Instructors can add an assignment to receive student work within Blackboard. Assignment creation triggers a new column creation in the “Grade Center” spreadsheet and allows all assignment submissions to be downloaded at once.
Add an Assignment
- Navigate to a content area within the course.
- Select “Assessment” from the action menu items.
- Select “Assignment” from the dropdown menu.
- Enter necessary information regarding the assignment title, description, and upload any files if necessary.
- Enter the number of points possible that students can achieve.
- Select when to make the assignment available to students.
- Click “Submit” to complete the creation process.
Note: The assignment link should be visible in the course content area where it was placed.
Note: Once a student submits an assignment, an exclamation point icon will appear in the respective column and row for the assignment in the Grade Center spreadsheet.
Warning: Students will not see the assignment if it is not made available to them. There are several options for selecting when and for how long an assignment is available to students; the due dates may also be restricted.
Student Submission Process
To review how students submit assignments, read the assignment submission documentation for students.
Add a Turnitin Assignment
Turnitin is a plagiarism detection service that can evaluate student submissions.
Instructors can create an assignment that uses Turnitin as follows:
- Ensure that “Edit Mode” is set to “On” in the upper right corner of the Blackboard course page.
- Navigate to a content area within the course.
- Select “Assessment” from the action menu items.
- Select “Turnitin Assignment” from the dropdown menu.
- Choose the type of assignment and click “Next Step”. (“Paper Assignment” is the basic assignment type. In addition, the other assignment types first require a corresponding “Paper Assignment”).
- From the “New Assignment” page, provide the title, point value (if desired), and the corresponding dates. Be sure to click on “more options” for additional assignment creation settings.
- After updating the “New Assignment” page click “Submit”.
- An assignment creation confirmation message will appear. Click “OK”.
Student Submission Process for Turnitin Assignments
To review how students submit Turnitin assignments, read the Turnitin assignment submission documentation for students.
Grade an Assignment
After a student submission, instructors will have access to the students’ work for reviewing, providing feedback, and grading. Instructors can access submitted student assignments through the Grade Center spreadsheet:
- Navigate to the “Control Panel” and click to expand the “Grade Center” menu items.
- Select “Needs Grading”. This presents only those submissions that have not yet been graded. Note: Other views are available in the “Grade Center”, e.g.: To see only assignment submissions, select “Assignments” under “Full Grade Center”.
- Click on an exclamation point icon and select the “Attempt” listed or select “View Grade Details” from the drop-down menu.
- Review the submission, enter a grade, and provide feedback in the provided form.
Download Assignment for Grading Offline
Instructors can download all student assignment submissions or can select individual student submissions to download:
- From the Grade Center spreadsheet, click the down arrows in the heading of the assignment column you wish to download. Select “Assignment File Download” from the dropdown menu.
- Use the top checkbox next to the “Name” column to select all student submissions (clicking the top checkbox selects all checkboxes below it) or select the checkbox next to individual student submissions for a more selective download.
- Click “Submit”.
- The system creates a compressed file in .zip format containing the assignment files. Click “Download assignments now…” and save the file to the local machine. Once the download is complete, use a standard system utility to decompress the file; this procedure is OS specific, but typically entails double clicking the downloaded file on the desktop or a file manager.
