Teachers: managing notebook assignments with moodle

This page describes how teachers can manage notebook-based assignments in moodle, which involves the following phases:

1. Phase 1: Creating and sharing a notebook assignment
2. Phase 2: Collecting students’ notebook submissions

A separate page presents how students can use a notebook-based assignment in moodle (retrieve an assignment and create a submission).
 

  

In these two phases, moodle and noto exchange zipped folders, which are copied from one platform to the other:

• Phase 1 will copy assignment material from noto to moodle so that students can retrieve it.
• Phase 2 will copy students’ submissions from moodle to noto, where you can execute them.

Phase 1: Creating and sharing a notebook assignment

We strongly recommend that you prepare the notebook for your assignment on noto to ensure that:

• The required libraries are installed on the platform
• The resource requirements (RAM in particular) are compatible with what is available on noto (check the information on this page).

Once you have finalized your resources on noto:

1. Go to the moodle page of your course
2. Add an assignment: click on “add an activity or resource” then select “Assignment”.
   
    
3. Provide an assignment name, an eventual description and configure the availability of the assignment, as you would normally do for any moodle assignment.
   
   
4. In the “Submission types” part, tick the box “Jupyter Notebooks”.
   👉 This will allow students to submit notebooks from their noto workspace on this assignment.
   Note: deselect the other submission types (unless you need them too, of course).
    
   Option 1 – If you want to provide students with a pre-existing notebook (and/or other files such as a dataset, etc.):
   1. Make sure that the notebook (and other material you want to share) is stored in a folder in your noto workspace.
   2. In the “Source folder” section, select the folder in your noto workspace that contains the material from the assignment
      
   3. Provide a meaningful name in the “Assignment name” field.
      👉 The folder you have selected will get zipped, renamed with the “Assignment name” provided and uploaded onto moodle, which will allow students to retrieve it in the assignment.
       
   
   Option 2 – If you want to create an “empty” assignment where you do not provide students with any material (i.e. students will create a notebook from scratch by themselves and submit it to you), do not select any folder from the noto directory tree so that the “Source Folder” textbox remains empty.
   
   
   
5. In the “Feedback types”, tick the boxes “Feedback comments”, “Jupyter Notebooks” and “Offline Grading Worksheet”.
   👉 These settings will allow you to upload students’ notebooks to your noto workspace, to upload grades back to moodle using a CSV or Excel file and to provide students with feedback in the form of comments or notebooks.
   Note: deselect other feedback types (unless you need them too, of course).
   
    
6. Configure the other parameters according to your needs, then click on “Save and return to course”, the assignment now appears on the moodle page of your course.

You can now share the assignment with students.

Phase 2: Collecting students’ submission

In this step you have two possibilities:

1. Retrieve the submission of a single student.
2. Retrieve the submissions of all (or several) students at the same time (bulk action).

We indicate how to proceed for each possibility below.

Retrieving the submission of a single student

1. On the moodle page of your course, click on the assignment name to display the summary with the overall number of submissions made by students.
2. Click on the “View all submissions” button.
   
   
   
3. In the list of submissions, find the name of the student then click on the link “View submission” that appears on the right side of the table.
   
   
   
4. You will see the contents of your noto workspace as a directory tree, select the folder in which to copy the submission into and click the “Copy submission” button.
   👉 The submission from the student (a zipped folder) will be copied into the folder you have chosen in your noto workspace and unzipped.
   
   
   
5. Go to noto and navigate to the folder you have chosen in your workspace, you will find a folder named with the name and identifier of the student.
   

Retrieving the submissions of all students (bulk action)

1. On the moodle page of your course, click on the assignment name to display the summary with the overall number of submissions made by students.
2. Click on the “View all submissions” button.
   
   
   
3. In the list of submissions, select all the submissions you want to retrieve by ticking the box at their left. If you want to retrieve all submissions, tick the “Select” box at the top of the table.
   
    
4. Go to the bottom of the page and find the “With selected…” dropdown menu, and select “Upload submissions to Jupyter”. Confirm by clicking “OK” on the popup message “Upload submissions to Jupyter for all selected users?”.
   
    
5. You will see the contents of your noto workspace as a directory tree, select the folder in which to copy the submission into and click the “Copy submission(s)” button.
   👉 The submissions from all the selected students will be copied into the folder you have chosen in your noto workspace and unzipped.
   
   
   
6. Go to noto and navigate to the folder you have chosen in your workspace, you will find folders named with the names and identifiers of the students (1 folder per student).