Providing Assessment and Overall Unit Grades through Moodle

As we all know, it is important to get assessment grades inserted into QLS as soon as possible, however many people are interested in getting these grades (and sometimes feedback) returned to students through Moodle as well.

Before we go on, it is important to remember that grades will soon be dynamically pulled out of QLS and available for students to see in the right hand block. However using the Gradebook in addition to this, can often be more useful, especially if you want to give feedback and/or format the gradebook to accurately collate individual assessments to provide a (provisional) unit total. This post attempts to show you how this can be done!

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Moodle Assessments

If you have used any of the Moodle Assessment tools (quizzes, assignment uploads), a column will be automatically inserted into the Gradebook. Of course, quizzes are typically marked automatically and will populate the gradebook immediately. You can also quickly leave grades and/or feedback for other types of assignments. The short screencast (in the next section) demonstrates how you can quickly leave grades/feedback to students (ff to 1:13).

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What about assessments that were not conducted in Moodle?

Many units have assessments that cannot, for one reason or another, be conducted in Moodle. For example, a unit I have been teaching this year had continuous assessment activities related to lab work. The marks for each continuous assessment were collated as a small percentage of the overall mark for the unit. This could equally relate to work submitted through Coursework Receipting or even observation based work, and you might want to provide feedback and grades online.

There are a number of options available to get these marks/feedback into Moodle and visible to students.

1. Create an offline activity [for grades and basic feedback]
2. Create an 'advanced uploading of files' [for grades and a return-file upload]

The following short video runs through creating these two options. A third option does exist, whereby an extra gradebook column can be added from Grades > Full View (from drop down) > Add Grade Item.

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Can I provide feedback to groups?

Yes! Although the default tools discussed above do not currently support group feedback, the most effective method is to ensure the students are in Groups (this blog post discusses groups & groupings). You can then create a Forum set to Separate Groups, and provide feedback for each group (and even facilitate discussion around grades/feedback). The beauty here is that essentially, a 'separate' forum is created for each group, and only those students in the group can see/participate in that forum.

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Can I upload grades to the Gradebook?

Yes! It is possible to upload a csv file to insert grades/feedback in bulk. This involves exporting the gradebook to get some of the default fields (user ID, etc), and then importing the csv to insert the values. The two links provided go through these step-by-step.

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How do I prevent the gradebook combining formative and summative grades?

...easier than you think actually! From within Grades > Full view, you can quickly change the weightings of different assessments to either exclude some (formative) and collate others. This short video demonstrates how you can do this.

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This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Moodle Grades (Part ii)

Further to last week's post about 'Returning Grades and Feedback through Moodle', we came across some confusing elements in how Moodle displays grades by default.

The problem...

Basically, if you have both formative and summative assessment work in Moodle, the Gradebook will automatically combine the different elements and provide a mean grade in the 'Course Total' column. This can obviously be a little confusing as students might take the overall grade as a real grade for their unit, when in actual fact it's not. In some cases, students have been allowed to retake practice quizzes so they achieve 100%, then achieve a much lower figure in the real test. This can display a massively skewed overall grade.

There are two solutions to overcome this problem:

1) Communication -  Explain to students that the 'overall grade' in Moodle combines formative work and actually not their 'real grade' for the unit - instead refer to the individual assessment for more accurate figures.
or
2) Fix it - Go into Grades and edit the weighting of each of the assessments in Moodle to ensure proper weighting is attributed, and an accurate overall grade is displayed. This can be done in about 2 minutes...

How do I do it?

If you like the sound of the latter option, the following screencast demonstrates how you can edit the weightings in Moodle Grades in just about 2 minutes.



If you have any further queries, don't hesitate to get in touch.



This work by Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License

Moodle Training in December

Although it is the season to be jolly, it is also the season where student engagement with the VLE increases - largely due to assessment periods. The training sessions in the run up to Christmas focus on three areas;

The use of level Forums in Programme Areas: this session has resulted from recent positive student feedback concerning Programme and Level forums in the 'Computing and Digital Technology Network' area. This session is primarily aimed at Programme/Network Leaders, Level Tutors and Heads of Departments (although other staff can still attend).
Dates: Tuesday 13th December & Tuesday 20th December

Options for Online Submission, Marking and Feedback: although we have run different sessions on Moodle assignments and Turnitin in the past, this session will take a broad approach and discuss the various options available for academic staff to manage the assessment and feedback process online.
Dates: Wednesday 14th December

Returning Feedback and Grades to Students Through Moodle: this session picks up on this blog post about returning feedback and grades to students through Moodle, even if the assessment did not take place online. Although the blog post covers the 'how to' elements, this is an opportunity for staff to come along, practice and ask questions while I'm in the room.
Dates: Thursday 15th December

As always, it would be great if you could confirm your attendance using the Eventbrite booking system below, and if you have any particular requests for training, feel free to get in touch.

Online Ticketing for Moodle Training powered by Eventbrite

This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Returning Grades and Feedback through Moodle

Many units across the Faculty are using some of the native Moodle tools such as quizzes and assignment drop-boxes to enable assessment and provide a channel for feedback and grades. But how can we return grades and feedback electronically for those assessments that were not facilitated through Moodle?

Before we delve in to this topic further, it is worth highlighting the University position, in that grades must be entered into Agresso at the earliest convenience. Further to this, additional work (expected implementation in Jan) is attempting to pull out those grades from Agresso and feed them directly into the Assessments block in Moodle units.

Having said that, there are obvious benefits of providing detailed feedback to students through Moodle's Grades tool, and there are a range of methods that allow us to do this. Here I will pick up on two of the most straightforward approaches;

1) Offline Activity
The 'Offline Activity' is available from the 'Add an Activity' menu, and is really straightforward. It easily creates an extra Grades column to enable you to provide a grade and some basic feedback.

2) Advanced Uploading of Files 
Whilst you may or may not use this to manage online submission, this tool still enables staff to leave a grade and upload a detailed feedback file to students.

With both methods, a link to the assessment appears on the Moodle unit page. Students can click on the link to view their feedback and grades, as well as being able to check through the Grades link.

How to....

Both processes are reasonably straightforward to set up and use, but the following screencast runs through the steps anyway.





As always, please do leave a comment if you have any questions or to share how you are using electronic methods to aid the assessment and feedback processes.



This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.