Creating an assignment

Creating an assignment means deciding three things: what you’re asking for, what form the hand-in takes, and how you’ll mark it.

Two ways in

From Assessments. An assignment is one of the buckets in the create wizard, alongside quiz, exam and the rest.

From a course. In the Create flow, An assignment is one of the scope chips — “A piece of work to hand in, with a due date — instructions, rubric and sample answer drafted by AI for you to review.” It appears in the plan as its own card, a sibling of the assessment card, and you can drop it before building.

Either way, the assignment is created and attached; nothing AI wrote is saved until you accept it. If the assignment can’t be created, the course is still built — “The assignment could not be created — the course is fine.”

Let AI draft it

On the assignment’s Content stage, the AI draft card offers to write the whole thing:

Let AI draft the instructions, deliverable, rubric and a sample answer — nothing is saved until you accept.

Choose Draft with AI and it produces, for review:

Instructions — the brief.
Hand-in — whether it’s a file upload or a written answer, and roughly how long.
Points and a suggested due date.
A rubric, with criteria mapped to learning outcomes.
A sample answer, visible to graders only.

Nothing is written until you press Accept draft. Accepting turns the draft into the assignment’s description, its hand-in block, a rubric in your library, and its settings. Discard throws it away.

Improve one piece with AI

Once an assignment exists, Improve with AI on the draft card redrafts a single part of it rather than the whole thing:

Choice	What it drafts
Rewrite the instructions	A clearer brief
Suggest the hand-in	What form the work should take
Generate a rubric	Criteria and levels
Write a sample answer	For graders only
Translate the instructions	Into a locale you name
Suggest a due date	Based on the work

You can add a note saying what should change. Each comes back as a draft you accept or discard, and accepting applies only that piece.

Translations sit beside the original, never over it. Translating into French leaves the source instructions intact and stores the French version alongside, so a translation can never quietly become the master copy.

Choose the hand-in

An assignment’s deliverable is either:

File upload — the learner attaches files. You set the allowed types, the maximum size and how many files.
Written answer — they type it, with a rough word count as guidance.

Learners can also record audio directly rather than uploading a recording, where the deliverable allows it.

Attach a rubric

The Rubric card picks one from your library.

Score every hand-in against the same criteria. Graders see it in the drawer; learners see it before they hand in and the scored breakdown after release.

Two things worth knowing:

The rubric decides the points. With a rubric attached, the hand-in is scored out of the rubric’s weighted maximum rather than the points you typed. The card says so — “Points come from the rubric.”
Learners see the rubric before they start. That is the point of one: telling somebody how they’ll be judged after they’ve been judged is not a rubric.

With no rubric attached, the hand-in is scored out of its own points.

Reference

Setting	Where	Notes
Instructions	Content stage	The brief learners read
Hand-in kind	Content stage	File upload or written answer
Rubric	Schedule stage → Rubric card	Sets the maximum; visible to learners up front
Points	Content stage	Overridden by a rubric where one is attached
Dates and late policy	Schedule stage	See Deadlines & late work
AI grading mode	Schedule stage	See AI grading
Sample answer	Content stage	Graders only — never shown to learners

Troubleshooting

The AI draft never appeared. Drafting takes a minute and the card polls for it. If it stays empty, check AI is switched on for your organization.

I accepted a draft and want the old version back. Accepting overwrites the instructions. There’s no undo on the draft card — redraft, or edit by hand.

The total says 100 but my rubric is out of 14. The pre-submit total reads the item’s points until the grade is stored; the saved grade uses the rubric’s maximum. Cosmetic, and it corrects itself once a grade lands.

A translation replaced my English instructions. It shouldn’t — translations are stored beside the source. If the English text changed, the model returned the translation in the wrong field; redraft it.

The suggested due date is in the past. Past dates are dropped rather than saved. Set one yourself.