Hi all, we've implemented short essay questions in our hack of the lesson module, which we'll have a beta soon (this was done in lesson because a specific client wanted it there).
The reason I'm posting here is to get some ideas on how folks are thinking short essay questions should be handled.
The way we're doing it is to have the question asked in the lesson, where the student fills in their answer (or answers if multiple questions are asked).
On completing the lesson, the student sees their grades for the automatically graded lessons and is informed (if there were essay questions in the lesson) what % of the total points remain to be assigned after the instructor grades the essay question.
The instructor can open the edit page of the lesson and see if there are questions to be graded. They get a screen listing the questions that have been answered by student for that lesson, then they can click on the student's answer, make comments, and grade it on the point scale that was assigned to the question (our verson of lesson also has a multipoint scale assignable by question).
The grades are added to the student's score for that lesson in the gradebook, and then the instructor has the choice of emailing the student with the grades and the comments for the lesson's essay questions (the instructor can email all student's at once or one student at a time).
Essay questions can be regraded simply by re-editing the comments or grade, and the new grades can then be emailed.
So what do folks think of this sort of format for grading short essay questions, and what changes would you make if you could?
Thanks!
(PS I can post some screen shots of the the beta if folks are interested).
Does the instructor start with an executive summary page? Such a page would have a list of all assignments waiting to be manually graded. Each one listed would have a link to click to get straight to the assignment ready to grade. As each assignment is graded, it would disappear from the summary of outstanding grading tasks.
Hi Ian, what we did is similar, you see a list of students and next to them a list of the essays waiting to be graded.
Once graded, the essays change status (color change and underline) and once emailed to the student they change status again.
So you can see at a glance the list essay questions, which ones have been graded, and which ones have been sent to the students with comments (if entered) and grade.
But the questions don't disapear (they fade to gray and italics) as we wanted to make it easy to re-grade or re-comment essays if the instructor wishes.
Once graded, the essays change status (color change and underline) and once emailed to the student they change status again.
So you can see at a glance the list essay questions, which ones have been graded, and which ones have been sent to the students with comments (if entered) and grade.
But the questions don't disapear (they fade to gray and italics) as we wanted to make it easy to re-grade or re-comment essays if the instructor wishes.
Well done. How about a toggle to redisplay the page with only the outstanding work showing? It's a warm fuzzy feeling for the grader to see such a page showing empty when the chore is finished.
"you see a list of students and next to them a list of the essays waiting to be graded"
I am not really a teacher but very familliar to the student's point of view. Therefore I have a problem with that list of students. I have always wanted the student to be anonymous when essay questions and assignments are graded but for some reason we have always been forced to put our name right on top of every single paper. I have always had the impression that there are many lazy teachers out there who simply look at the name of the student and then grade the essay.
If we are to implement this in Moodle I would like the teacher to get a grading view where he/she can see all the response texts but none of the students. The teacher can then reorder the texts and put the best efforts on top and the worst at the end. The limits for different grades can then be marked.
I am not really a teacher but very familliar to the student's point of view. Therefore I have a problem with that list of students. I have always wanted the student to be anonymous when essay questions and assignments are graded but for some reason we have always been forced to put our name right on top of every single paper. I have always had the impression that there are many lazy teachers out there who simply look at the name of the student and then grade the essay.
If we are to implement this in Moodle I would like the teacher to get a grading view where he/she can see all the response texts but none of the students. The teacher can then reorder the texts and put the best efforts on top and the worst at the end. The limits for different grades can then be marked.
I don't agree, Henrik. We often have students who have "dyslectie" (can't find the Englisch word. It means they have a reading/writing disability). If their disability is medicaly proved, they get a compensation (e.g. spelling errors don't count for their grade, more time, etc), so their disability is already calculated in their grades and don't has to be considered at the end of the year.
