Our draft spec for the new Gradebook in 1.9 has been evolving based on all the feedback I've been getting and I'm now seeking wider community input before Moodle HQ start implementing it for 1.9 over the next couple of months.
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Grades
The most important things to look at are the underlying structures for storing data and the mechanisms for transferring grades. Note the new events API which will take care of modules notifying each other of important grading events. Note also that numerical grades, scale-based grades AND outcomes-based rubrics are all supported in this model.
The actual interface is LESS important at this stage because we will have a new plugin structure for displays/reports (as well as import/export!). Extensions like "gradebook 2 plus" will in future be very easy to write as clean plugins, efficiently drawing from the exact same database of grades and just displaying them differently. I hope we start having a lot of community-contributed plugins to do graphing and all kinds of funky things. Nevertheless, your input on these aspects in the spec is very welcome too, as it's going to be difficult to cram all this functionality into an accessible, simple interface.
I'm looking forward to your comments and questions!
Will the gradebook communicate back to the modules ever? An example would be where an external system is integrated with Moodle that communicates grade information back to a module - I know this is rare, but it does come up. So, an interface exists somewhere that a user can override a grade for an assignment. The plan is that this is handled by the manual grade lock, or should that information go back to the assignment?
Another function that I could see as valuable would be retaining a history. In the proposed solution, when a grade is changed the times it was changed and the user that changed it are recorded but the old information is lost. Is there a way we could add a few fields to maintain that marking history? I could see value in a 'version' field and a 'notes' field. The 'version' field would numerically show the grading changes and the 'notes' could offer an explanation. For automatic grading (such as quiz questions) the notes would be handled automatically ('regraded by quiz'), but for a manual override, the teacher could be forced to explain ('spoke with student and we did extra work').
mike
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Grades#Overview_of_module_communication
Basically ANY change in grade triggers an event, so if the assignment wants to handle grade changes then it publishes a handler for it, and will deal with any grade related to assignments (and ignore any others).
The biggest advantage of thinking this way, for me, is that ANY part of Moodle can react to any other (not just activity modules here). As an extreme example, you can imagine some code handling events by posting them to a Windows app and making it beep or play an animation or something.
The biggest advantage of thinking this way, for me, is that ANY part of Moodle can react to any other (not just activity modules here).
This is a bit of a worry. So far, Moodle has been very good at the loose coupling part, and there are no module interdependencies. How do we make sure that we don't end up with the interdependency hell that Elgg has, for example.
Everything interacting with everything else is not a good plan, methinks. High cohesion and loose coupling have allowed Moodle code to grow in size and complexity while still being manageable.
My 2c in any case. I know your code won't be a mess, but we are many, many cooks in this kitchen One of the cardinal rules so far has been "no calls across modules".
(I guess my question is - if the safe rule was "no calls across modules", what is the new rule now? How do we distinguish safe vs unsafe cross-module calls?)
The event is flagged with data attached and Moodle says: "who wants it"! It's completely passive. Only modules that ask for it will be sent the data.
The standard old pattern we use is to load ALL the lib files and search for a function, which is effectively the same thing but less efficient.
The coupling will actually be looser than it was because we are passing everything in one object parameter, and because module functions NEVER call each other directly.
Once the requested data is passed to the handler function it examines the object and if it can't find all the info it needs or wants then it just terminates immediately.
Everything interacting with everything else is not a good plan, methinks. High cohesion and loose coupling have allowed Moodle code to grow in size and complexity while still being manageable.I'm not sure about that. I mainly work with Drupal and the various APIs and module hooks work great and save vast amounts of code duplication - a great example would be the views and cck modules plus the various other modules that simply extend core systems. The re-use of code and content that this allows, along with flexibility, makes a big difference, and it also leads to lot less places for things to go wrong in terms of security and performance.
Forced notes for each grade change? Whew .. Do you think the same people who complain about my resource summaries would want that?
(Not like the forced resource summaries in 1.8).
The main issue with having a textual "teacher-to-teacher change note" (because we already have a "teacher-to-student comment" note) for each change (forced or not forced) is that the interface needs have a popup window come up every time you change a grade, asking if you want to add a note about this.
Otherwise we need a separate icon in every cell that allows that note to be added (as well as the icon already there for notes to the student). Two notes icons.
My gut feel is that this might be too much for most teachers, but if we have a user preference for this (defaulting to off) then it should be OK.
The other (automatic) information we'll have from the log is:
- the grade item
- the user the grade belongs to
- the grade value before
- the grade value after
- the person who changed the grade
- the exact time it was changed
- how it was changed (manually, via module etc)
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Grades#grade_history
I think I may not be understanding this properly ...
Could this not be grade categories? eg if you created a category for Term 1, Term 2, Term 3 etc and grouped activities under those.
(Post re-edited to change course categories typo to grade categories)
-- Art
Exporting would also work if you wanted to keep them externally to Moodle.
In fact, thinking of it the gradebook work in general, if you are touching things like forum and glossary where the grading is currently stuck at the average grade, you might think about making these choices for reporting the final grade standard part of the API, so that all modules can provide this choice of how the final grade is calculated.
(I haven't had the opportunity to use gradebook past 1.6 in practice, yet, so if this is covered and I missed it in docs, thanks in advance.)
Sorry--had to correct my own egregious error, there.
Plus, I just wanted to say that the number of variables, conditions, and options the gradebook already has pretty much boggles my mind, so if the capability of having sub-categories would slow down or throw too much of a wrench in the aggregator's ability to work well, I'm sure we (meaning the "we" of the Moodle community) can figure out a workaround. Thanks!
History:
We would like to use History to create charts showing productivity (measured in overall course percentage points) over time ... that way we have a way of seeing patterns such as when spurts occur, when steady growth occur etc... for individual students in a given (self-paced) course
Cross-course events:
Also, we often have activities which are a request for the student to do another course and then report back that course mark ... it would be so nice to automate that process... I think that means that updating a course mark in one course should trigger updating an activity in another (self-paced) course
We have some courses that are made up entirely of activities referencing other courses ... so any changes in these courses should update the "overall" (self-paced) course
and now that moodle networking is available, we hope to do the same with courses that are on different moodle servers
Complete Report Cards:
Finally, we always need a way to show marks for all moodle courses (across the moodle network taken by an individual student ... this constitutes a sort of permanent "un-official interim report card" for students , teachers and stakeholders to have access to at any time to see a snapshot of how the student is doing.
Ideally we would combine this with historical graphs (see above)
thanks for asking for input!
1. I still use the very old calculated grade from Gustav. Teachers can create calculated columns. (I understand this becomes now part of Moodle ..but we wish now a kind of hidden preset for this functionality - initiated by the admin, based on institutional rules ...)
(Gradebook becomes veeeeery complex, please again a more simplified basic view for starters.. three levels instead of two?)
2. Moodle is still very course centered: we wish more and more cross-course overviews for grades (and other activities), without complex tricks as the metacourse: just plain teacher- and student-friendly overviews of "all my courses for this year" (with the option to split the year in institutional chosen periods - as I do for three years now in my hacked Moodle.)
