Assignments allow admins to allocate a task or piece of work to a specific audience in their organization with a specific deadline. DataCamp offers multiple types of assignments, including the ability to assign XP challenges, courses, specific chapters within courses, tracks, custom tracks, projects, and assessments.
The benefit of assignments is that they allow you to inform your learners what content you want them to focus on and by when you expect them to complete it. An assignment with a deadline can be a powerful motivator—we see up to 2x completion rates for content that is assigned versus content that is unassigned, so this can be a powerful tool if you want to increase completion rates.
Creating an assignment
In order to create an assignment, you will need admin permissions in your organization. Go to your Group Hub and find the Assignments section in the left-hand navigation. To create a new assignment, click Create Assignment in the top right-hand corner.
Assignment Types
Next, select the type of content you want to assign. DataCamp offers the following options:
Assessment
DataCamp Signal assessment assignments allow you to assign one of our existing skill assessments to your learners. All learners who are assigned the assessment will need to complete it, even if they’ve already taken the assessment in the past. This ensures that as an admin, you get the most up-to-date score. Keep in mind, skill levels are constantly changing as learners spend more time learning on DataCamp.
Course
Course assignments allow you to choose from any course in DataCamp’s course library. If you assign a course to a learner who has already completed it, then the assignment will automatically be marked complete.
Chapter
DataCamp courses are made up of several chapters (usually 4-6). These chapters can be assigned individually. In order to assign a course, you’ll first select the course in the first dropdown menu. Then you can select the chapter in the second dropdown menu. If you assign a chapter to a member who has already completed it, then the assignment will automatically be marked complete.
Custom track (Enterprise only)
Custom track assignments allow you to select any of your organization’s existing custom tracks and assign it to your learners. Learners will be required to complete the entire track by the deadline that you choose. If a learner has already completed the custom track when you assign it to them, the assignment will automatically be marked complete.
Custom tracks is an Enterprise-only feature, so this assignment type is also only available to Enterprise plan customers.
Track
Track assignments allow you to select any of DataCamp’s career or skill tracks that you want to assign to your learners. Learners will be required to complete the entire track by the deadline that you choose. If a learner has already completed the track when you assign it to them, the assignment will automatically be marked complete.
Earn XP
DataCamp learners earn XP as they complete course exercises, practice sessions, and apply their knowledge in projects. If you do not want to assign learners a specific piece of content, but still want them to engage with the platform, assigning an Earn XP challenge is a great option. This assignment will require learners to earn the amount of XP you choose by a certain deadline. For context, a typical DataCamp exercise has 100 XP available, and full courses range from 4,000 to 6,00 available XP. The amount of XP you assign and the deadline are fully customizable.
Project
DataCamp's guided and unguided projects can be assigned to your organization, team, or individuals for a more hand-off environment to develop your data science skills. For more information on projects, see DataCamp Projects: An Overview.
Selecting an audience for your assignment
There are three options for selecting the audience that you want to assign content to:
Your entire organization
By assigning to the entire organization, everyone will receive the assignment. If a learner joins your organization after you’ve assigned it, they will be enrolled in the assignment as well, as long as the due date is still in the future (they won’t be assigned content that was due in the past).
Specific team(s)
To create a team assignment, use the drop-down menu at the top of the screen. You can also create new teams and navigate to existing team pages by going to the Teams section in the navigation on the left-hand side.
Specific individual(s)
By assigning to a specific individual or group of individuals, the assignment will only be made available to these learners.
Choosing a deadline
In setting a deadline, you can choose a date, time, time zone, and if you want the date to be dynamic, so that all members, regardless of when they joined, will have an equal time frame to finish the assignment.
We recommend setting deadlines that are ambitious, but achievable and realistic for your learners to ensure the highest completion rates. Deadlines can be extended if needed.
Monitoring the progress of an assignment
Once an assignment is made, you can monitor the progress of the assignment from the Assignments section of your group.
The first tab shows all active assignments, which include all assignments with a due date in the future. From here, you can see the assignment and content title, what audience it was assigned to, the due date, and a notification if it’s due soon. You can see the number of learners who have completed it, the total number of learners it’s been assigned to, and the completion rate. You can also search and filter by assignment type to make it easier to find what you are looking for.
The Past Due tab shows all assignments which have due dates in the past. Here you can still see the number of learners who completed the course and the completion rate, but since it’s past due, you’ll also see the number of learners who missed (or who have not completed) the assignment. Learners can still complete assignments past their due dates until they are specifically archived, but as an admin you will have visibility into who was late in completing the assignment.
Lastly, the Archived assignments tab shows you all archived assignments. An assignment should be archived if you no longer want it to appear as an option to learners to complete, but you want to retain the assignment completion details. You can also delete assignments, but if you do this you will lose the data associated with who completed it.
For each assignment, you can also view more details about who has completed it, who is late, and who missed the assignment. Simply click on the View button on an assignment to access these details.
Editing and managing an assignment
If you need to edit the due date of an assignment to give learners more time, you can do so. First, click the View button to see a more detailed section for the assignment, then click Edit in the top-right corner. Here you can select a new date in the future.
If you would like to archive or delete an assignment, you can do that from this page as well. Click Archive to archive, and if you’d like to delete it permanently, click Delete once the page refreshes. Archived assignments can be unarchived, but deleting an assignment is a permanent action.
Learner assignment experience
When learners are assigned content, they will receive a notification in DataCamp that they have a new assignment and they will also receive an email. Learners can find all their assignments by going to the Assignments section in the menu on the left-hand side. We also prominently display assignments in the learner dashboard so that learners see a list of upcoming assignments as soon as they log in, as well as send a reminder email four days before the deadline.