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Joining the Multiple Marking project
The University College London (UCL) Moodle team is leading on a collaborative project to make Moodle support marking workflows where multiple markers are required, in order to meet the needs of Higher Education globally.
We set out on this journey in Summer 2024 deciding to take a dual track approach:
- Work on a plugin based approach in the short/medium term to be able to deliver benefits to our institution quickly and use this to learn and refine what works with users before feeding this into the long term solution.
- Work on implementing this in "core" Moodle Assignment in the long term as our strategic solution.
The plugin approach we selected was to take the open sourced version of the Coursework plugin developed by ULCC/CoSector with the RVC and the BLE . UCL then dealt with the technical debt to make it work in Moodle 4.5, we then focussed on improving the experience for markers, especially when agreeing feedback, which can be seen in our launch blog post and our enhancements blog post. This has been launched at UCL in February 2026 and is landing well so far.
A key institutional driver is to improve feedback and our NSS scores relating to this, Coursework directly helps support the timeliness of the feedback being returned to students, however this is also a good opportunity to promote advanced grading methods like Rubrics and Marking Guides, and other feedback methods more generally.
Throughout the 2024-25 period one key area of focus for the long term solution has been for us to build the relationships with Moodle HQ and bring together a number of key institutions together to drive the buy-in and legitimacy of this endeavour, this has taken place over a number of MoodleMoots and bringing onboard the University of Bath (UK), King's College London (UK) and Monash University (Australia) as funders of the project. We advertised the project more publicly in April 2025, with the support of our Moodle Partner, Catalyst - https://www.catalyst-eu.net/blog/2025/04/29/enhancing-assessment-in-moodle-the-double-marking-project . Which culminated into a joint workshop between the newly formed Moodle HQ Community Contributions team , UCL, King's, Monash, Catalyst Europe and Catalyst Australia in November 2025 which has helped to establish a solid working relationship.
We have now successfully delivered the first phase of work, Open Double Marking into Moodle Assignment in Moodle 5.2 which was released in April 2026. The second phase, to expand the ability to record feedback separately is well underway and should land shortly into core Moodle for the Moodle 5.3 release which will come out in October 2026.
A third phase is also in progress to implement sample marking, led by Monash, this is also aiming to land into Moodle 5.3.
It is worth noting that UCL is looking to upgrade to Moodle 5.x/6.0 in Summer 2027 so will only rollout the Moodle Assignment internally once a few more phases have been integrated into core Moodle. This is primarily due to our internal capacity being flat out on developing and promoting these improvements in the assessment space, leaving insufficient capacity to manage the change to Moodle 5.x in 2026.
A common question, we get is what is the benefit of joining the project and funding it. Apart from the obvious that if no one funds it, nothing will happen, we will outline a few of the benefits more explicitly.
Coursework and Moodle are fully public and open source available for you to adopt (or not) on your own. So our polished outputs are available to all, you will get to benefit from our prior work immediately.
As a project funder we will make available to you a couple of plugins:
- Assessment Creation Wizard - a virtual activity plugin which allows simplified recipes and provisioning of markers during the setup of a Coursework activity. We are also expanding this for Assignment use cases.
- Feedback Tracker - this Moodle report plugin allows students to track assessments and the feedback for these Student view Blog post, we then expanded this to provide a Staff view so they could keep track of any marking they have, and finally an institutional view built through a data export into Azure Data Lake / PowerBI.
You will also gain the ability to share back your experience and learn from others through termly meetings with fellow project funders. While the core Moodle phases of development are still building up the foundations to allow fully formed processes to take place, this is already available in Coursework now, and we would encourage you to use this even on limited basis in order to gather feedback from your institution. This feedback would directly feed into the capabilities we build into the core Moodle Assignment in future phases.
Depending on how much funding you have available for this, you could either jointly fund one of the planned phases or fully fund a phase.
If you are interested to join the project, please do reach out to Alistair Spark via LinkedIn or email.
The next phases of core Moodle Assignment development are well documented in the Moodle Tracker
In general we want to develop the flexibility into core but leave space for institution-specific logic to live in plugin space.
As our developments at UCL are user research driven, this will also bring in feedback about wider aspects of Moodle Assignment which we are also likely to work on along the way. e.g. Advanced Grading Methods and PDF annotation have come up a few times.