Assignments Overview

Assignments are coursework that is assigned to a group of students in a class. Assignments will always have a due date and some type of grading capability. They are always associated with exactly one class and they will always have a unique identifier within that class. Within a given class, assignments can be assigned to everyone, particular students, or to groups of students (called sections).

The relationship between a student and an Assignment is called a Submission. Currently, each student will have exactly 1 submission. In the future, we may choose to support group submissions, but this comes with its own set of challenges.

Please note, there is no specific entity for student grades. Grades are managed as a part of the Submission entity.

Assignment Aliases

Aliases are a way for developers to use their own identifiers for assignments. At the moment, only assignments support aliases.

For example, normally you would retrieve an assignment with the following URL:

https://ed.link/api/v2/graph/classes/60786a19-9713-49d1-a0d2-a2ba48c6d1eb/assignments/32a951a7-a2c0-4d12-b081-7e6a7d2c837e

With aliases you can use a custom identifier to retrieve the same assignment:

https://ed.link/api/v2/graph/classes/60786a19-9713-49d1-a0d2-a2ba48c6d1eb/assignments/edlink:101

Note that instead of using the Edlink UUID, you are able to access the assignment using the alias edlink:101.

Aliases must be in the format type:identifier where the type is a string and the identifier is a string. The type is used to distinguish between different types of aliases. For example, you might use the type edlink for assignments that you create from one source and atlas for assignments that come from another source.

An assignment can have multiple aliases. But the combination of the type and identifier must be unique. For example, you can't have two aliases with the same type and identifier, even if they are for different assignments.

This is how aliases appear when you retrieve an assignment:

{
    "$request": "d833925a-0d38-4bb9-9e0f-2a6f75530af1",
    "$data": {
        "id": "5654dafd-d1da-4f3f-adc2-3abd2e10b7e8",
        <...>
        "aliases": [
            {
                "identifier": "108",
                "type": "edlink"
            },
            {
                "identifier": "110",
                "type": "edlink"
            },
            {
                "identifier": "101",
                "type": "atlas"
            },
            {
                "identifier": "3",
                "type": "atlas"
            }
        ]
    }
}

Creating Aliases

There are 2 ways to create an assignment alias. When you are first creating the assignment, you can pass the alias in the request body in the id field.

POST https://ed.link/api/v2/graph/classes/:class\_id/assignments

{
    "id": "edlink:101",
    "title": "Grade 1 Numbers to 20 Workbook",
    "due_date": "2022-10-17T17:30:00.000Z",
    "description": "Test Assignment",
    "display_date": "",
    "grading_type": "points",
    "points_possible": 100
}

The other way is to create an alias after the assignment has been created by posting to the Create Alias endpoint.

Properties