Moodle - Assignment Grading With Marking Workflow (staff/faculty)

Moodle marking workflow, a feature of the Assignment activity, enables you to add grades and feedback to student submissions and release (show) the grades and feedback to all students at the same time. Marking workflow will also prevent any grading/feedback notifications from being sent to students if marking workflow is not set to released. Use marking workflow if you are marking assignments over several days and would like all students to see their grades/feedback at the same time.

Marking workflow does a lot more than allow the release of grades/feedback at the same time, but these instructions will only cover these aspects of marking workflow. For more information on the additional capabilities of marking workflow, refer to the official Moodle documentation.

The main steps to using marking workflow are:

1. Enable marking workflow in the assignment activity (if it's not already).
2. Grade submissions and provide feedback as usual
3. Set marking workflow state to released, which will make the grades and feedback available to students

Note that once you have enabled marking workflow that you will need to set the marking workflow state to released to release the grades. If you want to disable marking workflow, you may need to release the grades and then disable it (or re-enable it, release the grades, and re-disable it).

Steps

1. Enable marking workflow in the assignment activity

Watch the following video (no audio) or skip to the steps below: (recommend watching full screen)

To use marking workflow, you must first enable it for the assignment. Navigate to the Assignment, select Settings at the top, scroll down and expand Grade, set Use marking workflow to Yes, and select Save and Display at the bottom.

Now that you've enabled marking workflow, students will not see their grades/feedback until you release it to them.

2. Grade submissions and provide feedback as usual

Grade student submissions, providing grades and feedback.

Instructions on Moodle assignment grading may be found here, and if you're new to grading in Moodle then start with the 'online grading' grading workflow.

Once you've finished grading the assignment, continue to the next step below to release (show) the grades to the students.

3. Set marking workflow state to released

Watch the following video (no audio) or skip to the steps below: 

Once you're ready to release the grades/feedback to students, navigate to the assignment and select the View all Submissions button.

This is uncommon, but if you are grading in a multi-section/multi-cohort course and you have access to other instructors' cohorts (groups), you'll need to select your cohort. In the example screenshot below, the instructor is grading 'Cohort 1' while another instructor is grading 'Cohort 2'. If the course is not multi-cohort the Separate groups option shown below will not appear, so you won't need to make a choice here.

You'll usually want to release all student grades at once and here's how. On the View all Submissions page, at the top left, select the box shown below that will select all students.

Scroll down below the submissions table and next to With selected... set the drop-down menu to Set marking workflow state and then select the Go button.

Set the Marking workflow state to Released and select the Save changes button.

If you return to the submissions table you should see the marking workflow status of each student is now set to Released.

Once the marking workflow state is set to Released, students will be able to see their grades and feedback for the assignment.