While the LEO Assignment activity is certainly easy to use, there are certain considerations that need to be made before designing any kind of online assessment activity. Creating an online assessment is more complex than simply transposing existing assessment items to some online system or tool see Technology enhanced assessment page. Instead, designing an online assessment task is a unique opportunity to consider the purpose and nature of your assessment. "Making decisions about whether, when or how to use online assessment in your teaching requires a clear focus on the nature and purposes of assessment and on the basic principles of assessment design" (Benson, R and Brack C. (2010) Online learning and assessment in Higher Education: a planning guide, accessed 16 December 2019.

Three questions you may like to consider when moving your assessment into LEO:

1. Which tasks might be best suited to quality student learning and feedback?
2. How might the tasks take advantage of Technology Enhanced Learning tools available in LEO?
3. How might the Grading and Feedback of this task be done in order to provide timely quality feedback to my students? (adapted from Blended learning activities).

It is important to consider not just the affordances of the tool you are using, but consider also the processes in place within your teaching team for grading, apportioning responsibility for grading, and, providing timely feedback to your students.

The Assignment activity allows teachers to collect work from students in the form of a digital file, review the submissions, download them, and provide both written feedback and numerical grades. The work a student submits is visible only to the teacher and not to other students. The student is required to agree to a Declaration of Originality at the beginning of each semester before they access LEO.

With the Assignment activity, students can:

• upload one or several files, along with a message to their marker
• paste their assignment text directly into an assignment text field, adding links, images
• upload audio files
• upload an individual or group submission
• link to pages or collections created in their ePortfolio as evidence.

Benefits for students

Using the LEO Assignment activity allows your students more flexibility when it comes to the assignment submission process. Students can submit their assignments from anywhere they have internet access, eliminating the need to come onto campus for the purposes of putting a paper assignment into a dropbox, including outside of ACU's normal operating hours. The Assignment activity also allows students to incorporate multimedia and interactive elements into their assignment submission.

Benefits for teaching staff

The Assignment activity offers similar benefits to teaching staff as it does to students. Teachers are able to access the submissions of their students from any device with internet access, negating the need to come onto campus to collect physical assignments. Teachers are also able to set assignments with multimedia or interactive elements, in a way that isn't possible with paper submissions.

Other benefits of online assignments for teaching staff include:

• enhancing students' assessment-as-learning experiences
• helping teachers give timely and more comprehensive feedback
• making it easier to manage large volumes of marking and administration
• analysing student or group performance
• recording students' learning processes
• allowing automated assignment submission
• online return of grades and feedback to individual students.

With the assignment tool, teachers can:

• assess individual assessment submission
• assess group submissions and provide feedback and grades to individual students within the group or as a group
• provide inline comments for PDF file submissions
• provide additional feedback by using a rubric or marking guide
• use a marking workflow if you want to manually release grades to students at a specific time
• use a marking allocation if you want to allocate students to a specific marker.

You can add a practice assignment to your LEO unit, to give your students the opportunity of interacting with this tool. This can help to negate some of the anxiety your students may have if they are using a learning platform for the first time. Setting up a practice assignment will also allow you and your teaching team to dry-run your grading processes.

Feedback and Assessment. (2016). 1st ed. [PDF] University of Wollongong. Available at: http://www.uowblogs.com/moodlelab/files/2016/02/Online-Assessment-and-Feedback-handout-ur3d97.pdf [Accessed 27 May 2016].

Innovations in Assignment Marking, Massey University. (2016). Case Study - Using the assignment tool of a learning management system. [online] Retrieved from: http://etools.massey.ac.nz/casestudyat.htm [Accessed 29 May 2016].

Key ideas for designing assessment (2015), University of Adelaide. Available at https://www.adelaide.edu.au/learning/teaching/assessment/designing-assessment.html

Paynter, M. and Bruce, P. (2016). Case Studies: Using Moodle for Collaborative Learning with University and Senior Secondary Students. In: 1st Moodle Research Conference. [online] Heraklion, Crete - Greece. Retrieved from: http://research.moodle.net/67/1/04-Paynter-Case-Studies-Using-Moodle-for-Collaborative-Learning.pdf [Accessed 30 May 2016].

Keppell, M., Ada Ma, E. & Chan, C. (2006) Peer learning and learning‐oriented assessment in technology‐enhanced environments, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 31:4, 453-464, DOI: 10.1080/02602930600679159