If you want to create a writing assignment online for your ESL class, the New Assignment page is where it happens — one form that handles the assignment's setup (title, due date, grading, rubric) and the actual task content (writing prompts, quizzes, and other exercise types) in a single flow.

This guide walks through building your first assignment from scratch. It also works as an ESL assignment creator for quizzes and other exercise types, since a single assignment can mix writing tasks with quizzes, gapped text, matching, transformation, or reading comprehension tasks.

Before you start

Go to Teacher → New Assignment (or use the New Assignment quick action on your dashboard). If you've saved templates before, you'll see a Load from Template dropdown at the top of the page, plus Browse Templates and Browse Test Bank buttons — useful if you're reusing a previous setup rather than starting cold. There's also an Import from PDF or Image panel that can turn an existing worksheet into a quiz or writing task automatically. This guide assumes you're building from scratch.

Steps

1. Open New Assignment. Navigate to the New Assignment page from the sidebar or the dashboard's Quick Actions panel.
2. Set the Overall Assignment Title. This is the name students and you will see everywhere the assignment is listed (e.g. "Unit 5: The Digital Age").
3. Set the Due Date and Due Time. Pick a due date from the calendar and a due time — submissions after this point are late unless you allow late submissions.
4. Choose a Grading Scale. Options are 0 to 100, 0 to 10, A to F, or "No grading (feedback only)" if you just want AI comments without a score.
5. Pick a Rubric or an International Standard (optional). Use the Rubric dropdown to select a saved rubric, or the International Standard dropdown to grade against a framework like CEFR or Cambridge FCE instead. Choosing one clears the other — a task is graded against a custom rubric or a standard, not both. You can also leave both on "None" and assign without either.
6. Assign to Classes and/or Individual Students. Check one or more classes in the Assign to Classes list, and/or search and check specific students under Assign to Individual Students. At least one class or student is required before you can submit the form.
7. Set the toggles that fit your assignment. Shuffle order randomizes task/question order per student, Autopilot correction turns on quiz-only AI auto-review, and Allow late submissions controls whether work after the due date/time is still accepted.
8. Add at least one task. Use the task-type buttons — Writing Task, Quiz Task, Gapped Text, Matching Task, Transformation Task, or Reading Comprehension — to add one or more tasks to the assignment. Each task type opens its own editor (with AI-generation helpers) where you set the CEFR level and content. If you add more than one task, their score weights must add up to 100%.
9. Assign or save. Click Assign to [N] student(s) to send it out immediately, or use Save as Template / Save as Test if you want to reuse this setup later without assigning it yet.

What the setup section looks like

Notes on task types

Every task type button adds a differently colored task card to the bottom of the form: writing tasks (jade), quiz tasks (purple), gapped text (cyan), matching (amber), transformation (rose), and reading comprehension (sky). You can add multiple tasks of different types to the same assignment — for example, a writing task plus a quiz — and the platform automatically rebalances their score weights evenly unless you adjust them. Most task types include an AI-generation panel so you can generate a prompt, quiz questions, or exercise content from a topic or an uploaded file instead of writing everything by hand.

Next steps

Once you're comfortable with the basic flow, two things will save you time going forward:

• How to Build a Writing Rubric — so AI grading follows criteria you define instead of a generic standard.
• How to Use Assignment Templates — so you don't have to rebuild this setup from scratch every time.