Creating an activity

Activities are assignments or exams within a course. Each activity has its own access, security, and submission settings.

Prerequisites

• You must have at least one course .

Steps

1. Open the MATCHA Dashboard , select your organization, and click the course you want to add an activity to.
2. In the course view, click New activity .
3. You will be presented with a choice between three common activity types. These are used to provide reasonable defaults for the fine-grained settings in the next step. If your activity is of a different type, simply select the best match and make adjustments in the next step.
4. Enter an Activity name (e.g. “Essay 1” or “Midterm exam”). This name is visible to participants.
5. Add Instructions for students (optional). Use the rich-text editor to describe the assignment, prompts, or rules. These instructions will be shown within MATCHA. Important : if using Single-App Mode (see below), you should put all your activity instructions in this box since students may not be able to access your LMS during the activity (unless you enable the built-in browser and allowlist your LMS).
6. Configure proctoring :
   • Indicate whether the activity is proctored (supervised). This important setting influences several other settings and changes the behavior of MATCHA. For example, MATCHA will sometimes call for proctor actions in proctored mode.

   • If proctored, you can indicate whether students must check in with a proctor. This feature is necessary to prevent students from accessing the activity from outside a supervised space. Normally, check in should always be required, but it can be deactivated for special circumstances.

     Check in can be required to start the activity or eventually. If you say "eventually", students will be able to start prior to having checked in, but their submissions will be flagged if they submit without having checked in ever.

   • Indicate whether this is a multi-session activity. This setting does not have any effect on MATCHA's behavior but informs proctors that students are allowed to check in to the activity through multiple sessions.
7. (TODO: continue to improve this text) Configure Access : how participants join the activity.
   • Access code vs LTI: If using LTI, participants enter a code or open a linked file. The access code is generated when you save.
   • Start and end times: when the activity becomes available and when it closes.
   • Check-in: require participants to check in with a proctor (for supervised activities).
   • Multi-session: allow participants to work across multiple sessions (e.g. supervised writing labs).
8. Configure Security : controls that enforce integrity during the activity.
   • Proctored mode: enable Single-App Mode, fullscreen, and other controls.
   • Focus enforcement: deter switching to other apps.
   • Proctor alarms: alert proctors when policy violations are detected.
   • Optional: complete tracking for unsupervised settings.
9. Optionally configure Browser (allowed domains for research), Cloud storage (submission collection), or Proctor list (who can proctor).
10. Click Save . The activity is created and an access code is generated. Share the code (or a link) with participants so they can start the activity in the MATCHA app.

Next steps

After creating an activity, share the access code with participants. They open the MATCHA app, enter the code, and begin writing. You can view submissions from the activity’s submissions page and export certified .docx files for grading.