2. Yes, an overview of "all my courses" is really easy to do now. It's just another report plugin acting on the same data. It would have a different appearance I would think, because it's more of a summary. Does anyone want to try a visualisation of how that should look?
For the second point, overview and grades consolidation will be more easy if grade categories can be set as cross-categorie (viewable in all (?) courses )
For the categories, why not add a calculated state : failure , succeeded with critererions : minimum average or other...
Does it make sense to add this column to every grade_item as well?
It could just be a simple float value which would get compared against the normalised final value for each grade stored in grade_grades_value.
In the GUI it would be easy to colour cells green or red depending on the converted value (even for rubric scales). If the cutoff is == grademin (the default) then we can just ignore it and do no coloring.
I think this would be simple to implement, so I've added 'gradepass' to grade_items and grade_categories. This would also work for calculated columns.
Sure, see attached ppt (sent to my blog because the attachment is 168k. There are 7 screenshots of various views of the Moodle transcripts component Doug et. al developed for 1.6, in the ppt).
I think that consider the site gradebook is only just another report plugin acting on all the data courses is not the good way.
It would be better to consider that a course gradebook is a particular case ( may be the most frequent ) of multi courses gradebook. Data are the same OK, but calculations or categorizations may be not. Example : I dream about global categories for grade...
Do you mean that you want to see all the individual assessments (grade_items) for all your courses listed together on one gradebook? What if they have different students and permissions?
But It's not easy for me... and for you !
So. I try to say you what I need and why...
I want a unique gradebook for a student.
We use Moodle for a public-health diploma. We have several courses for each discipline. In each an assignment with a assignment grade" ( first category) and an other assignment with "a participation grade" ( second categorie). Students have to do all assignments and have to have a minimal average in "assignment grade category" to succeed this category. No condition to succeed for "participation grade category". For succeed the diploma there is minimal mean to have too. If a student failed a course (or if his grade not so good for him), he can retry the discipline the next year ( but he is subscribed in a other moodle course) and the his grade his the best between the two year. ( It is not me who decided this things so complicated, and these people can do worse)
I would like that moodle calculate all. I think it is relatively simple if exist global categories (I mean categories where I can put grade from several course):
To resolve my problem :
- I create a global categorie "assignment" in which I create a global subcategorie by discipline in which I put all assignement from year/discipline courses.
- I create a global categorie "participation" in which I create a global subcategorie by discipline in which I put all participation assignment from year/discipline courses.
- I configure each categorie with the good agregation mode.
I know that it is not so easy, but I dream.
I hope you understand better what I mean. I hope too I progress in written english.
Sorry for answering so late, people are using more and more my local Moodle - we welcomed this week our 4040-th local user (not counting the 114 guests) - and users develop all kind of wishes
(We are now pimping the calendar, see the screenshot.)
Your question about the three levels: can I solve that with roles? We are working in teams of several teachers, so not the admin, not the individual team-member-teacher but the team-leader must be able to set AND FIX the formula for the calculated columns in a classroom gradebook. Only that calculated column will be connected to our student administration system.
..behind the small buttons are the local month views for each school in PDF - based on the "Florence" script - for example KO stands for Kottenpark:
Student can see all own courses
Teacher sees all courses taught
Parent sees all of their child's courses
Dept Head sees all dept courses - filter by groups (when these are available at site level), by student, by teacher
Administrator (not necessarily site admin) sees more....
An on it goes....
History - I think there is enough data in the grade_history table now to do that (and you can do it as a custom report) but it's going to be quite a job ... I'm not even sure if plotting grades vs time is really going to be meaningful.
Cross-course events - are you saying that you want the "overall" grade from one course to appear as a column (grade_item) in another course? Hmm ...
Overall reports - yes, no problem. I also want to see a report based on the outcomes specifically (across courses) that will be an excellent way of seeing what each student has done and can do.
cross-course events: If you prefer, maybe we can do this with CALCULATED grades... I mean one type of calculation could be: extract overall course mark from course B and insert it here
course complete flag: that would be very useful so we can finally leave the students in the courses for as long as they want after they have officially finished the course
generally: i think that the simplest way to insure ability to satisfy all school's various current and future requirements would be to have a very flexible CALCULATED mark mechanism, and gradebook plug-in mechanism that includes cross-course calculations
I am really glad you are tackling this gradebook thorn. I dream of the gradebook being almost like the part of most online games which keeps track of points and motivates players to get the highest number of points possible ... the rules vary from school to school or even course to course but it seems that most of our high school students are (whether we like it or not) motivated by their "marks" and if that keeps them productive and learning, then I think we need to make gradebook a flexible and powerful instrument... so that we can use it to give greater incentive for course completion and higher-order constructive learning.
I cannot wait for X-mas:
The last two months I was very busy in comparing systems for our vocational training department. One issue is the missing part for matching results of activities in Moodle with a system for competency grading. (The Teacherplan Moodle was one attempt to meet that need)
Looking at the solutions of others - I saw last night also CanDO, see the picture - I realised that it could be much simpler implemented in Moodle:
if you have a course with activities AND you make it possible to label - in edit mode at the end of the row of icons - each activity with a dropdown menu choice for a competency (c001, c003, c004) then you can use the normal grading system for that activity for setting and handling the pass/no pass level.
If you create one big table with student names along the rows and the c001, c002... c999 along the columns, with mouse-over descriptions in the headers, you can create an overall mechanism where the table shows a pass in the cell for that student on that competency, when the activity is graded in it's context. Based on this table you can create several-vocational-training-wished-views:
- the raw table as described, like CanDo (webservice connection with CanDO? )
- a view on the grouped competencies
- a subset view of the student progress compared with the needed competenties for several professions
Ok Martin, when can this be ready
From my experience, faculty will not like that at all, and it will be one of the first things they demand their admins hack out of the code. The option of putting in a note for a grade change would be very nice.
If you want to keep faculty happy (and you really do, use persuasion, don't use force.
(...looking back... )
Yep, I guess I did...
I of course meant this definition: "to make or cause especially through natural or logical necessity". Yep. That's what I meant. I mean who could argue with 'logical necessity'? Ahem.
Well, 'forced' might be a bit extreme. I'm more thinking of the availability of a note to indicate why the grade was overridden. I think it should be left to the institution as to whether its required or not. It can be forced by their own policies and actions. If a note is required, and one isn't provided, the powers that be can ask the specific marker why they didn't provide it (seeing as all the other info is there)...
mike
"About the history, I was planning to use the normal Moodle log, but perhaps a special purpose grades log would be a good idea. Would others find this useful?
Forced notes for each grade change? Whew .. Do you think the same people who complain about my resource summaries would want that? "
1. Use normal Moodle log might not be a good idea, I would prefer a special purpose grades log. For large user base moodle installation, we often run into trouble when we upgrade Moodle as the mdl_log grows too big and during the upgrade it would crash MySQL. Please be considerate for large user base moodle users
2. Not a big fan for forced notes for each grade change, but I think it would be good to make it a option for instructors (not global level setting, but course level setting). Just my 2c.
