Grading Discussion Forums

Hello everyone,

I hope you're weathering the Moodle transition well. First, a note on the illustration. I was looking for some sort of semi-creative way to illustrate grading and stumbled on this image via a Google search. It links to a blog that I thought you might enjoy, whether you have a theological bent or not. Here's the link to the blog: http://facultyblog.eternitybiblecollege.com/2013/05/god-loves-creativity/

Now, onto business. I recently got a question from Dr. Mary Borden on grading Discussion Forums in Moodle. The issue seems like a common one so I decided to share her question and what we figured out via this blog.

Basically, Mary typically gives each student one grade for their participation in a forum, as opposed to individual grades for each post. She also offers the students formative feedback but not in the forum itself, as it is feedback that she feels should be between the student and instructor. What she found when she went into the first discussion forum for the U.S. History to 1865 course she is teaching was that the forums were set up with a bunch of functions that stymied her ability to grade in this manner.

We outlined her concerns in an e-mail to various members of the Moodle support team as follows:

1. How can an instructor look at all of the postings that an individual student makes without having two computer screens or constantly scrolling up and down the forum? In Angel, instructors were able to sort a forum by student name and were able to see (in the grade submissions function under utilities) how many posts a student made and how many posts s/he replied to. Clicking on the numbers would let the instructor see all of the posts.

2. How can a grade be entered manually in the gradebook for the forum?

3. How can an instructor deliver individualized feedback to students on their participation and work quality in the forum?

We weren't able to resolve the issue through correspondence with the support team, so we began tinkering with settings and functions in her course. Our tinkering solved the problem, as far as we can tell. Here's what we did:

1. If you go into the M1 discussion forum and open the settings block, there's a tab that states "View Posters" and has an magnifying glass icon next to it. If you click on it, it opens up a window that lets you see how many posts each participant in the forum has made. That function resolves the "number of posts" criteria that instructors typically use in grading a forum.

2. If you click on a participant's name, you can send them a message. That resolves the matter of private feedback.

3. If you click on "Logs" (which is also in the settings block), you can see which posts each student read and/or contributed to. You also can see the posts themselves and the replies they made. To do this, change the button that says "all participants" to a specific person. I tested this function out with a number of students in Mary's course, and found that I was able to read a) initial posts they made and comments from others than ensued; and b) the initial posts they commented on, as well as their contributions to the conversation. 

That seems to ease up the issues of formative feedback and monitoring participation. 

Here's what we figured out with grades:

1. If you click on "edit settings" while you're in the forum, you will go to a page that says "Updating Advanced Forum in Module 1" (or whatever forum you happen to be working with). In there, you can make a bunch of changes. Under Grade, there's a sub-category of Grade Type, which is set to "rating". You can change it to "manual." Under "ratings", there's a sub-category of Aggregate Ratings, which is set to "average of ratings". You can change that to "no ratings". This all seems like it would resolve the issue of students having a low rating on one post that pulls down their grade regardless of the quality of their other posts. It also gives the instructor the ability to grade work in a forum as a whole without worrying about whether a one-sentence throwaway remark from a student who otherwise made a slew of quality posts would hurt the student's overall outcome in the forum.

2. There's also a category called "Activity Completion". Students can manually mark this area as completed, unless the instructor turns the function off. In this category, the instructor can determine when an activity is completed by setting up certain criteria (such as a minimum number of posts and replies to others) or leave the activity open indefinitely, which I know some instructors like to do. 

I hope this information helps, and you're able to make use of it.

Best wishes,

Himanee

Basic changes to individual course sections

Hello everyone: Consider this post Himanee's quick and dirty guide to Moodle 101. I have the happy (or perhaps unhappy, depending on one's perspective) circumstance of not being under pressure to prep a course to actually teach this term so I am using the week between the Faculty Reading Period and the start of a two-month reassignment to work with my colleague Sheila Aird on prepping a section of Digital Storytelling that we co-taught in January for fall for her to teach separately in September and for me to teach either separately or with her in 2014. As emphasized in my previous post, I am learning as I go.

Here's how to start editing the course:
1. After you've logged into Moodle and found your course section (hover over the My Courses tab and click ... yes, the TechHelp desk had to guide me toward this bit of wisdom), turn the Edit button on. To do so, click on the orange button on the top right side of the screen. You'll know it's on when the text changes to "Turn Editing Off."
2. The course will be organized into sections, which are essentially the things we understood as "modules" under Angel. The sections will be arranged in a variety of different ways, depending on how the course template was migrated from Angel to Moodle. My colleague Nicola Allain is going to help me figure out how to rearrange the placement of sections in a couple of days so I'll update you as I can.
3. When the Turn Editing button is activated, you'll see a bunch of icons within each section. However, the only section that you'll probably see as open is the one that is currently highlighted. If you click on Edit Settings under the Settings tab, which will be either on the left or right side of the computer screen, and change the "format" from "Onetopic" to "Topics," you'll be able to see all the sections of the course.
4. Here's a quick guide to what the icons mean:
a. The pencil lets you edit the section title.
b. The green arrows let you move the items in each section back and forth horizontally, so you can list them as main topics or subtopics (sort of like the folder within folders approach that we used in Angel).
c. The cross-bar lets you move items within the section. So, let's say the learning contract is the last item in the section and you want it to be the first. Use the cross-bar to position it to where you'd like it to go.
d. The flower-shaped sprocket with a pencil in the middle lets you edit within the item.
e. The X lets you delete an item altogether. This is a permanent deletion, so be careful when you use it.
f. The tiny eyeball (which is so tiny that it barely resembles an eyeball to me!) lets you hide or reveal an item.
g. The tech info folks tell me that the last two items probably won't be used much. They're in place to assign students the role of course assistants and, well, I'm not sure what Personalized Learning Designer is for. If and when I find out, I'll let you know.

