A timed assignment refers to the scenario where you wish to put a time constraint on students to complete a piece of work within a certain time period, but allow some flexibility over when they can complete the work. For example, you might set a piece of work with a 2 hour limit to be completed at a time of the student’s choosing within a 24 hour window.
That’s pretty straightforward to achieve using quizzes, but for assessments that are based on essays or similar long-form writing, it would be better if we could use the assignment tool, so we can check the work using Turnitin and use the marking and feedback tools which are available.
The assignment tool does not have such a feature built in, but with a little bit of improvisation we can get good results. This is quite an advanced use of Brightspace, so these instructions assume that you are familiar with the basics of quizzes, assignments and release conditions.
Process outline
With a standard assignment we know when a student submitted, but what we won’t know is when they started. To do this, we can use a simple quiz – presented to the student as being an academic integrity declaration – which must be submitted in order to see the assignment and any related materials. A new screen has been provided in Brightspace to calculate how much time has elapsed between the quiz being submitted and the assignment being submitted.
Detailed set up
- To begin with, we need to create a quiz in the usual manner. This does not actually need to have any questions, you can create a section and create your academic integrity declaration to the Section Text. Be sure to make it clear to students that submitting the declaration will start the timer on the assessment and that they should take note of the time as a timer will not be displayed. Set the start date and end date to coincide with the window that your assessment is due to be open.
- Now create the assignment in the usual way, or amend an existing one that was created by the Assignment Setup Wizard. Add a release condition so it is only available to students who have completed one attempt on the academic integrity declaration quiz.
- In the Content area of your module, create a new subunit for the assessment in an appropriate location, and use the Existing Activities menu to create links to the quiz and the assignment. if you need to add further material you can add the same release condition to these files too.
- Go back to the quiz and edit it. On the Submission Views tab, edit the default view and update the message displayed when students submit the quiz to include a link to the content.
So now, once the start date on the quiz arrives, students will be able to take the quiz and confirm the academic integrity declaration, which released the assignment itself.
Student submission process
Students access the quiz through a link in content as usual. A link is added to the submission view to direct them to the assignment or the assignmnent brief.
Students can close Brightspace after getting the details of the assignment, and come back later to submit. The link for this will be in the same content area where they took the quiz.
After students have submitted
The “Timed Assessment Calculator” is a tool which compares the timestamp on the quiz and the assignment, so you can see whether each student has submitted within the required time frame.
To use it, create a new subunit in your module and call it “Staff only” and make that subunit hidden. Then within the subunit, use the Upload/Create menu to create a link to this address:
It will work better if you don’t make it an external resource. (We are using a hidden subunit rather than hiding the link to avoid students getting spurious notifications about the new content item. If a student did accidently get the link, running it from their account would not reveal any information.) The link only has to be created once per module.
Now, open the link if it hasn’t already opened, and select the quiz and assignment you have used. This will show you a report with the timestamps for each student and how many minutes have elapsed between the submissions. Where a student has submitted more than once you will see both the first and last timestamps. You have the option to download the report for use in Excel.
Pros and cons
This method has been developed in-house as a workaround. The main pros are that is allows the standard assignment tool and associated marking and Turnitin facilities to be used, and as a happy by-product allows students to be shown an academic integrity notice before they begin.
The main cons are that there is the scope for it to be confusing to students, and that they need to keep their own track of the time as no clock is shown on screen.