It makes perfect sense for there to be a 2 way relationship in the event that grades are altered manually in the gradebook. The person making the change in the gradebook may not be the person viewing the (e.g.) Assignment reports.
Another "me too" for the audit trail proposals. This follows the recent regrade/comment option for single questions in Quiz. People get very twitchy when things can be changed without a trace of what went before. Also there is an expectation that it is recorded "in the system" where this type of info then acquires greater weight (for better or worse).
Never allow to change the grades!! That smells like double bookkeeping. Allow teachers to give the student the benifit of the doubt - despite the grades - and create a place for a note that overules the grade.. but never will change or hide it.
The signal for the student is also more clear: work harder next time, use this second chance.
One of the reasons is that even teachers make mistakes in grading, and they like to be able to fix them easily.
1. I'm a high school teacher, with one year-long course divided between four grading periods. I've had to create four separate courses to keep the grades separate. I would really appreciate at way to separate different grading periods within one course, especially the grades.
2. Our district has an approved grade book program that allows teachers to decide whether to count blanks (no grade assigned to a student for a particular assignment) as zeros or not include them in that student's average. A similar tick box on Moodle would be useful.
3. I'd also like to be able to manually change grades for glossary assignments. I use that module in my Geography class. Because the score for that assignment is an average, rather than summative, I have to give each entry (I usually assign 10 to each student) a grade out of the total number of possible points. If a student doesn't complete all the assigned entries, the score only averages the entries submitted, and there's no way for me to penalize the student for not doing some of the assigned entries.
1) Four categories should do that nicely. The default gui shuld allow you to select one of the categories (say Term 2) and "zoom in" to just show those items, with a column of totals for just those items (next to totals for the whole course). Does that work for you?
2) Good idea for a site preference (course preference?)
3) Firstly, we can probably modify Glossary and add an option to choose mean OR summed grades, but you will also be able to manually change ANY grade you like in the gradebook if you want to.
I don't see much about final grade for the course and transcript. Am I missing something that's there? Or should we treat it as a "second stage" once you guys are done?
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Grades#Overall_grade
The transcript showing overall grades from all "my courses" will definitely be just another report available in the menu. The actual layout of this is "something to look at later" for me but I'm keen to see mock ups!
> (at least until you manually want to change it).
Ok - and do you currently see that final grade at any point getting "materialised" and stored?
At our end, we are figuring out a bit how to deal with "course completion" and the related "final course grade" for institutions that don't have a Student Mgmt System.
This is something that moodle does not currently even think of, and perhaps I am shoehorning here. But we also have scenarios that we are looking at where it's useful as data within moodle - for example
- recurring courses
- course pre-requisites that point to other courses
In other words, - yes, it's a report from the user's POV, but I'd also want it to be queryable at the DB level, materialised in the grades table.
I'm almost 100% certain now the calculated column is the way to go.
So basically all you'll need to do is find the grade_item with courseid == X and 'itemtype' == "total". All the grades for that column can be got from the grade_grades table matching that grade_item->id. Easy enough?
Moodle core doesn't, but we have. Back for a distance learning portal project (unfunded) Humboldt's Doug Dixon developed a pretty nice Transcripts block which pulls the final grades and provides methods for transferring them to other systems, as well as displaying them in Moodle--with a nice set of color changes for completed courses, in progress courses, and upcoming courses in a degree program.
A few other nice features:
It pulls the final grades and puts them in a separate table, and provides methods to lock them from change after a set date. This means that after the final grades are given it takes an administrator to change them.
Final grades can be downloaded by course in CSV, and also loaded into a directory, where one could pull them into a SIS. The idea was to provide the grades in a simple, standard format so that multiple institutions with various SISs could pull the grades into their flavor of SIS--which I would say is a good functional requirement for the Moodle Network.
This project actually came out of a full distance learning portal which was almost funded by Cal State, but Doug has continued to work on the transcripts component on his own time.
More: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=50049
This comes up in a number of transcript-type reports I've had to do. Typically, course-completion is defined as all gradeable elements completed and graded, but this is only because there is no Moodle 'course complete' rule. I think it would be valuable to have both a 'final grade' field that can be calculated (even projected) and overridden and another indicator to define course completion. There are probably a number of ways we could configure the course completion to work:
- automatically, such as when a course has a defined time period,
- progress driven, as in all activities completed,
- manually, as in a teacher/administrator acknowledging completiion for students.
Having said this, do we think course completion should be part of the gradebook?
mike
The total/final/overall grade should definitely be in the gradebook.
I can imagine a course setting like:
Course is completed when:
- Total grade is: XX%
- This date is reached: XX
- All activities have been attempted
- ??
And then perhaps we have a completely separate table "course_completed" which is very simple (id,courseid,userid) and regularly updated by course/lib.php or something depending on the course setting (which may draw from the grades, logs etc as needed).
Some sort of activities_completed could be useful too (for ultra speed in conditional activities later).
Now, the course completed thing has to be handled by the course handler somehow. In the past, I have triggered these events through use of a block. The block's presence in the course means that it gets called every time the course page is displayed so it can do a 'course complete' check and update the information accordingly. It doesn't even need to display anything. And, I add a cron job just in case it misses something.
But, this really should be part of the course handler. The gradebook shouldn't decide when a course is completed, the course should. It could then generate an event that the gradebook can pick-up (I think I'm starting to really warm up to these events). In this way, specific course formats could decide their own way to flag a completion (weekly format would be 'n' weeks from start, topic format could be all activities complete). We could have rules defined that can be selected as part of the standard course settings, or set by the format itself.
Now, are there a finite set of rules, or should we be looking at some sort of flexible, rule-defining system?
mike
- Total grade is: XX%
- This date is reached: XX
- All activities have been attempted
- ??
many institutions have a period of time (1-2 weeks, for instance) during which final grades may be entered-when faculty finish this they like to see it immediately so they can go on to the next thing.
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Course_completion
It would be very useful to collect any feedback on the spec's talk page or in this discussion:
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=126016
Any input on that?
So my question is, what about a module/section/unit etc. completion option?
For example, at the moment in the quiz the logic is this: You can see the score if
- Either, you have the capability mod/quiz:viewreports.
- Or, it is before the quiz close date, and the "Later, while the quiz is still open, Students may review Scores" checkbox is checked on the quiz settings page.
- Or, it is after the quiz close date, and the "After the quiz is closed, Students may review Scores" checkbox is checked on the quiz settings page.
I am wondering if we can cover all the required cases by adding two columns capability and contextid to the grade_items table. These would be pushed in by the module. If they are NULL, the grades would be displayed to everyone. If not, they would only be displayed to users when has_capability($gradeitem->capability, get_context_instance_by_id($gradeitem->contextid)) returns true.
So in the quiz example above, whenever the quiz is created or edited, and on the first cron run after the close date, the following code is run in the quiz module:- If we are before the close date
- If the "Later, while the quiz is still open, Students may review Scores" checkbox is on, set the capability and contextid columns to null.
- Else set it to mod/quiz:viewreports, and the contextid of the quiz.
- Else, if we are after the close date
- If the "After the quiz is closed, Students may review Scores" checkbox is on, set the capability and contextid columns to null.
