Tag Archives: d2l-grades

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Browser Tabs and Keyboard Shortcuts: My Secret Productivity Weapon for Batching Repetitive Tasks

Sometimes your learning management system just doesn’t provide the large-scale bulk editing or bulk creating options you need it to. So, when you need to make big changes to a course, it can seem like you’re going to be clicking away all day.

A few days ago, I had an instructor who wanted to convert all fifteen of his discussion assignments from whole-class discussions to group-based discussions, and the student worker I would normally delegate this task to was out of the office. I was faced with what would normally be a half day of tedium, creating the group-based discussions, copying the prompts from fifteen discussion assignments into seven group-restricted discussions per assignment, and re-linking the group forums in the modules.

Fortunately, this wasn’t my first rodeo. I got my start in instructional design as a student worker myself, and I found a massive time-saving technique that not only dramatically cuts down the time these things take, but also reduces the opportunity for errors. This project took me about 25 minutes.

I’m going to share the secret to my success–a way of batching these repetitive tasks together.

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The Magic of Text Expansion: Type in a Code, A Paragraph Appears

At our recent DOTS Alumni event, a faculty member from the College of Education was going to present on his methodology for efficient and effective grading. He then had a conflict with the event, so I presented in his place – and, as per usual, a colleague’s good idea sparked an interesting research path.

Dr. Philip Gnilka introduced me to the idea of using an Excel spreadsheet with coded comments to give feedback to students. He was inspired by the process detailed in Andrew J. Czaplewski’s article, “Computer-Assisted Grading Rubrics: Automating the Process of Providing Comments and Student Feedback”.

The article details how to grade with an Excel spreadsheet, a self-contained document with an assignment rubric on one page and the codes for pre-drafted comments on a second page. For Philip, this works well. In the spreadsheet, he can fill out the rubric on the first page, type in the codes that refer to the comments he wants to give, and pull those comments into the page with the rubric. He then uses the Save As function to save a copy for the student and either upload (to D2L) or email the graded document for the student.

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“Could Rosie the Robot grade my papers for me?”

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At the end of each term, as you pass your harried colleagues in the hall, there’s likely a common cause for your collectively frazzled state: the stack of papers (or digital file folder of papers) that awaits your grading. They loom there, at the corner of your desk, in the middle of your table at home, or in that desktop folder, and you can feel their mental baggage as you hustle through the rest of your end-of-the-quarter tasks.

Grading writing is hard. It takes time and thoughtfulness on your part, and even if you calculate how many hours of grading you have ahead of you (perhaps trying to limit yourself to 30 minutes per paper, knowing full well that your students [hopefully] spent far more time than that writing the paper), you’ll still be reading papers at all hours, struggling with eye strain and red ink visions and mental exhaustion because if you see ONE MORE comma splice…

All of this is what makes the concept of automated grading at least tempting. Continue reading →

Quick and Easy Curving

Something Happened! — That Sinking Feeling

Sometimes the grade distribution on your exam seems a bit low — maybe even horrifyingly low.

Perhaps there wasn’t enough time to focus on a topic due to a holiday, a bout of illness struck, or maybe there was a question that was ambiguously worded. The assessment might be brand new and still needs some tweaking, or maybe the students just didn’t get it — there was a collective lapse in memory.

Whatever the reason, the grade distribution is low and it feels bad for you and worse for your students.

What Happened? — The Empathy Hat

Now that you’ve identified there is an issue, the next step is to identify the reason for the low scores. Continue reading →

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Keepin’ It Idiomatic: Basing Assessment on Authentic Knowledge

I first had a try with Garage Band about three years ago.  I liked the ease with which I could get started, the editing tools were easy enough to use, the sound libraries are realistic, and even finishing a track was relatively simple. However, after three years of using it on and off, I am using different software for most of my recording needs.  Simply put, Garage Band is hard to play.

Let me add a little background to this.  I’m a former music teacher, performer and clinician with a Master’s degree.  I’ve got more than twenty years experience on three of the instruments I have at my disposal through Garage Band, but I struggle to play them well in this software.  Why?  They are not idiomatically designed.  I just can’t get used to trying to play guitar or bass with my fingertips on a screen, touching to play a note. I’m expecting to finger a note, and strum or pick with the other hand.  Here it takes all my fingers just to punch out a decent bass line.  Oh, and did I mention that if I don’t hit the note in exactly the right place, the string will bend?  Ask any guitar player and they’ll tell you that bends aren’t easy to do, but Garage Band makes it almost necessary to bend if you want to play at all.  I miss the feel of the strings on my fingers too.

Now I know that Apple can’t make all those things happen.  There isn’t a way, at least not yet, to make the keyboard actually feel like I’m pressing keys, or make guitar chords that feel right. (By the way, these are next to impossible to do by hand.)  But I did have a hope that perhaps someone who is an actual musician wouldn’t have to feel like a fool using this software.  After many years of playing an instrument, muscle memory takes over.  You may not realize it, but you have learned to expect certain position cues, responses and reactions from the instrument that just aren’t there in a virtual capacity.  Unless the virtual instrument is an instrument first and a computer controller second, those features may never be there.  Whose guitar has only eight frets anyway?

Just as it is important to try and design music performance software that will actually be musical, it is important to make these sorts of connections in all kinds of education. Continue reading →

Low-Cost Student Assessment

Student X has done the reading all term, they promise! It just happens they missed [concept covered in reading] and must’ve been [doing a good student-like activity] when you talked about [concept covered in lecture]. Now it’s finals week, Student X has no idea what is going on, and it’s going to hurt to fail them. If only there were a way to ensure they were doing the reading (or at worst, have documentation when the grade challenge comes)…

I have been working with James Riely, who teaches a hybrid Data Structures course in the College of Computing and Digital Media, to develop a series of low-value quizzes so he can painlessly assess student reading, lecture attention, and concept mastery. Not only are these quizzes useful for James, but they also allow students to self-assess their grasp of the concepts so they can reach out if need be. Continue reading →