IMPROVED ASSIGNMENTS MANAGEMENT IN MOODLE ENVIRONMENT

The purpose of this contribution is to present a solution that was developed to support Digital Systems Description course. In this course the students should comprehend the methods and techniques used in digital system design, and gain the skills in digital systems modeling using hardware description languages (HDLs). The lab assignments in this course used to be managed and evaluated manually. In addition to tedious work it required, it brought about other issues like non-objective and non-realistic assignments evaluation or plagiarism attempts. Nowadays there is a common practice to use LCMS (Learning Content Management Systems) tools for course management, study materials creation, presentation, and management, as well as assignments and tests management. However, most of the LCMS support only the basic functions for assignments management like collection of students’ works with or without timing restrictions, manual grading and feedback providing. These functions do not fully satisfy the assignments management requirements of the course. That is why the new module was designed, suitable for more or less automated tasks to students allocation and solutions assessment in the area of digital systems modeling. Among other functions the module automatically verifies plagiarism attempts, as well as the syntactic correctness and simulation results of the solutions using external compiler and simulator. The paper presents our first experience with course assignments management redesign based on Moodle LCMS (Learning Content Management Systems) using the special Moodle extension recently developed at the Faculty of Informatics and Information Technologies, Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava. The module provides full supports for VHDL assignments. Other HDLs are partially supported as well.