- Else set them to mod/quiz:viewreports, and the contextid of the quiz.
I think the way to do this is a core API fuction
grade_item_is_locked($itemtype, $itemmodule, $itemteminstance)
then change each module to call this function where necessary and display the warning/prevent the changes.
Probably the best option is a new capability 'moodle/course:editgradeswhenlocked'. If you don't have this capability, you are prevented from changing grades (in well written modules) when they are locked. If you do have it, then you can change the grades in the module, but are shown a warning when doing so (and the changes don't propagate to the gradebook, of course, since they are locked).
Anyway, we should decide what behaviour we expect of well-written modules and document it, so users know what to expect, and module authors know what they should be implementing.
To make all this work in a way that is easy to understand for users, I think locking/unlocking should be on a per module basis, not on a per grade_item basis. E.g. with a assignment scored against several outcomes, the whole assignment is either locked or not. You can't lock just one outcome. That's too confusing.
I'm not sure about locking on a per-module basis ... with this function the assignment can easily detect what is changeable for a given assignment and disable the individual outcomes in the GUI that are locked.
Do we imagine that the new gradebook is the only place for grades now, or do modules still maintain their own as well?
Maybe what we need is a gradebook configuration setting:
...Or, maybe a capability setting?
Yes the capability is exactly what Tim suggested and makes the most sense to me too.
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Grades#Core_API_functions
And I think that the appropriate level of detail is, for example for the quiz, to send each attempt score, and have the aggregation done in the gradebook (but probably in the default gradebook view, only show once score for the quiz).
That lets me rip the aggregation code and the mdl_quiz_grades table out of the quiz, and anything that simplifies the quiz is great. It also means that aggregation will be consistent between modules, which is better for users.
However, we probably do need an easy link in the editing quiz UI, to give one-click access from there to where you change the aggregation settings.
Hmm ... while the gradebook does support this (it's the purpose of the itemnumber field) I disagree with the quiz doing this in 1.9 ... is there really any desire from teachers to have all the individual quiz attempts directly in the gradebook? (rather than just clicking on the link to the quiz report for details).
I'm imagining those unlimited quizzes where one person does it 100 times (eg 100 grade_items/columns) and everyone else has blank scores .... I'm also thinking of calculations piled on calculations ... calculation precedence ...
I think to make this amount of data easy to handle in the gradebook GUI it is going to take a lot more work ...
Send attempts to the gradebook as individual scores:
How would this work in the following:
Student A enrolled in courses 1 &2 which are enrolled as child courses in meta course. Lets suppose the metacourse is used as a "site wide" induction type course with a (unrelated) fun quiz included. Should the grades appear in course 1,2, both (or perhaps none if unrelated to the topics od courses 1 or2.
Could extending the flow of information beyond enrolments also get a bit complicated when groups are involved?
Ditto for course two.
However, I don't consider myself an expert on how metacourses work, so this may be a silly idea. in which case shoot me down.
- Mary
Update (having read on in this thread)...
- I didn't think that if you enabled the grades to be seen in the child courses they would NOT appear in the Metacourse. Hmmm....maybe it does open up holes for data to be somehow jumbled, but I still like the idea of seeing the gradebooks via sections (in the child courses) as a mirror - but not as a feature to CHANGE the grades in the child sections.
I like the idea of using groups to manage sections, but I also know why our instructors don't enable this functionality. The groups option - if implemented course-wide and set up by section doesn't allow for cross-section interaction, and another issue is that students can't SEE who is in their group unless a group member chooses to participate*. Some of our sections are due to cross-listings of courses so a few are quite small and we roll them into metacourses to create larger groups to participate in. I don't know if this is making any sense...
* I know a work-around for this visibility issue is just posting the group lists, and our instructors are doing this. Have to keep in mind we're on v 1.6.2 and this may have been fixed in later versions.
I totally understand where you're coming from. I was going from the perspective that our teachers use one metacourse for multiple sections. The individual child classes (sections that feed into the metacourse) are hidden from students - they only see the metacourse. The instructor has one gradebook in the metacourse. The trouble is at grade submission time, the one gradebook in the metacourse doesn't sort the grades by students per section. So the instructors download and manually manipulate the lists into sections for grade submissions into admin & records system.
I was thinking that the hidden child courses would actually show just the gradebook mirrored in the metacourse. The instructor can't edit it in the child sections but can view it by clicking on each hidden section and getting a grade list for each section to download to excel and submit to admin and records for grading purposes.
And for some reason, using groups, unless the instructor posts to the students which group they are in, students aren't aware of who is in their group until other group members begin participating (this is in a fully online course).
It's much easier in hybrid/blended/traditional-web-enhanced classrooms than in fully online courses to explain the groups.
So, I think we're on the same page - I just wanted to clarify in case it helps the Moodle developers see different perspectives on how the metacourses are being used and the issue of the gradebook.
Thank you for sharing how you use groups and metacourses in your courses. I'm always open for more teaching pointers to pass on to fit all the varied situations we've got out there.
Peace out!
- Mary
I do see what you mean by separate groups and the gradebook - I really think that's cool. I just can't wrap my head around our current enrollment procedure for loading students (students don't self-enroll, we use LDAP, I think)...
I will bring this up to our sys admin, however and see what he thinks about how to load the students - then I can train on using the groups for managing multiple courses...
- Mary
- Mary
Getting down to basics my initial feeling is that Metacourses are used in such diverse ways that any move to extend and modify relationships with other courses is worthy of an entirely separate developement effort and combining this with the current thrust on the Gradebook is not the best way to go.
Caveat: I am not a developer.
Some thought would have to be given about students ... my guess is that adding a column will NOT affect the rows, so that you only always see the grades for students enrolled in the current context.
We typically give a score ranking the quality of a piece of work (example: good job that's level 4, poor work that's level 2).
We also need to provide a weighting for each assessment (example: Your year end project is worth four times as much as Monday's journal entry)
Is this covered? can it be done in some convenient way?
Absolutely no problem with that. Each assessment (ie grade_item) has a multfactor and a plusfactor field which can be edited easily in the gradebook (each column will have an edit icon).
Though here's a thought: the order these are applied will matter ... (Gx4)+3 != (G+3)x4. I had assumed scaling before shifting, but ... is the other way around ever used?
So we just need to implement one, and documentation it clearly for users, so they know what numbers to enter.
If the multiplier is 2, and the offset if 10, what score do you expect 0 to be scaled to? Surely, when the offset is 10, you expect an old score of 0 to get mapped to 10.
The scenario I envisioned:
That was a really hard ____________. Perhaps I should give everyone an extra ____.
Even the lowly zero person receives the extra mark, assuming this individual would also have received ___ better than zero had the assessment been fair in the first place.
Then the mark is weighted based on its importance in the overall evaluation scheme.
I think this fits into the predominant evaluation schema understood by the teachers I know.
I actually find the whole gradebook discussion to be interesting, since everyone seems to have a very arbitrary and personal (yet strongly) held set of philosophical/scientific/mathematical beliefs to support the voodoo they use when cooking up a final set of marks.
