What is iAssign

iAssign (interactive Assignments) is a free educational system provided by Laboratory of Informatics in Education (LInE). It is a plugin of Moodle that allow to enrich it with more interactive learning tools, for this reason named interactive Learning Modules (iLM). Bellow we present an image of iAssign, under Moodle 3.6 version, illustrating three situation: the course page with an instance of iAssing activity, a portion of iAssing block of activities, and one of its activity, this one with iGeom as the iLM responsible to increase the learner interactivity with the content (geometry in this case).

The iAssign version on Moodle plugins area is not the current one. Bellow you can find the more recent one.

Fig. 1. An image with 3 of iAssign interfaces, at left most the course with iActivity, the iAssign block of iActivities and the iActivity with the iGeom (iLM to geometry).

Additional informations: objectives and what is iLM

The project iAssign (Interactive Assignment) was initiated in 2009, when we decided to abandon our Learning Management System in favor of Moodle. The first version of iAssign was released to Moodle 1.9. It was the technical contribution of the master dissertation of Patricia Alves Pereira under the supervision of Leônidas de Oliveira Brandão.

iAssign's goal is to increase interactivity in activities related to specific subjects (such as Geometry, Functions, Programming,...) in a flexible way. This means that a system administrator can add new Web educational systems, for reason, we call them an interactive Learning Module (iLM).

In this sense, a iLM is any interactive tool that runs under a web browser. They use HTTP protocol to communicate with the Moodle (e.g. to get the teacher's activity from the server and to send the student/learner answer to the Web server). Typically an iLM is any HTML/CSS/JavaScript package, formerlly was more common iLM implemented in Java (as the iGeom Java).

This means that any Web system, in principle, could easily became an iLM and be integrated to Moodle under iAssign package. You can see a more detailed explanation of iLM following this link.

If the iLM offers automatic assessment functionality, iAssign is able to deal with it. The figure 2 ilustrate the iAssign working under Moodle (version 4). The back image is the iAssign page with 3 exercises, one of then uses iVProg (the one under the green square) and the exercise 1.3 uses the iHanoi (the one under the blue square).

Fig. 2. A Moodle 4 with iAssign and the iAssign using a iLM to programming (iVProg) and a iLM to Tower of Hanoi (iHanoi).

By security reason, only the administrator has the privilege of integrating new iLM into iAssign. Once integrated, an iLM can be used by anyone with access to iAssign. For instance, everyone with privileges from teachers on are allowed to use the iAssign authoring tools to create new activities to the students.

The main features of iAssign package are:

1. the authoring tool to allow any teacher to easily prepare activities to students. Activities can be:
   • an exercise (if the iLM has automatic assessment, it is associated with the automatic evaluation);
   • a test (the student does the activity, if iLM has automatic assessment, the student gets immediate feedback, but no data is recorded in Moodle's database);
   • an example (nothing is recorded).
2. reports about students activities:
   • teachers have a survey (and some statistics) about student's answers and can have quick access to any of their answers;
   • teachers also could download a package with all the students answer;
   • the students have a survey of their activities (including their grades).
3. integration with general Moodle grades
4. a filter that allows the insertion of iLM content into HTML text in Moodle.

Besides, as the majority of Moodles' modules, iAssign can export any set of iActivitis (perhaps with other activities).

About the available version of iAssign

There are iAssign available from Moodle 1.9 on. The version allowing the integration of HTML stack packages are those from version 2.5.00, it is the first version on the "download" area bellow. It came with the folowing iLM writen with HTML stack: iVProg, iFractions.

Download

Click here to download the iAssign package for Moodle 3 and Moodle 4.

Click here to download the iAssign package for Moodle 2.

Click here to download the iAssign package for Moodle 1.

iLM

Here are two of our interactive Learning Module:
  iVProgH: visual programming (download iVProgH and this set of Web pages).
  iGeom: geometry and related topics (download iGeom).
  iGraf: functions in 2D (including calculus tools) (download iGraf).

Demonstration videos

Resources for learners

Resources for teacher