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.

The New Look Moodle...

Finally, the new Moodle theme has been applied and all users will see the new colour schemes.

Staff can build their unit areas safe in the knowledge that they will not lose any information or resources. Some of the key things to look out for with the new theme are 'Sticky Blocks' - these are the blocks on the left and right columns that are permanent, or 'sticky'.

For example the 'Quick Links' jump menu (previously called the Course Menu) is an
excellent tool that enables users to jump straight to a particular section in the unit, rather than scrolling down the page. The other advantage is that all other week/topic content is hidden to simplify the screen and reduce disctractions.

The right hand blocks are dynamic in that they pull information from various places:

• Notifications draw together information from within Moodle, including Announcements, Events and the Calendar;
• Assessments identifies assessments from within Moodle, as well as information from the Coursework Receipting System including details of extensions and receipts (for students) and details of total submissions etc (for staff);
• Resources brings together information from Reading Lists (further reading, items to buy, etc) and Equella files (past exam papers and other reusable content).

When logging into Moodle, all staff should see at least two areas - a personal Sandbox (where you can play about with the various tools available) and the Staff Resource Area (which contains excellent resources such as the Moodle Training Guides and How to Moodle Moodle).

Further to these two areas, you will likely see other areas that you will be teaching - you can use the WebForm to manage staff enrollments to these unit too.

Having said all that, there are still a few kinks in the system so if you do come across anything unexpected, please drop me a quick email to make sure we are aware of all problems, and of course if there are any questions, concerns or general points, feel free to contact me directly or share your thoughts in the comments section.


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