1. One comprehensive gradebook for a student, instead of one per course (i know everyone will scream).
2. Ability to email the entire gradebook to any email ID - parent / teacher / student / counsellor
3. Ability to not have particular activities of a course in the gradebook - we make SCORMs/quizzes etc for learning purposes only and dont want them to show up in the gradebook at all.
4. Student completes a course, moves to another one, unenrolling from the first one. Archive of all previous grades achieved has to be visible somewhere.
5. Gradebook shows students marks, highest in class lowest in class, average of class etc. for each activity or as selected
6. Lets say a student studies Maths in Year 1 , Year 2, Year 3. Gradebook should compare performance of student over years / courses, graphically also
7. There should be one "GradeBlock" instead of a gradebook, plugin the gradeblock as a sticky and all grades are visible whereever you are.
8. Option to create Sub Categories inside categories, allowing more flexibilty.
9. Abilty to "neat" print the gradebook in one A4 size paper
I'll stop....its 1 at night, will dream rest during the day
Please log on and play around with it. The idea is to approach the development of the gradebook from the bottom-up (we've been doing mostly top-bottom so far), from a user's point of view. Once we have a solid interface drafted up, we can start setting up unit tests that will guide us in the coding process.
The mock is a beginning !
But, you know what they say about assumptions
You're absolutely right on what they say about assumptions !
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Grades
but yes, only graded activities are shown, and you can "collapse" categories if you aren't interested in looking at them (just like now in fact).
and yes you can import or manually create arbitrary columns (that don't need to be connected to any activity at all).
Each grade can have notes attached (eg you might want to note that the student was "missing" next to a zero grade).
An ability to change the CSS for different sections within a gradebook would be great, for example, i could use different background colours for topics etc. Also, ability to compare any students performance with the class averages in a graphical manner would be of great help to teachers.
the mockup looks good! I have some thoughts about the interface:
- Is there/will there be a facility to use colour coding to show deadline stauts? This is something I've done for ages in my paper register using red/black pen, but it would be great to have it in moodle too. Perhaps a CSS class for those that are late, another for those where the student was absent, another when there is work waiting to be marked etc.
- What happens when I click on a grade? It would be really handy to have that take me straight to the piece of work and its grading interface.
- Would it be difficult to add tooltips with the status of the piece of work i.e. how many days/hourse late, how many times it has been submitted, grade history etc.
Your 3 suggestions sound reasonable, and the 2nd was already planned in fact. I hadn't thought about the status of the assignment. This will not apply to every grade, since some grades may be arbitrary (e.g. the teacher rates the students as to their participation, helpfulness etc...).
Also, grade 'features' such as the ones you describe will likely be different for each module (e.g. quizz has 'number of trials', but other modules may not have that). This will complicate the implementation of displaying these features.
However if this isn't already in the spec, it will most likely be added. The deadline status should be fairly standard attribute of work-based grades, so shouldn't be too hard to implement.
In project-based learning, there are often multiple self-assessments, peer-assessments and teacher assessments. One example is a research essay done in three drafts. Attached is the paper form used for it. Online we try to duplicate this system, and allow as many assessment cycles desired.
Assessment Sets: typically 5-10 assessment criteria. For example, essay introduction, essay length, essay format. The "set" has a title and could be reused and shared as a set.
Assessment Criteria: each criteria has 3-5 checkpoints/items which have descriptive and numeric properties (see attached).
Checkpoint Comments: these comments tell the student exactly what they must change to improve their grade in the next assessment cycle. I do three cycles in my English writing class. I allow even more cycles if students want to improve their grade--theoretically up to 100%.
Overall Comments: usually a short comment like "Excellent!"
Total Scores: we have three types of scoring
- self-assessment
- peer-assessment (averaged)
- teacher-assessment
The main problem we have is that the current Moodle assessment scales do not have...
- both descriptive and numerical scales to each criteria
- comments by criteria item
- total summary grade
- naming of sets of criteria
- systems for self and peer assessment
- saving and sharing of sets across course and site
Thanks! Don
Sets of outcomes, no.
Comments, yes.
Peer assessments, not as such (this is something that needs to be handled at the module level).
The gradebook in 1.9 is like a big blank spreadsheet which all modules can use to store their final results. Your project module can do a LOT of unique stuff internally even though it only puts one or a few columns of final grades out to the gradebook.
Good. I suspected that. Now how can we share assessment criteria across modules?
Can we develop the current system of sharing simple scales across modules? The project module, the assignment module, and any module with student-generated content will share the same scales. And yes, the assessments will eventually deposit some score into the gradebook. But creating the descriptive checklists is so time-consuming it needs a template bank or something to quickly copy and modify.
Re: Gradebook for 1.9 - A same grade for a group
I'm working on a project for assign a same grade to all users of a group,
but i don't know if this gradebook allow this functionnality ?
Thank you
Re: Gradebook for 1.9 - A same grade for a group
I discussed with primary school collegues. We in France have a complete table of end of cycle (3 cycles on 8 years) competencies, as a guide to build our job, from a single activity, to periodic program.
It would be appreciated
To import the competencies table in Moodle grading reference system.
to get the capacity to affect each activity we build ( as an assignement or a workshop ora lesson), a set of two to five specific competencies to be graded.
Then, when we periodically manage the children achievements, says by period (5 period in a scholar year), we would get a table of grades attained by effectively worked and graded competencies.
Thanks for your interest
I would like to be able to express the final grade (or final grades) with formulas as I can do with a spreadsheet.
I would like to have some operators like in a spreadsheet, maybe with the topX operator SUM(LARGE(TheRange,{1,2,3,4,5}))
And then to be able to use the names (or id's) of the activities to write a formula like with an spreadsheet.
As to do as single formula may become complicated then intermediate ones could be defined.
for example: having the activities a1, a2, a3,a4,a5 the teacher could define
Theory: a1*10%+a2*20%+a3*70%
practice: a4*50%+a5*50%
final:iff(AND(theory>=50%;practice>=50%);theory*50%+practice*50%;0)
Advantages:
- Flexibility
- Export to spreadsheet could include the formulas, changing the names of activities by columns
- Display the formula to students.
inconveniences:
- Not so easy to write a formula? (maybe now is also complicated)
- Possible syntactic errors, good error messages.
- Problems when activities are added or deleted
The only difference is that you name your columns yourself, and then refer to them using [yourname] in the formula.
For grades and quiz results, our "wish list" will be to have:
- Decimal/fractional grades (especially for assignments).
- Download of quiz results, including the students' attempts, questions, answers and responses. This is very important for Lab 'adaptive' quizzes.
Looking forward for more good news at MoodleMoot-Canada!
Ghassan
This is not something the gradebook should be involved with - it is quiz specific, and so is a feature that should be provided by the quiz module.
