Forums | E-Learning Practitioners
Grades plus pilot
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Grades plus - planning
08 March 2016, 12:50
I just wanted to find out at this stage what strategy the 3 schools have for releasing this functionality to students.
- Do you have a plan? – are you going to release this?
- Have the academics in your school been made aware that this pilot is coming?
- Given the very limited time – how are we going to capture feedback from students and staff?
- Will you be needing any help from the E-learning Unit and if so what?
Simultaneously we need to be thinking about the next phase of the development of Grades plus (i.e. the Moodle 3 upgrade in July.
08 March 2016, 16:01
My plan is to check Grades plus myself immediately after the upgrade and then, provided it works as I expect it to from earlier testing, I will invite Maths staff and students to take a look at it.
Do I need to do anything special to release it? I'm assuming it will be there for everyone to use much like it was for me in the test system.
I have referred to Grades plus on one or two occasions in all-staff emails over the past few months and in particular I used it as justification for putting all our in-term assessment marks in QMplus this year. (The first-semester marks are there and I hope to have most second-semester marks in QMplus before 22 March.) I think I also mentioned Grades plus in an SSLC meeting a while ago. So both staff and students should have a vague idea that Grades plus is coming.
I'm proposing to invite staff and students to email any feedback they may have to me. I will then aggregate it and pass a summary on to the E-learning Unit. However, I don't think I will be able to do that until mid-April; I hope that will be soon enough. Based on past experience, I'm not expecting a lot of feedback!
I don't think I need any help from the E-learning Unit, but if you have any better suggestions that what I have outlined above then do please let me know.
I think the main Grades plus enhancement I would like to see after July is a facility for any staff member to pick any student easily and look at their grades, and for advisers to have very easy access to the grades for their advisees. That's the main way that I see Maths staff using this facility.
10 March 2016, 11:12
SBCS:
- Do you have a plan? – are you going to release this?
Via the landing page message board / tutorials.
- Have the academics in your school been made aware that this pilot is coming?
Only to some. Will be announced at the next staff meeting and in teaching groups.
- Given the very limited time – how are we going to capture feedback from students and staff?
SSLC. Maybe a survey.
- Will you be needing any help from the E-learning Unit and if so what?
Guides for students and staff on how to use would be useful.
Provide posters that we can put up in the school to raise awareness
29 March 2016, 15:25
I don't think I will get any more feedback, so here is what I received.
Students
All responses were very positive. Students would like Grades plus to be extended to include overall module results and results for all years. Here are the individual comments:
| I like it, easy to access easy to read, better than having to log onto mysis, would be nice if you included all grades across all years (as both year averages and individual module components) so we'd be able to see progress across the years. |
| I am a third year maths student. Would it be possible for you to upload my grades from the first two years? |
| This is an excellent facility. I especially like the histograms and being able to see how I faired compared with the rest of my fellow students. |
| I have checked out the grade plus function on QMPlus and I have to say that I love it! It really gives you a better understanding of how you are actually doing and how you are doing compared to your peers (which is always encouraging or eye opening Some times..) I would eventually improve the colour scheme and the graphics to make it more appealing but otherwise everything so far is awesome! |
|
I looked at the gradesplus page with great hope, but feel let down as it is just for the coursework element of the masters level courses. They have no mid/end of term exams. It would be fantastic if students could see their grades from previous years. At present, I have no way of checking my results from 2011/2012 in Mysis. Wouldn't being able to see a predicted degree class be more of an incentive to students? Seeing a third in cold hard writing on a screen is far more shocking than having to sit and manually add all the module results for each module for each year, then working out the degree class with each year's weighted result. And I can't even do that, as I can't see my first year results. I love the way the histogram shows how I do against my peers. Personally, it makes me work harder... |
| Gradesplus looks really good! It would be nice if we could see results for modules taken in previous years there as well. Also it would be nice if in the 'mygrades' section we could see the module names and not just the module codes. |
Staff
Only one staff member responded, as follows:
| Well, I tried to see the grade histogram of my module, but all I got was "Warning: unresponsive script"...... |
30 March 2016, 11:49
Hi Francis,
Thanks very much for posting this, it's a useful start.
Some of the E-Learning Unit were at a Moodle conference last week and saw that at least a couple of other universities are working on similar things, done slightly differently. One, UCL, reported back from a pilot that they had run and the ability to see grades and feedback from previous years was also high on the list for students.
It is an interesting point about only being for the coursework portion of modules and not including other items such as end of year exams. I'm suprised that students can't check grades from previous years in MySIS. Something we need to consider however we don't want to make this an alternative view on to MySIS.
As the first release of Gradeplus focussed on the student interface, there isn't much there to entice staff at the moment. Although there should have been more than an error message.
We still have many questions about Gradesplus and the direction it should be going in.
Gill