Bulk sending of assignments to classes

Overview

There are times when it is desirable to send a specific assignment, or set of assignments to specific classes across a large number of schools. An example would be sending a baseline assessment to all Grade 8 classes within a specific district or a common summary assessment to all the custom Grade 12 classes at a set of schools all part of the same school group.

A verified teachers at a school is only able to send an assignment to the grade classes at their school, or any of the custom classes to which they are linked as an active teachers. Teachers on Siyavula with additional permission such as a Manager, Project Coordinator or ICT Coach can be linked to a Project, which consists of a group of schools.

There currently exist a project for every district in the country which comprises all the high schools in that district. We use this infrastructure to grant district subject specialist the Project Coordinator role and link them to the project for their district. This enables them to view the Project Dashboard and access the classes and reports for all the schools in their district. We also use this infrastructure to create Projects for school groups to enable management at these school groups to view and access all the schools that is part of the group. Even though it is possible to view the report for an assignment across all the schools in a project, we do not yet allow a Manager, Project Coordinator or ICT Coach to send an assignment across multiple schools.

We developed a tool, which is only available to Managers on Siyavula, which allows a Manager to send an existing 'special' assignment to a list of classes. These classes can grade and/or custom and be across multiple schools. This tool can be accessed under 'Admin console > Siyavula Assignments

And then you'll see the list of assignments

This tool only allows you to send 'special' assignments that already existing in the list to classes. You can't yet import your own assignments into this list, but you can create one

To send one or more special assignment to a list of classes, you need to select the assignments from the list of available assignments. All the assignments you select will be send to all the classes on the list. If I want to send all the summary assessments created for Grade 8 to all the custom and grade classes for Grade 8, I need to select all the assignments.

A helpful trick is if you want to select all the summary assessment for Grade 8 without needing to scroll to find or select them, you can enter into the search box the part of the assignment name that is common, which is "Summary Assessment 8-" and it will only show ie. the Summary Assessments from 8-1 to 8-20. You click the "select all" box to select them all. But I still scroll through all the selected ones to make sure all of them are selected and I didn't accidentally select more.

There exists a box where you can copy the IDs for all the classes you want to send the assignments to. It is possible to get the ID for an individual class by looking at the URL if you have the class open. When I open the "Overview" for a class I can see the class ID at the end of the URL

But finding the class IDs for all the grade and custom classes across a hundred schools will take a long time. There is a way to get the class IDs for all the classes at all the schools in a project.

If you open the project dashboard and select the 'class spreadsheet' you can download the Excel

The Excel will be zipped and require a password to unzip. You'll see column data for grade, subject and class name which will enable you to sort of filter and extract the classes for specific grades and subjects, etc.

Where there are both grade and custom classes in the list, it is important to decide whether you want to send to both the grade and custom classes. You'll identify the grade classes by the default name 'Grade 10 Mathematics' or 'Grade 10 Physical Sciences' rather than 'Maths 8E JS'.

If for example I want to get the list of all the custom and grade class IDs for Grade 8 Mathematics classes in a project, I can add a filter to the column headings

If I filter to only show me 'Grade 8' and 'mathematics' classes. To be safe, I copy the filtered class IDs into another tab and I also check how many there are before copying and pasting it into the box. (I do a count of the number of unique class IDs again to make sure I haven't accidentally copied the class IDs of more classes.)

Once you've compiled the list of class IDs, you can copy it from the Excel sheet to the box

and the assignment will be sent. If the assignment has already been to sent to a class in the list, the assignment will not be sent a second time.

Before I send, I double check that the number of assignments I selected looks correct, in this case 21 assignments. I also make sure that number of class IDs seem realistic (when I filter a column to hide certain rows, if I select the entries I can see it might still copy the hidden ones.)

It will give me a message to confirm its been sent.

Updated on: 08/03/2023