This is not available in core Moodle, but it is available as a third-party quiz report that you should be able to just plug in: http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=96
I think that the basic points of my proposal are:
- The syntax for formulas is the same as for spreadsheets (but internally can be translated to a php sentence)
- the formulas appear in the spreadsheet when you export the grades (if its openoffice, then better ) . So you get the spreadsheet with the grades, the extra columns and the final grade already computed, by means of the formulas. Manually changing a calculated grade for a student means that in the spreadsheet it also includes the value instead of the formula
- Al the methods discussed in this thread about how to compute the final grades, are done through pages that, at the end, generate a set of formulas. The advanced teacher can choose to edit directly the formula
We (OU) really want the columns to appear (by default) in the same order that the activities appear in the course, and we want the category of each column (which might be things like 'informal self-assessment' or 'formal continuous assessment') to appear appear in a row near the top of the table.
Is that going to be possible? what do other people want?
The purpose and idea of the gradebook in Moodle hasn't been thought of in a comprehensive manner. Why do we need a gradebook and what should it achieve ?
The gradebook should be a resource or an activity. It reflects the performance of a student, and there has to be one screen in which a student can see his overall performance in all courses too. The biggest problem of the 'gradebook' is its display location and tight integration into the 'administration' block. Also, the fact that only 1 instance of a gradebook can exist for a course.
Here are some scenarios which the present gradebook can't fulfill :
1. I would like to place the gradebook in an HTML block so that i can add more activities and resources after the gradebook, a forum to discuss grades, resource pages of comparisons and analysis of grades etc. If the gradebook were an activity or resource, this would be possible.
2. In a course, many teachers prefer to have separate gradebooks for a semester. In the next semester, while the same course continues, a fresh gradebook is required, without the addition of previous grades. At the end of the academic year, a complete gradebook is required, of all past semesters. If the gradebook were an activity, we could place a fresh activity each semester and there could be an option to add all previous grades to make a 'final' gradebook.
The attached image shows how powerful a gradebook should be.
This allows all sorts of "views" to the data to be created as blocks or whatever, including that you've described.
1) Ability to enter decimal points in any assignment rather than integer only dropdown boxes (this reported to gradebook)
2) Ability to have more than 100 points for a single assignment
3) Ability to upload grades from an excel spreadsheet
4) Have an option for "drop lowest" even when the grades are not all out-of-100. Since the average is calculated by summing and dividing by the total, it should drop the lowest percentage grade, not the numerically lowest.
5) We would like to add (or take away) points on the grade for an assignment or for the final grade
6) We would like a "late" checkbox that automatically decreased points for a particular submission
7) When we turn on "show percents", we only want the totals, not the percents for every single item (this may already be in the plan)
8) We need better ability to look at separate groups in the gradebook; we have quite a few multi-section courses (this also mentioned in other parts of this discussion)
9) Ability to print a paper-friendly list of missing assignments for a student or a whole class.
10) Vertical display of grades in student view
11) Gradebook V2 improvements provided by Jeff Graham (manual editing of grades, especially quiz grades, graded events)
I will end with a snippet from one of my instructors:
I want to mention, though, that after going back to WebCT for my Astronomy class this semester, I have a renewed appreciation for the Moodle Gradebook. On the whole is is much quicker, easier, and better than WebCT.
Thank you!atw
I've tried to find reference to this but is anyone looking at how the scales module or grade book can have textual scales linked to numeric values or ranges? e.g.
excellent effort = 10
good effort = 7, 8 or 9
satisfactory effort = 4, 5 or 6
poor effort = 1,2 or 3
no effort = 0
Why not just have numeric scales with a range of feedback comments you ask? That may be fine too but I wonder where these things would get defined? Is there a way of defining standard comments as feedback for insertion in the comment fields from a selection via a menu? Should this be defined in a scale, in the assignment/quiz etc. etc. or in the grade book?
A diagram to show the work flow of this may help perhaps I will do one?
I ask because I was wondering how the grade book will fit into best fit assessment scenarios for things like EdExcel DiDA coursework in the UK where you want to assign several marks for various components of an eportfolio and these are related to criteria? It would be easier to award the grades via textual reminders of the grades but that these equate to numbers for totalling up scores. It would be great if the criteria referenced scales of scores were able to be overlaid a course so that they wouldn't have to be set up on each individual course around the country?
An example from the DiDA best fit guidance may be a scale that shows the following textual scale but somehow this allows for assigning a score from a range :-
Some research and some SoAP = 1, 2 or 3
Accurate, current research and good SoAP = 4 or 5
Discerning, reliable research and very sound SoAP = 6 or 7
I'm beginning to think this is really best handled via the teacher comment field. It would be good if the assigning of a score then provided some default text in the comment field for later editing.
Would this be something that one would set up within the course and so shared via course backup or could it be a "schema of grading available in the grade book? Or is this what national or exam board standards assessment meta data integration will supply?
#1) It would be nice to have the ability to assign a code name to a graded activity - like we do in our manual gradebooks.
At present, the title we give assignments for our students to see is the same that is listed in the gradebook. This can make for some very long titles - and a very long scroll. Also, the grade alignment gets off, creating visual confusion.
Maybe create a few extra fields under each quiz setup, etc.:
Quiz Title:
Title abbrev/short name/code12-15 char. max?)
Gradebook options:
Use quiz short name in gradebook: (checkbox)
#2) (For me this is a BIGGY!!)
Is it possible to assign more than one grading scale to an assignment?
Elem teachers rely heavily on rubrics and sometimes external motivators, such as point reward systems.
For certain activities, points are given. Homework earns a regular homework credit, but then also, a reward point. Tests earn the regular correct/incorrect grade, as well as, reward points based upon their score. The higher the score, the more points. These points are then "cashed in" periodically for privileges or prizes (such as homework-free pass, extra free time, or (real special) small reading books, fancy notebooks, pencils, trinkets, etc. You have no idea how many tiny bouncy balls and yo-yos I've gone through! lol)
Right now, I have Scales set up for this, but I am limited on the activities I can "grade" this way because I can only apply one scale to each assignement.
Sometimes, there are assignments where I have to grade according to accuracy (regular grade) AND by a rubric (quality) plus I give Reward Points because these tend to be very difficult assignments.
That's three different Scales for one activity. I hope some of this makes it in!
Thanks for asking!
Martin,
My faculty would really like the ability to display progressive grades. An estimation of their grade to date in the course based on work due to this point in the course. Example: 60 points earned out of 80 possible at this point in the course.
- Hold/release. Currently, whenever a student's assignment has been graded the student sees the results immediatley. But what if the faculty wants to go back and readjust the final grade? It may be too late for a change of mind if the student has already seen her grade. This may be addressed by something like:
- Have a setting in the assignment creation page : hold grades for release / release immediately
- On the grading page an option Release now/ Release after [date/time] / Hold all (overrides setting)
- Also a reminder on the grading page of the current grade release status.
- Faculty may want to go back to a previous course to revisit how they did their grading. Here is where the notes will really come in handy. But once students are unenrolled from the course all their grades disappear. It would be great if there were some means to annonymize student names in a gradebook after the course has finished so that the grades and comments can be preserved after the original students are unenrolled.
