Introducing PressPrimer Assignment
We’re excited to announce that PressPrimer Assignment 1.0 is now available on WordPress.org! It’s a document submission and grading plugin for WordPress educators, and it marks the start of our second suite of elearning plugins that we’re building alongside PressPrimer Quiz.
Why an Assessments Plugin?
I spent over a decade building effective elearning sites for organizations of all sizes with WordPress, typically using LearnDash. That plugin, and other WordPress LMS plugins, offer minimal assignment features (if they do at all), so assignments ended up rarely being used because they were cumbersome for instructors and students to use. At best, the functionality allowed students to upload a file, then instructors had to download it, open it locally, make offline notes, then send feedback via the standard WordPress commenting system. Existing WordPress plugins don’t have a grading system, a way to preview files, a way to manage workflow, a markup system, etc.
But how amazing would it be if assessments could be an easy-to-use, engaging part of courses built in WordPress? Imagine running a course where you could assign projects, view and edit them right inside WordPress, mark up comments right in the document, use AI for automated grading and proofreading, and a whole lot more? Assignments could start becoming a useful fixture of elearning courses that actually build competency and improve performance.
File Uploads and Document Viewing
In this first, free release of PressPrimer Assignment, we’re starting with the basics. As with other plugins, students can upload files from right inside a course. We natively support PDF, DOCX, RTF, ODT, and common image file formats. Our approach gets very different right after upload, where we parse document files, extra text where we can, and give students a preview of what they uploaded.
Yes, PDFs have a built-in viewer. Word documents convert to HTML and display inline. Images and text files have their own embedded viewers. This means teachers don’t have to worry about downloading a file or using one platform for reviewing submissions while they add notes and grades in another.
Text Submissions
Not every assignment needs a file upload. Assignments can also be submitted in a rich text format, with a robust front end editor designed just for assignments. We built a text editor with live word and character counters, automatic saving, undo functions, and more. If students leave a session in the middle of an edit, their work is right where they left off when they resume working later. And all formatting is preserved when instructors get to the grading step.
A Grading Interface That Makes Sense
Having support for parsing and rendering a variety of file types means that instructors can grade documents directly in the browser. Here’s our grading interface:
That’s a student’s PDF upload on the left, perfectly rendered inside the browser, and the grading panel on the right. Instructors can instantly review the instructions to students and grading criteria, then assign a grade and include any comments for students.
When there are assignments waiting to be graded, administrators and the creators of assignments will see how many submissions are waiting right from the admin menu. You can also go straight from grading one paper to the next without having to exit or go back to the list of submissions. It’s easy to move efficiently through ungraded items.
LMS Integration
Use LearnDash or Tutor LMS? Version 1.0 of the plugin includes native integrations for each in the free plugin. Just like in PressPrimer Quiz, you can add assignments to lessons or topics and they’ll be displayed in the front end to students. When that’s done, users must submit an assignment and receive a passing grade to move on in the course.
Uncanny Automator Integration
PressPrimer Assignment is of course fully supported in Uncanny Automator. The 1.0 release adds these four logged-in triggers:
- A student submits an assignment
- A submission is graded
- A student passes an assignment
- A student fails an assignment
Each trigger includes a full set of tokens, from student info to score to feedback and more. With these triggers, you can do things like enroll someone in the next course when they pass an assignment, send the user an SMS notification when their submission is graded, notify the user’s manager when they fail, etc.
A Full-Featured First Release
Version 1.0 of the free plugin is already far, far beyond what other assignment add-ons offer. Beyond what’s above, it includes:
- A reporting dashboard to see key stats and trends at a glance (and users with a Teacher role see records for assignments they created only)
- Full support for resubmissions, both before and after grading
- Control over file size, file type, and the number of allowed files
- An Assignment Performance report to see key stats about each assignment at a glance
- Three visual themes and full control over design
- An email notification system with support for submission and grade confirmation emails
- A front end submissions page so users can see the status of all assignments they submit
This is already a lot, but don’t worry, we’re just getting started. We’ll begin work on 2.0 shortly, as well as a number of premium add-ons that will really take WordPress assignments to the next level. How about AI-supported grading and feedback? Proofreading? On-screen commenting and markup? Stay tuned!
Getting Started
PressPrimer Assignment is completely free and available now from WordPress.org. You can add it to your website by visiting Plugins > Add New in /wp-admin/ and searching for “PressPrimer Assignment”. Documentation is live in the Knowledge Base, and you can check out overview videos on the PressPrimer YouTube channel.
We hope you like using the new plugin as much as we enjoyed building it!
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