That's one reason why a teacher MUST know who's assignement he's grading. I believe most of the teachers are so fair to read the whole assignement and not just the name 
The lecture feedback model (which is getting rave reviews where I am) already
provides the sort of functionality mentioned above, I think. .
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=8837#48271
Tim
Thanks for the reply, Tim.
However, I do not see mention of this in the module you suggested. I am looking for something simple, such as a check box for a quiz that says "publish averages of all test takers to students."
In any test or quiz, students want to know what the average grade was. In a small class the instructor can handle it, but for online classes with rolling admission and hundreds of students it would be impossible.
Also, I would like the capability, of a grade on a test or quiz to be automatically e-mailed to the student, instructor, or another party. Again, I am looking for a simple check box.
There are quiz programs out there on there that do all this and more. I was just wondering if Moodle has any of this built in. Maybe it's right there in plain sight...but I am unfamiliar with Moodle...
This shows the kind of functionality I am looking for: http://tesol.net/scripts/QuizTest/
Perhaps I can just install this program and link a Moodle module to it?
- Tony
We have an option to send the quiz scores (in the upcoming release of our module) for the essay questions. The rest of the questions in a lesson are automatically graded, & the student sees their grade at the end of the lesson. If essay questions are used, the email tells the student their final grade, automatically graaded questions + essays.
The average idea is a nice one! We have an option for publishing high scores, mainly to encourage students to take non-graded practice lessons, but it should be pretty easy to publish a running and final total of the scores also.
We'll look in that for the beta release.
Thanks!
The average idea is a nice one! We have an option for publishing high scores, mainly to encourage students to take non-graded practice lessons, but it should be pretty easy to publish a running and final total of the scores also.
We'll look in that for the beta release.
Thanks!
Hi Tony,
sorry I misunderstood. You are right there is no way of having a mail sent our or the average published. Testing is not Moodle's forte due to the general ethos of the system but it is getting better all the time.
I used to use QuizTest and continued to do so for quite a while after I started using Moodle because it had timed tests (only recently integrated into Moodle) and for the email functionality. When two email came in at the same time I could see if the response were almost identical. I can do that using the log function of moodle too but it is nice to be in real time. Also QuizTest while free and modifiable is not GPL so even if one modifies it, as I did a bit, it is impossible to share that with others. There are various improvements available for the quiz module available on the forums.
I look forward to Michael Penney's beta essay question module.
Okay. Good! I guess I will be waiting too, or using QuizTest. Thanks.
Its september 6, Where is the essay question hack.
Hi Steven, we put essay questions into a new version of lesson.
You can read about it and get it here:
http://learn.humboldt.edu/course/view.php?id=21&topic=3
back up everything before installing. The zip has a readme with installation info.
You can read about it and get it here:
http://learn.humboldt.edu/course/view.php?id=21&topic=3
back up everything before installing. The zip has a readme with installation info.
I didn't see any info on installation in the read me. I'll figure it out though.
I realize you are still testing for 1.4 so maybe I should wait.
Hi Steven, sorry I see that didn't make it into the readme, it installs
like a standard module: replace lesson, add the lang files to en, visit
admin, and it will run the database upgrades.
I've just tested it with 1.4 MySQL and it works fine.
In edit mode you'll see form labels (Jump: jumpto[0]), this is part of our section 508 code, but you can add a 'class="hidden-label" and set it's visibility to hidden in your style sheet to get rid of them.
We've added this to our version of formal white, and you can also download that (below the lesson zip file) and install it to get rid of the form labels--it also works on 1.4 (or just copy the styles from styles.php to your own theme).
I've just tested it with 1.4 MySQL and it works fine.
In edit mode you'll see form labels (Jump: jumpto[0]), this is part of our section 508 code, but you can add a 'class="hidden-label" and set it's visibility to hidden in your style sheet to get rid of them.
We've added this to our version of formal white, and you can also download that (below the lesson zip file) and install it to get rid of the form labels--it also works on 1.4 (or just copy the styles from styles.php to your own theme).