Hi
We have several courses per subject, for example, our Year 9 students are enrolled on the following Geography courses:
- Expedition Tourism
- Expedition Oceans
- Expedition World and Maps
- Expedition Earthquakes
- Expedition People Everywhere
- Expedition Coasts
Students study roughly 8 subjects, which means they end up with potentially 48 gradebooks they have to check to keep track of their progress.
Please could we suggest having a method to pull together all the gradebooks for a student so they can be viewed centrally from one location.
Thank you in advance
Daniel
It would be really useful if the same was also true for the teachers. A teacher can view all their gradebooks from one central location, where they have several courses per class.
Perhaps this is something which can be collated using the enrollment key.
I'd really like to be able to track a students use of the course through the gradebook, for example, (in a secondary setting) if I set a homework of 'post at least once to the X forum and reply to at least one post', or 'post at least 100 words to X wiki', I'd like to be able to somehow have that come up in the gradebook as either done or not. similarly, I'd like to be able to see if they have accessed a certain resource, so that if I wanted them to read or print it, I can quickly see who in my class has not accessed it at all just before I start my lesson.
I know that this is already possible through the logs, but its not immediately clear who in the class is missing from the list of names and it doesn't allow many items to be seen on the same screen. I really need a way of showing the whole class in gradebook style, so I can tell at a glance who I need to check up on and perhaps keep track of whole class moodle use in a 'participation' category.
Would it be possible to build a simple interface to allow a query of the log tables to be entered as a gradebook item? Something like activity/resource + deadline + action required?
Matt
Also, with regard to "maxgrade", I see that the default is a hundred; I've read previously that this can be set to something else, but will we (or faculty) be able to set this on a Moodle-wide or class-specific basis?
The default for maxgrade and mingrade will be overridable at the site and coruse level.
I currently try to develop some user adaption features in a plugin designed for new moodle 1.9 which will use the new gradebook API and database schema (I know it still is under construction ).
For moodle the new 1.9 version gradebook seems to be an excellent data source for doing user adaption on a high level, so I currently try to develop a plugin using data stored in the gradebook. So on the high level I don't need to worry about the internal structure in the activity modules.
I studied your spezification, but I do not understand in which time interval the grade data from the modules is written.
Will there be really ALWAYS the current grade data in the gradebook?
I think about some legacy modules like SCORM activities (in the current implementation) for example or some third-party modules which store the user progress in their internal database while proceeding through the different SCORM content objects. This data can currently be accessed by the scorm_grades() function in the "good old" 1.8 way.
When will this function be called by the legacy framework of the new 1.9 gradebook? Will it be alwas called when necessary so the data is up-to-date? How does the gradebook system know when it has to update its data?
I notice it says the interface is changing rapidly due to user requests. Here is a request...
The "Sort By" drop down list should contain a variety of options besides first name, last name, rank. As you know, the Profile now has definable fields and those fields may be the primary sorting categories. For example, we will often sort by Student Number, because to submit our grades on paper forms, all students are listed by ascending student numbers. We also have an extra defined fields for name, because in Japanese, names have three sets of first names and last names (kanji, kana, romaji), not just one set as in Western countries. All of these will need be options for sorting.
Awful lot to take on board and digest. Just wanted to put my 2 pence worth in!
We love Moodle at our College, but the biggest issue is about seeing an overview of submitted work for a student for all courses.
I'll explain how we work.
We primarily use Moodle for submitting assignments - music, video files, documents etc. We grade them Resubmit, Pass, Merit, Distinction.
Students are enrolled over 8 different courses (or Units, as we call them).
What my tutors are crying out for is a page that allows the tutor to see the progress of a student for all courses. They are finding it difficult to manage students work when they have to look over 8 units to gather individual's data.
I guess it's like the MyMoodle function, but just having tasks, submitted and Grade for all units.
I'm sure this has been suggested and hopefully it will be implemented for new versions!
Thanks for all the hard work
DJ
In the UK the main "competitor/partner for the gradebook is Capita's SIMS.net Assessment Manager. They way this is used means that a head of department/faculty can get overviews of grades/assessments from all of his/her teacher's classes for comparison or for ranking across a whole year or band.
If you are not use a single course for a subject or band then using groups you need this ability to view across courses. I wonder if meta courses could help here if they were extended to allow aggregation of meta course gradebooks - possibly to much of a complication and roles across the site would be better.
Another need is for viewing only certain grades across any course such as a Deputy Head would do for getting the key assessments out of the system. Will the display/reporting layer allow for cross course reports that would allow this.
I guess this will make use of the reporting plug-in interface so a report for head of department/ deputy head would be possible. The question is really will we have whole site roles that can view the all courses or selectable sets. This would best be implemented so categories of courses could be selected.
Any chance that one day that report plug-ins can be designed on-line like database module templates rather than coded?
We give tests to professionals that are required by state law. Many sites offer these test BUT the professional submits the test results to the state to comply with the law.
So, we need Moodle to keep track of the passed tests they take on the moodle site. We would also like the professional to be able to enter the name/site and credits earned they took on other sites. Since the state validates the credits Moodle just needs to track them so the professional can see what credits they have and what they need.
Did I do an ok job of making that clear ?
Mike
Please give us the option of removing "-" grades from the population completely for the purpose of statistics generation.
Report Card
Transcript
Ability to see grade from each class the student is a member of so they don't have to go to each class. This is the same, I think, as the Report Card and Transcript.
Thank you for any consideration.
Folks wanted a picture view - a report card is a one page view of all of the courses that a student is (or has been) enrolled in and gives all of their course grades as well as overall combined grade from adding up the courses.
Ex:
Student: Joe Shmoe
Course Selections: Jan 1 2006 - Dec 31 2006
_______________________________________________
#1 Class: Organic Chemistry
Asnmt 1 Asgnmt 2 Course Result:
50% 100% 75%
_______________________________________________
#2 Class: French
Asnmt 1 Asgnmt 2 Asgnmt 3 Course Result:
100% 100% 100% 100%
_______________________________________________
#3 Class: History
Asnmt 1 Asgnmt 2 Course Result:
0% 0% 0%
_______________________________________________
Combined Report Result: 58.33%
Version 1.9 - Expected June 2007
I am getting into this discussion a little late, but here goes.
It appears to me that there are different views for the Grade Book. One for teachers who want to see all the students and all their grades in that one class. Another view is for a student who wants to see only his or her grades from all the courses. In addition to the two views already planned, I think it is useful to create a view for administrators who may wish to list all the students and all the courses, sorted either by courses, or by students.
Finally, there is the need for creating transcripts for individual students, which can be a special case of the student view of the grade book.
Teachers may wish to have the flexibility of adding new columns (i.e. assignments, quizzes, or activities) to the grade book. I did not see this functionality in the docs page. Perhaps it is part of the AJAX functionality.
In addition, teachers may also need to be able to add or remove students from the grade book, and handle exceptions, i.e. manually adjusting or overriding any particular student's grades. Again, this may be already part of the AJAX plan.
I think it is overall very exciting to have the Event API and the Core API because this will open up Moodle to all the flexibility that you envision.
Thanks,
Andrew
From what I can see this functionality may be included in 1.9. Is this the case? Is it worth moving to 1.9 to have this functionality (we are just piloting 1.8 at the moment)?
