A major shift in how the Assignment activity works has taken place between v1.6 and 1.8 . In v1.6 the assignment activity was a monolithic entity with three component 'types', namely, 'Offline activity', 'Online text', and 'Upload a single file'. This allowed the course creator to easily switch between assignment types with little fuss. Thus one could create an offline assignment and then switch it to 'Upload single file' when desired. Now, in version 1.8, the assignment activity has been split into 4 separate sub-activities. What this means is that now a teacher cannot switch between assignment types without creating a new assignment and copying the details over (there's still no way to copy or 'clone' an activity). This can also have an impact when restoring a course -- the teacher restores a course which she taught using Moodle 1.6 where the assignments were offline and now she has more confidence she wants to switch those assignments to Advanced upload files in the new Moodle 1.8 version. However, in order to achieve this she will have to create a new assignment for every instance in the restored course, copy the details over and delete the old assignment. This issue has surfaced in a conversation on Moodle.org (Is it a bug or did we lost a feature?)

I propose that the assignment module be refactored to incorporate the assignment functions within a single module as in v1.6 to allow easy switching between the different types.