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.