For Teachers and Admins
On the Vocareum platform, Teachers create assignments and then publish them to Students. Students can only view, work on, and submit published assignments. Once submitted, assignments can be graded, and then the grades and feedback can be made available to students.
This article explains the key elements of assignment creation. The Vocareum Help Center also features guides that cover assignment creation in more depth for specific lab types.
Interactive Guided Walkthrough
Try out this Atlas simulation for a guided walkthrough of the assignment creation process:
This simulation was created using Vocareum's Atlas lab type. To learn more, visit the article: What is Vocareum Altas?
Key Concepts for Assignment Creation
To create an assignment, navigate to a course and select "Edit Assignments" on the course menu bar.
You can either start from an assignment that has already been created by selecting "Copy" or select "New" to start from scratch. You can copy an assignment from the current course, or import an assignment from one of the other courses where you have access.
Below are the sections that you will need to configure to create an assignment.
Name: Enter your chosen name for the assignment. This name will be displayed to students so they can identify the assignment.
Group: You can optionally place an Assignment in a Group to visually organize it in relationship to other Assignments. Group placement is reflected on both the Edit Assignments page for Teachers and the Course page for Students.
Parts: In this section, you can add or edit the "parts" of the assignment. Assignments can have one or more parts. Each part is an independent environment where students can work on learning activities.
Parts within an assignment can either have the same deadline or independent deadlines. If any parts in an assignment include graded rubrics, the assignment score is the total of all its parts' scores.
TIP: In most cases, each assignment needs only one part.
You might choose to add more than one part to an assignment if:
You want to split a single assignment into multiple milestones, each with a different deadline.
Some activities in the assignment require students to work in a different environment than others. For example, one part could be a Vocareum Notebook lab and the other part a Virtual Machine lab.
Students need to submit multiple, separate Jupyter Notebooks for auto-grading in Vocareum Notebook or JupyterLab. (Typically only one Notebook can be auto-graded per assignment part.)
Part Settings: Click on a part's name to access the part settings. For more details on these options, visit the Part Settings reference.
Assignment Settings: Visit the Assignment Settings reference for more details. These settings are applicable to the entire assignment.
Configure Workspace: The assignment part setup workarea for Teachers and Admins where they can pre-configure the lab with files and set up autograding scripts.
Student View: Opening your Student View of an assignment part creates a temporary student workarea where you can experience the lab as a student would and perform tests. Your Student View is individual to you, not shared with other Teachers or Admins. Student View closely mirrors the student experience, but it is distinct in a few ways:
You can run through an assignment, submit, and view your grade within the lab environment, but grades generated in Student View will not be reflected in the course submissions or grade dashboard. Only enrolled student submissions and grades are saved.
The Student View workarea automatically resets at the end of each session to reflect changes made in Configure Workspace. Each time you re-enter your Student View after a previous session has ended, you will have the experience of a new student accessing the lab for the first time. In contrast, enrolled student labs save student work and only reset if the Student or Teacher actively triggers a lab Reset.
Student View provides an example student experience of a specific assignment. It does not extend to other areas of the platform. If you navigate away from your Student View lab to other pages in Vocareum, such as the Assignments page, you will return to your normal user experience as a Teacher or Admin.