Moodle Media Collection Assignment

The Media Collection activity can be setup to accept contributions from students. Students can submit a media collection as part of an assignment. These contribution can be set to link to a Moodle assignment activity, where lecturer can provide the grades and feedback. 

The Media Collection activity allows a single student, or a group of students, to upload a gallery of related media items that include video, audio, image and document file types. When used for assessment, student galleries can be then submitted to a linked Moodle Assignment activity.

When setting up the media collection activity and the Moodle assignment activity, it is best practice to place them together, within the same topic/week. You can then hide the Moodle assignment activity from students by changing its visibility to Stealth mode. This will keep the activity available to be linked but not visible for students on their course page. 
Additional information: https://teaching.unsw.edu.au/thebox-best-practices-and-naming-conventions
Media collection galleries and items are not treated as user data. This means Importing, restoring, duplicating and using the Sharing cart will copy all galleries and gallery items inside the collection. This will also dissociate gallery items from the user.

Why use Media Collection Assignment

Better tailored content - The advantage of using this activity over the assignment activity alone, is that it allows students to better tailor the presentation of their content to their audience.

Feedback in comments - Depending on how the instructor configures it, the media collection activity allows the instructor and potentially other students to provide their own comment feedback to gallery items.

Feedback from multiple peers, addressing specific elements of a video, can be quite powerful as students are more likely to accept the feedback and be empowered to make any necessary changes in future assignments. This also enhances their ability to analyse other peers work.

Create a Media Collection Activity

A Media Collection activity must first be created for students to create galleries. To create a media collection:

  1. On the Moodle course home page, click Turn editing on at the upper right of the page Button for Turn Editing On
  2. In the appropriate section, click Add an activity or resource. In the resulting pop-up window, scroll down, select Media collection.
  3. On the Adding a new Media collection page, click Expand all at the upper right and in the General section:
    • Enter a Media collection name and any necessary Description.
    • Choose Assignment collection as the Collection type.
    • Enter Tags to help organise the collection.
    • Choose the Maximum items [that can be added] per gallery.
    • Choose the Max galleries [that can be added] per user/group.
      A media collection can contain multiple galleries however if you are setting up the collection as an assignment, it is best to allow only 1 gallery per user/group.
    • Set Allow comments and Allow likes depending on whether students should be allowed to comment on or like each others contributions.
  4. In the Display list section, select how you want the collection's thumbnails arranged, and whether and where you want captions to display with each item.
  5. In the Gallery defaults section:
    • Select the default Gallery focus. This option allows you to define what types of media are displayed by default.  Users will have a dropdown to change gallery focus when viewing a gallery.
    • At Gallery view options, select what view mode (Carousel and/or Grid) are available when creating a gallery.  If you select Grid view, specify how many Columns and Rows you want the grid to contain.
    • Select whether you want to Enforce gallery defaults.
  6. In the Availability section, dates can be enabled to specify a period where students can only view the gallery without being able to contribute to it.
  7. Complete the remaining sections of the page as desired then click Save and display.

Connect a Moodle Assignment activity

After the Media collection is created, a Moodle assignment must be created to enable submission of galleries. To Link the media collection to a Moodle assignment:

  1. Go to this Moodle Assignment activity page and follow the instructions to create an assignment activity. Remain in the Adding a new Assignment page.
  2. On the Adding a new Assignment page, click Expand all at the upper right.
  3. In the Submission types section, set the following settings:
    • For submission types, check the Media collection check box. Note that if both the Media collection and File submission check boxes are checked, students will also be able to submit files that are independent of the media collection activity.
    • In the Media collection drop down list, select the Media collection activity that students will be submitting their galleries from. 
    • In the Gallery visibility dropdown select when other students can view each other's work (for example, in a peer review assignment).

Hiding the Moodle Assignment activity

The Moodle Assignment activity can optionally be hidden to reduce confusion. To hide the Assignment activity:

  1. On the Moodle course home page, click Turn editing on at the upper right of the page Turn editing on button.
  2. Open the "Edit" dropdown beside the Media Collection activity and click "Edit settings".
  3. Check the "Assignment Submission in Media Collection" checkbox in the "General" section.
  4. Click "Save and return to course".
  5. Open the "Edit" dropdown beside the assignment activity and click "Hide".

View submitted Media gallery

To view the media gallery that a student has submitted to the Moodle Assignment:

  1. On the course home page, click the link for the assignment activity.
  2. On the assignment page, click View all Submissions.
  3. On the submissions page, click on the name of a Media gallery in the Media collection column to view the students submitted Media gallery within the Media Collection activity.