Ideas on how to make a cumulative activity with a cap?

Ideas on how to make a cumulative activity with a cap?

by Nic McPhee -
Number of replies: 3
I'm trying Moodle for the first time in about 48 hours surprise and I'm trying to figure out how to incorporate an (paper) activity. For several years I've had students attend campus events of their choosing, and write responses on index cards which I graded on a 1-5 scale. They then had to get, say, a total of 40 points during the term to get an 'A' on that portion of the course. The trick (and the bit that's causing me problems with Moodle) is that they can attend as many events as they wanted to (and had time for), and turn in cards for all of them. Any points above 40 were ignored.

This activity has a number of nice properties, but the downside is you end up with a lot of notecards, and it's easy to get behind. It would be cool to move this to an electronic setting both to simplify the management of the mini-essays and to potentially allow for peer feedback (esp. when I get behind).

The three candidates seem to be forums, journals, and workshops, but I can't figure out how to make any of them actually work for me. Forums allow for multiple posts, but average all the ratings instead of summing them, and journals and workshops are one-time deals (with workshops being synchronous to boot).

I could presumably impose a lot more structure and have something like a one journal or workshop every week or two where students can post an "event card" if they have one, but this really changes the nature of the assignment, and I'm not real happy when the technology tail wags the pedagogy dog smile.

Any thoughts on this? The closest I've found is this patch (from this thread on extra credit) which allows for cumulative scoring in forums. It doesn't provide for a cap, though, and I probably can't get patches applied to the production system on short notice at this time of year.

Many thanks - Nic
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In reply to Nic McPhee

Re: Ideas on how to make a cumulative activity with a cap?

by Phil Cozens -

Hi Nic,

I'm not sure whether this is a possible answer to your problem or not, but I use the Assignment module to have my students create an Independent Learning outline.  They are expected to adapt this as the curse goes on and upload different versions of the plan which are each graded.  Although they use the same template, they save the documents with increasing number tags.

Phil

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In reply to Phil Cozens

Re: Ideas on how to make a cumulative activity with a cap?

by Jill Kaminski -

I do this, but I had to tweak a few things to get it to work. In one of my classes, I have 3 activities per unit: one quiz (100 pts) and two assignments (20 and 10 pts). The maximum number of points for the unit grade is 100.

First, I use the Calculated Columns module, so that I can create a column with a calculation for the sum that will result in a grade no higher than 100.

Next, I had to tweak the Calculated Columns code a little so that the modulus operator can be added. I posted this on some discussion forum, but I'm not sure where and don't have time to search for it right now.

Last, here is my intense-looking calculation:
(round(A1+A2+A3))-((step((A1+A2+A3)-100))*((round(A1+A2+A3))%100))

Here's an example from my gradebook of what this looks like. Notice that in this case, there are really 5 grades that can contribute to the 100 points, so the formula above was modified to include the sum of 5, but hopefully you get the idea.

Jill

Attachment gradebook.JPG
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