Create, Collect and Grade Assignments

Overview: With Blackboard Assignments, students electronically view and submit assignments in one place, and submitted assignments are stored in one single location.

With Blackboard Assignments, you’ll be able to:

• stop using email to send and receive assignments.
• collect and download all submitted assignments in one packaged folder.
• get a date/time stamp of submitted assignments.
• easily add, send, and store grades and comments.

Action: To add an assignment in Assignments (or any other content area), go to the page where you want to add the assignment. You must add the assignment before students can submit.

1. In the upper right corner of the page, make sure Edit Mode is ON, or click to turn it ON:

2. Under Assessments, select Assignment:

3. Provide a name for the assignment, enter your instructions, attach relevant files, select the points possible, and select Availability, Due Dates and Recipients settings, and click Submit. Your assignment is now posted and visible to students:

You and your students should now see the assignment. Students simply click on the assignment name to submit their work.

You won’t receive notification when students submit assignments through Blackboard. Their submissions are automatically stored in the Grade Center, which you should periodically check.

Action: Collect student submissions from the Grade Center (in the Control Panel).

1. Open the Full Grade Center (Grade Center area in the Control Panel):

2. Scroll through to locate the assignment, click the arrow next to the assignment name, and select Assignment File Download:

3. If you have more than one page of students, click Show All on the bottom right of the page to see all the students listed on the same page. Then check the box next to Name to select all the students who have submitted their work, and click Submit:

4. Click the Download assignments now link and save the .zip file to the desired location on your computer:

5. The assignments are now stored on your computer. Close or minimize Blackboard, and go to where you saved the zip file. Double-click to open the “gradebook…” folder. The folder will typically contain two files per student submission (file names include the students’ usernames for easy identification):

• their attached submission in MS Word, Excel, etc., and
• a text file produced by Blackboard that contains submission information and student comments.

Note: The Assignment File Cleanup function, which can be accessed directly below Assignment File Download, allows instructors to select students and delete files associated with their submissions.

Action: You can also view, grade, and annotate assignment submissions directly within the Grade Center, without needing to first download the submissions. This is referred to as “in-line” assignment grading.

In the Grade Center, selecting a student’s submission attempt provides an online “quick view”, so you no longer need to download a student’s paper to read, mark it up, and grade it!

1. For each student submission, hover over the submission entry (! indicates an ungraded submission), click the drop-down arrow, and select the desired submission attempt:

2. The contents of the submission will appear in the viewer window:

3. Select from the following options to zoom in or out, comment, or download the work to your computer:

Example of instructor mark ups and comments, which can then be seen by the student:

4. When you are finished, input your score in the Grade box along with feedback in the Comments box, and click Submit.