Assessment Task Improvements: Supporting Differentiation, Collaboration and Usability

Building on our last  Assessment Task release in August 2019, we are happy to announce a variety of improvements to the Assessment Task feature for students, teachers and administrators. In addition to a refreshed User Interface, we have introduced new features with Differentiation in mind, allowing teachers to meet the needs of all learners in their Class.

Student Differentiation for Assigned Tasks

We know that teachers want to create learning opportunities that enable every student to achieve appropriate personal learning goals. To support differentiated learning and teaching, teachers now have greater flexibility when assigning tasks to students, including the ability to:

• Scaffold learning by assigning specific tasks to meet the needs of individual students
• Offer extended or personalised learning opportunities to individual students
• Assign tasks based on student level (such as Higher Level or Standard Level in IB Diploma or Extended and Core in IGCSE) 
• Personalise assignments for differing proficiency levels in language learning
• Have more freedom to assign Project-based and Group Assignments

One of the benefits of this update is that students now see only their own assigned tasks, and teachers can only grade students on tasks to which they have been assigned.

Refreshed User Interface

We have improved the Add New Task form by arranging it into clear, numbered sections and adding a new Lesson Experience field to the Task Details section. We also updated the Task View into similar clear, distinct sections, and improved the resource stream so that it matches the Unit and Portfolio streams. Task Resources can also now easily be added through a modal window.

Task Sharing Improvements

We made sharing tasks more convenient by moving the linking of Unit Resources from the Add New Task form to the Task view page with the resource stream. A “Share Resources to Copied Tasks” button has also been added that will copy the task resource stream to all shared tasks. This removes any previously existing resources in the shared tasks.