As far as I can tell, any changes that you make are implemented automatically. When you leave the course and come back in or when you refresh your computer screen, you'll see the changes.

5. You might want to add articles, web links, or other resources to individual modules. I haven't actually tried to do this yet, but my understanding is that you simply click on either "Add Resource" or "Add Activity" and the program guides you through. Be a little careful for now with "Add Activity" because my understanding is that the Gradebook is much more stringent and less controllable in Moodle than it was in Angel. I'm looking for ways to get around that.

6. If you want to add additional sections (or Modules, if you will) or move sections around, here's what you do:
a. Go to Edit Settings. Under Format, change to Topics. In this case, you need to save the settings by going to the bottom of the page and clicking Save Changes.
b. After you're in Topics mode, the "cross-bar" icon will be your best friend in terms of rearranging your sections, or in terms of moving materials out of one section and into another. So, for example, if the instructor of Hip-Hop America decides that the video lecture by KRS-One fits better with Module 4 than with Module 1, the instructor can move it. Similarly, if the flow of Transformations of the Colonial Experience would work better if Modules 2 and 3 were shifted, you can move the Modules.
c. When you're in Topics mode, you also can create new sections. To do so, go to Edit Settings and under "Formatting Options for Topics format", you'll see a place where you can designate the number of sections you want your course to have. Choose accordingly. To give an example of why you might want to do this, I'll go back to the section of Digital Storytelling that I am working on with Sheila. The course announcements, a semester-long blogging project, and a pile of supplementary readings all were contained in a section labeled Module 1 when they really each needed to stand alone and be at the top of course page so that students would be able to find them. We created three new sections for these items, and then moved the materials to the appropriate places.

The final point I'll make for now: Most of the movement of materials from section to section and the creation of new sections is done by "drag and drop." That can be a bit of a pain because computer scrolling functions often pause mid-stream and sometimes when a hundred people are on the server, it slows down. Just be patient, and be careful. We did find in making some of our changes yesterday that sometimes sections "disappeared" or got automatically renamed before we could get them to their appropriate spots. Nothing got lost, however, as far as I can tell. I finished the initial cleanup of the course this morning on my MacBook and did find that the drag-and-drop was a little easier because I could use one hand to move the scroll bar up and down while keeping the other one on the mouse with the cursor directed to the item or section I was trying to move.

I hope this is helpful. Do post comments if you have questions, or if you have discovered anything else that might be helpful for all of us.

Also, one warning: I don't have access to your sections. The Office of Integrated Technologies hasn't granted us this privilege yet. So if you want me to look at something you have done, I won't be able to do so. I can, however, access the Pristine Master copies of the courses so we can compare notes that way.

Best,
Himanee

For instructors who teach courses I coordinate

Me, at the National Day of Service before
President Obama's 2013 inauguration.

Hello instructors,

Before diving further into the Maddening Moodle Muddle, I wanted to reiterate a few basic policies and practices that I hold vis-a-vis the courses that I serve as Area Coordinator for. These courses are currently: US History to 1865: What Does It Mean To Be A Free Nation?; US History Since 1865; US Women's History: Lives and Voices; Transformations of the Colonial Experience; Historiography; and Hip-Hop America: The Evolution of a Cultural Movement.

1. I view all of you as great, qualified instructors and I trust your decisions. I monitor classes as I can, but many of you have been teaching for ESC (and teaching more generally) longer than I have so I hold you capable!

2. That means, please, by all means, put your personal mark on the courses that you teach. Add Course Announcements, supplemental resources, lecture notes, thinking points, and even alternate assignments as it makes sense to you. If you can drop me a note via e-mail letting me know what you're doing (or would like to do), I would appreciate it. Keeping tabs on new activities, changes, etc., will be helpful for all of us in the long run as we'll have a continually growing pool of fresh ideas and approaches.

3. There are a few things about the online courses at ESC that cannot be changed. These are: the course description, the required texts, and the documents that are in the course regarding college policies. I have revised the course descriptions for all but one of the courses under my coordination since I joined the college in 2010, and plan to tackle that last one as well as revisit all the existing courses once our Moodle transition is completed. Textbooks are ordered months in advance through the college bookstore and often are tied directly to student financial aid packages. So changes to texts are also changes that require a multi-step and lengthy process. College policy documents are well, college policy documents. We need them to stay intact.

4. In the past, under Angel, we were able in some cases to arrange for an individual course section from a former term to be poured into an instructor's section for a new term. I do not know at this point if we'll be able to do this. So, please, if you want to implement your changes from one term to the next, keep a copy of them, in a Microsoft Word file or something similar. I personally tinker with my own course sections each term because I am always finding new things or ideas that I want to try out. I encourage you to do the same.

5. Specific changes to the Moodle course templates poured into your individual course sections are just as possible as they were under Angel. ESC policy states that instructors should seek AC permission. Consider the permission granted. The next post will offer some suggestions for how to go about making changes. Remember, that I'm learning how to do this at pretty much the same time as you all are.

Best wishes,
Himanee