding of the subject. But not too difficult, so it doesn't scare them away. Keep in mind the content you discussed in the module and make sure not to put very difficult assignments at the beginning of your course;
- Try not to have too many assignments of the same type and difficulty;
- Use the advanced settings when creating assignments. For example, you can set the assignment to accept any kind of answer as the correct one, for example:
Additional recommendations for creating assignments:
Text of the assignment (base):
- assignments should be connected to the learning objectives of the step;
- text of the assignment should be clear. Avoid using ambiguous wording;
- text of the assignment should be as concise as possible;
- terminology that you are using in the assignment should all be covered in the course material;
- if the assignment text contains negative clauses, make sure to underline it. For example: do NOT submit more than one paragraph.
How to design answers for automated grading:
- avoid making the answers very long;
- all the answers should be similar in grammatical structure;
- answers should be the same length. The correct answer shouldn't be much longer than the wrong ones;
- the question and the correct answer shouldn't contain exactly the same words or phrases;
- terminology in the wrong answers should correspond with the content of the course;
- eliminate answers that might be somehow connected with each other;
- if the answer is supposed to look like a few numbers, put in the numbers in the system starting from the smallest one and increase them;
- if a learner is supposed to choose several correct answers, do not make all the options correct (the learners might be confused by the absence of the wrong answer).