The pesky pesky assignment activity in moodle....

The assignment activity is one of the main types used by our course vendors.  We have, over the course of many years, built this list assignment tweaks - as encountered and requested from teachers and students.

The things we find that we want in the assignment activities

1 - the assignment be always avail (no start and end time) (timedue - timeavailable)
2 - that the teacher be always notified via email when a student submits an assignment (emailteachers)
3 - that the assignment submission notify the teacher after a single submission (in other words no DRAFT mode for students) for upload type (var4)
4 - That there are different types of assignments (upload and uploadsingle)
5 That most of our assignment types are considered by moodle as *advanced type (assignmenttype = upload)
6 For the advanced type assignments - that the student can submit up to 3 different files for the assignment. (var1)
7 - that each assignment should allow up to a maximum of 20 MB file size (maxbytes)

 mdl_assignment table values

I have a script that updates the emailteachers,, var1, var2, var4, maxbytes columns in the table - so I do not have to do this manually in each course.

We have a concept of a course master - where all this assignment formatting is done once - then that course is used to create copies for teachers.