Create a course assignment

What CoCalc assignments are for

CoCalc courses distribute computational work into student projects. Students do not need a separate submission step: instructors assign files, students work in their projects, and instructors collect the results.

Create an assignment

1. Open a course file.
2. Add or select students.
3. Create an assignment from files in the instructor project.
4. Assign it to student projects.
5. Collect, grade, return, or peer grade as needed.

For notebooks, use nbgrader when you need automated grading cells and structured feedback.

Update an assignment after students have started

After an assignment has been sent once, use Send Selected Files for ordinary fixes. Select the files or folders that changed, then send only those paths to student projects.

By default, selected-file updates target only students who already received the assignment. Check the option to include students who have not received it yet.

Existing student files are skipped by default and count as successful. This is the safest way to add a new file or folder without touching student work.

Use overwrite only when you intentionally want to replace existing student files. Students and instructors can usually recover earlier versions with TimeTravel, but avoiding accidental overwrite is better.

Selecting all files in Send Selected Files is the safe replacement for "assign again". It makes the target paths explicit and keeps overwrite as a separate choice.

What makes this different from an LMS

Canvas and Moodle organize course communication, calendars, and grades. CoCalc organizes live computational work: notebooks, terminals, LaTeX, code, datasets, software environments, realtime help, and TimeTravel.

Why this matters in CoCalc

Instructors can see what students are doing, help in realtime, recover mistakes, configure a shared runtime image, and run a course where the computational environment is part of the assignment instead of a prerequisite.