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The following is a demonstration of how any instructor can bulk download all student
submissions for a particular assignment. This is useful if the instructor knows they
will be without internet for awhile but still want to read student submissions. An
example is an instructor going on a plane flight where they won't have internet connectivity.
Before getting on the plane, they want to download all the submissions to then read
on the flight.
Note: Before trying this in a live course, I suggest testing in a sandbox course first.
As seen, I have an assignment here that one student has submitted to. I only have one
student in the course because I didn't want to spend
a lot of time creating multiple accounts and then uploading fake assignments. So for our
purposes, imagine there are a lot of students here and a lot of student submissions. Instead
of downloading them one at a time, we will bulk download them using the moddata
folder.
SCROLL DOWN
First, in the assignment submissions page, scroll over one of the assignments. If you
are using Firefox, down in the bottom left corner, it
will show the link location of the particular assignment. If you are using a different browser,
it may show the link location in a different spot. To make it easy for you to see I'm going
to copy the link location and paste it into the web address bar.
Within the URL you will notice two numbers after where it says assignment. You can ignore
the %2F character combination. That is the URL encoding of an ASCII character. It is
how you represent a forward slash. In my particular URL, there is a 68 and then an 84.
The 68 is representing the assignment number and the 84 is representing the ID of the
particular student. For this tutorial, don't worry about the ID number of the student.
Now that we have the assignment number. Let's go to our file server. I'll go back to
the course homepage and then select Files in the Administration block. My course is
brand new so I don't have much content in it. Again imagine a lot of files in here.
One of the folders will be moddata. Select moddata. Then select the Assignment folder.
If you have a lot of assignments, you will then have a lot of numbered folders here.
I only have one though. You will notice that it is #68. That was the number of
the assignment I found earlier. This is the folder that all student submissions for that
particular assignment are stored. If I were to go into the #68 folder, it then has a
#84 folder. That is the folder for the one student who had submitted an assignment so
far. If lots of students had submitted, then there
would be lots of numbers here. To prove that this is the student submission from before,
lets go in the folder. You can see that the one file in this folder is the same name of
the file submitted by the student that we saw
before.
SCROLL DOWN
Stepping back, we want to download all the student submissions so let's go back to inside
the assignment #68 folder. Check all the folders within the assignment number folder. Since I only have one student submission,
I only have to check one box. After you have checked all the boxes, in the pulldown menu
select Create Zip Archive. It will confirm all the folders and files that will be in
the zip file. Name this zip file and then select Create zip archive button. The
zip file will then download to your computer. From
there you can extract its contents (i.e. all the student submissions) and your done.
Couple of notes though. First, NEVER DELETE THE ORIGINAL MODDATA FOLDERS.
This will cause you to lose all the student submissions within that folder and
could cause all kinds of other havoc.
Second, this is a test in a 1.9 environment so I'm not sure if this will work in 2.x
because there is a different file structure in that version.
Lastly, thanks to teclet.com which allowed me to set up a free Moodle course.
For more cool tips and news, check out moodlenews.com.