Many thanks.
I have been working on a block to do what you want. You can try it out and download it from the links below:
download zipped file:
http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=894
view demonstration - you need to login as guest:
http://www.lambdadev.net/lambdamoodle/course/view.php?id=13
Please send to me any comments and feedback.
I am still working to improve it so your suggestions will be most appreciated.
Thanks,
Andrew
1. Please consider the user case that an instructor might have 1000+ students in one course. Would the "Grade locking," "Grade visibility" features features still "usable" for such large classes? This is the case here at SFSU and we had to do some local customization (including adopting gradebook plus v2 and modified it a little bit) to make gradebook really "usable" for our teachers. The really great thing about GBPv2 is that you could use your "tab" key to manually enter grades, which is really great! Would this be possible for the upcoming new gradebook that would be included in moodle 1.9?
2. Export/Import feature is GREAT! By the way it would be great to have import/export available in both Gradebook and "assignment" level (this is particular useful for teachers who teach large classes!)
3. The current GUI (based on the mock-up) seems to be a little bit confusing, could we invite some end-users (teachers/students) and have them look at it, to see if they could understand how to use the new gradebook without much re-training? User-friendly (and course-centered, for university-setting) has been the strength of moodle, let's don't lose this strength...
Just my 2c.
eg http://test.moodle.com/grade/report.php?id=2
If you make yourself an account and enrol in that course you'll automatically be made a teacher.
About the tabbing, that's definitely on the list (MDL-10414) ... see MDL-9137 for all the status.
By the way, I would suggest to load the test.moodle.com with a least 50,000 dummy courses, as, this would really shows some of the performance issues that a larger institution would encounter. We created a script to automatically create these dummy courses quickly, if it would be helpful I would be happy to post them here or in the Moodle QA forum, thanks!
http://test.moodle.com/grade/report/grader/index.php?id=2
Re: Gradebook for 1.9 - your input wanted
I created an account on test.moodle.com but when I try to see the grades (clicking on the left menu) I get a "No reports accessible" error message and after that a 404 error " The requested URL /course/view.php:id=2 was not found on this server." (note the : instead of the ? in the url seems there is a problem in the redirection)
Using the url given in your message, I get a "Désolé, vous n'avez actuellement pas les autorisations pour effectuer ceci (grader:view)" (the error message is in french an approximate translation is "Sorry you don't currently have the rights to do that")
can you elaborate the use case when you have thousands of students in one course?
How would you like to see the results reported?
Would you want some kind of filtering of the students, such as by last name, by enrollment date, etc?
Would you want to export the report for the entire class of thousands of students to, say, an Excel spreadsheet?
Thanks,
Andrew
I just tried out the new 1.9 dev gradebook on my local dev machine and here are some of my initial impression:
1. The current GUI of Grader report might not work really well for large classes (again, for classes with 1000+ students). It would be better to use a GUI similar to the participant list (see screenshot) so that instructors could quickly locate a particular student's current grade.
2. What's the main differences between "Grader report" and "User report"? If the "User report" meant to be the report to "whom" you logged in, then it should probably exclude instructor. Currently when I login as an instructor I could still access the User report (and of course no grade was shown).
Just my 2 cents. I will continue to look at the new gradebook and check with our instructors to see if we could come up with some other (hopefully useful) comments.
By the way, this thread is getting long and load really slow. I just noticed that it seems for forum you can not set up to display, say 20 replies per page. This should be a quick fix and I just reported this issue to MDLSITE-224
If you think this need to be addresses please vote for this issue too, thanks!
I like the participant's filtering system as you said. I will try to learn to generate it.
Do you have any problem with downloading large Excel spreadsheets? I have been unable to download files with large number of rows, like over 100. This problem is in Gradebook 1.7. I will test it in later versions and see if it persists.
Importing the whole Excel file to replace the grades seem a bit overkill. Is it possible to perhaps use the mechanism in the flat file user bulk upload, to replace existing user grades and add new ones, using a CVS text file with specified header row containing the field names of the columns. This may be trickier to do than just uploading the whole Excel file. Then again, with the grade structure spread out over a number of tables in the table, any kind of importing will not be trivial.
I am a newbie, so please excuse any obvious blunders and let me know, gently if you please
Andrew
I just went for a visit to the new gradebook again and I maybe found another problem: Is it possible to read the gradebook data with an automated tool?
In detail: Users usually know where to find the desired grade when they search for it by hand. In my opinion it is not possible for an automated tool to search for a certain grade because it does not know what a single grade means. There are currently lots of different grades in the gradebook: Manually entered grades for an activity, calculated ones, too, grades for category aggregation, final grades for a course, ...
So for exmaple I want to know if a student was successful in an activity X, or not (by simplifying this problem into these 2 values good -- bad). How can I determine this with the gradebook? Which grade item is the right one to tell me this? Sorry, but my tool in fiction will not understand the "outcomes" and what they mean. There must be another solution for accessing grades without using semantic interpretation...
So it would be nice if anyone could tell me a solution for this problem. Maybe we need to store some additional data for the gradebook (?) But I am sure that automated grade data tracking will be a nice feature not to forget, even for future purposes.
Yours, Gert
can you please explain the automated tool? How does it access the Moodle Gradebook? Do you export the data into Excel first, and then import the spreadsheet to the automated tool?
A lot of information is already in the Gradebook, so perhaps it may be possible to extract it to your automated tool by using an intermediate solution, like a block that export what you need into Excel.
How automated is the tool?
Andrew
Hi. Just a note of input. I use Moodle for providing Continuing Education. As part of that I have to export grades and various info for all courses and users and upload to an automated system. The entry into the database is triggered when the participant passes a quiz and generates a certificate. This way I only receive export information of people who have passed courses. The information is gathered from the person's profile page, the course settings page and the certificate module. In retrospect, I would have all of the information that comes from teh settings page be integrated into the certificate module for simplicity. Anyhow, Ballistic Learning designed this gradebook for me that exports all information into an Excel spreadsheet and includes all relevant information for CEBroker uploads.
I have been using it for a while. The version they developed was on Moodle 1.6. Not being a developer, I am not sure how easy it would be to modify for 1.8/1.9. Nevertheless, I have found that particular plug-in to be imperative and would love to see it available to other users as an optional module.
If you would like to look at it, you can email me at dr.snipes@allceus.com
Hi
We are a corporate environment - not a university. Our needs are very basic and yet we are struggling with meaningful grade scores iro number of points = a percentage and then keeping track of each staff(student's) progress in a gradebook/database. We need to report by Group company (category) then by department (sub-category)
We use Articulate presenter & quizmaker and we get a 1 or 0 for pass or fail BUT only the student can see the latest % score. We are testing with Moodle 1.8
Please help us test the new Moodle 1.9 Gradebook
or in a new thread here:
Gradebook
I do no think I understand the question.
May be you can elaborate? What is a marking period?
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Michael, in such case you can either have a separate Moodle course for each period, or have one course and put grades into sub-categories in the gradebook, and hide those categories that are not needed at the moment.
This all depends on course organization, imho.