Feedback Methods Compared — Candidate 1: PDF Annotation

I have never had a good relationship with paper. As a schoolkid, I brought the wrong notebooks to class; as a teacher, I misplaced assignments. When the possibility of electronic submission and feedback arose, I jumped on it enthusiastically. My first attempt at giving feedback online was to have students mail me files which I would comment on and mail back. Because this was the early oughties, students sometimes didn’t know how to send emails, often didn’t know how to attach files, and regularly saved them in wrong format. Even when I managed to get the files I needed, managing hundreds of emails was a pain, so after a few courses, I abandoned the idea.

Before grading starts, uploaded work is converted to PDF, and this is where we hit the first snag, as not all Moodle servers are set up to do this, and even when they are, not all files convert successfully. You should therefore first make sure you have a suitable PDF converter installed—see Ben Kahn’s article Moodle PDF Conversion Plugins: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. You should also set assignments to only accept the kind of files that can be converted. Rather than converting as you grade, Moodle runs batch conversions once every 15 minutes, and we experienced a massive system slow-down after a computer science assignment deadline when the converter tried unsuccessfully to convert hundreds of massive zip files to PDF! (To be fair, this can also be a problem with Turnitin, but at least there the problem is on their server, not yours.)

Once you have your PDF, you have the normal array of tools, such as highlighting, underlining, comments and stamps. The module comes with just a tick, a cross, a smiley and a frowny preinstalled, but you can upload your own images to create custom stamps (I made a skull and crossbones stamp for really bad errors!).

A particularly useful feature is the quicklist (accessed through the dropdown menu in a comment box), which lets you save comments for future reference.