Hi There,
I like the idea of teachers being able to see at a glance the marking they need to do. I know there are some plugins that do this. However is this possible with Moodle 3.0 as the plugins available seem to stop at 2.8.
Cheers
Dave
Hi There,
I like the idea of teachers being able to see at a glance the marking they need to do. I know there are some plugins that do this. However is this possible with Moodle 3.0 as the plugins available seem to stop at 2.8.
Cheers
Dave
Hi Dave,
The Grade Me block does what you want and is compatible with Moodle 3.0. If you install it on the front page of your site, and then set it to display throughout the entire site, you will always be just a couple clicks away from being able to grade anything that needs it.
This setup works great on small sites, but it does slow the front page a little. So, if you are running a large site, you might want to just install in each course, instead of on the front page.
Grade Me and large or many courses -
Grade Me is great in smaller courses. It really slows down page loads as more and more students are in a course, though.
I thought I would jump in and give you some estimated courses sizes where the block will work and where it won't. We could use it in courses up to about 300 to 600 students enrolled. The range is wide since it also depends on how many grade-able activities there are. Beyond that the page load times out due to how much it slows the page opening. If you place the block on the front page, be sure that no one has several large courses or they will not be able to load the front page after log in. I am an admin of a site with about 8000 students and I have the teacher role in several large courses. I was the first one that hit the point where the front page no longer loaded. Then a few of the larger courses wouldn't load. I had to have a co-admin in the site that didn't grade in any courses remove the block from the home page so I could get in there. When the course pages started timing out I had to turn off the block site wide, delete grade Me from the course side bar, and then turn the block on again so others in smaller courses could still use it.
Marking Manager -
Today I did the deep level site maintenance and installed the Marking Manager. It is on the front page and I timed it at only adding about 6 seconds to page load time, no page time out risk at all. I was able to easily grade my 1000 plus student (live and at your own pace students combined) course for the first time in about 6 months. I had been grading by taking a screenshot of the activities page and on grading days I compared the screenshot from the last grading run to the current activities list to see which ones had increased. It was time consuming, but it was better than manually checking each activity one by one from the course page. My guess is that Marking Manager should be close to their 3.x updates. They have a whole set of tools, so it may take them a little longer that some because there are several of them. It would be worth waiting for if you have a few people that teach very large enrollment courses.
Addendum ...
Today I really got a chance to dig in and explore the FN Marking Manager. I went in to tone of the courses and the Grade Me block showed 2 assignments waiting in queue to be graded. I added the new FN Marking Manager and I was surprised that it showed 38 needed to be graded. I took a look and the ones that the FN Marking Manager was showing that Grade Me was not were the assignments where the students scored brlow our completion tracking set point of 80% and the student had resubmitted. For some reason, Grade Me block wasn't picking up on the re-submissions it would seem.
In addition to showing what still needs to be graded, the Marking Manager also gives additional statistics there nice and handy such as how many students haven't logged in for the last 7 days along with a link to see a list of who they are. You can also set what percent score you want for it to show students that are under that percentage in their total score. The default is 50%, but I set mine to 80% since that is what we use across the site in completion tracking (mastery-based).
I know that the Marking Manager isn't yet updated for 3.x, but it would be worth the wait since there is still some summer left before students become active.
Hi Dave
The built-in Dashboard will do this if teachers drill down into the lists. Here is a quick video about the Dashboard