Do you use grade book columns that are not associated with content in your Learn course? If so, what situations do these apply to? What do you track in these manual columns? How do students become aware of these graded items and their associated grade and feedback?
Hi, Gail. I'm afraid I don't fully understand your response. Could you please offer more detail about what you mean by, "There are a handful of situations where this is useful, none of which is the student 'getting away with it.'"?
Brad - do you mean manually-created columns, or manually entered grades?
Grades of some sort are posted in about 70% of our courses. This may only be a single final grade, or it may be all of the marks throughout the semester. Other assessment tools are adopted at much lower rates, however (Assignments ~52%, Tests ~19%), so there are a lot of manually created columns which are not associated with an assessment or other object in the course.
For most of our courses, students turn in paper copies of their work in-class, or complete a presentation/demonstration without turning in a file. Sometimes feedback is given on the Grade Center column, but most of the time it is given on the paper itself, which is handed back to students in class. Ditto for tests, which are used much less than other tools in Blackboard. There would be a mention of these somewhere in the course, but it may only be a description on the syllabus or schedule. Attendance/participation is also usually manually created, since we do not have a university-wide attendance system.
Students are usually informed because the faculty member makes an announcement (via Blackboard or in class) that the grades have been posted. Students also check their grades quite frequently, so they see when a new grade has been posted. We get a lot of questions from faculty about how their students actually view any written feedback in Blackboard, suggesting that there are improvements that could make that more visible to students (particularly because, if faculty take time to provide feedback, they want students to read it!).
I would love to see mobile notifications, or email notifications, for new grades posted. If there is an option for it now, I've missed it, I'm afraid.
We have the same uses, but regarding how the students know they have a new grade available, they should get a notification email.
But we are currently facing a issue regarding this point (I have a ticket going on...)
Also if you use BBmobile learn or BB student apps, students will get a notification more or less 30 minutes after the grade is available
Hi, it apears that it is normal not to have an email when a new grade is entered in a manually created column. Do you confirm ?
But with the Blackboard app you get a push notification.
Thanks,
What's the advantage of requiring physical copies of papers to be submitted (instead of uploading them as files in Blackboard)? Have students and/or instructors ever been polled about possibly uploading papers instead of turning them in in class?
Personally, I think there are many more advantages to having students submit papers through Blackboard. For us, it is an individual decision every faculty member makes, and many faculty prefer paper submissions. In most cases, I think it is just easier for them (it's what they are accustomed to), although I also think that using an Assignment is easier than managing so much paper! Some faculty also prefer reading and marking on paper, particularly those with vision issues related to long periods of using a computer screen.
Hi, John,
As well as being an Instructional Designer at my community college, I also teach English, both F2F and online. My English department requires a certain number of papers must be handwritten in class for all freshman writing courses (ENG 101, 102, etc.). This is a perfect example of the need to utilize a manual column in Blackboard. I often use manual columns in my gradebook for things like extra credit or penalties (e.g., excessive absences); I even use them as a "checklist" to keep track of students who I have had to refer to academic intervention -- I set the primary display to "Text" and then enter the date when I made the referral.
Hope this helps! -- Celeste Sherry
One course that comes to mind is a Chemistry course where they have a manually added column where they enter the initials of the lab assistant/supervisor of each student. They can then easily organise by that column so that those lab assistants/supervisors can enter grades for those students when they do lab work. The instructors could have used a smart view instead, but IIRC that practice began before smart views were introduced. They additional benefit is that when the Grade Centre is exported to Excel, that data remains too.
We use manual columns to enter participation grades or extra credit which is related to the course, but not tied to any assessment within Blackboard.
I enter manual grades in the gradebook for students' participation in discussions.
I use manually-marked columns, which are not linked to quizzes or assignments, for publisher content. I then export spreadsheet from the publisher, copy/paste grades into Work Offline Bb download spreadsheet, and upload grades back to Blackboard. It is possible to setup LTI and grade sync with most vendors today, but there were other limitations involved, so manual entry was a best option.
I've seen manual columns used to add group belonging, or to "flag" some students, or to indicate they've performed a certain task (like ungraded oral presentation).So the info recorder in manual columns are not necessarily numbers/grades, and not necessarily destined to be shown to students, from what I've experienced.
We use the Grade Centre to track grades in all of our creative arts courses, and add columns for information such as the ULN (Unique Learner Number) and ID for the awarding body, which are needed when we export the grades from the Grade Centre and send them to the awarding body for certification. This saves having to enter them manually after the export.
We also have a series of columns to record the students' destination after completing the course, which the lecturer manually enters.
We use standard grade columns for work not completed online. For instance, hand-written exams are still a popular form of assessment and feedback and marks for them are put into a standard grade column.
For vivas or presentations there might not be something to turn in either, so the mark and feedback would be put into a standard grade centre column.
We have in the past also used them for physical pieces of work handed in (architectural models, physical projects like art work) to our helpdesks. However we recently got Blackboard consulting to write something which works like an assignment but is submitted/receipted by the help desk staff member receiving the work on behalf of the student (students can't submit to it). It's very new but we think this will reduce the number of standard grade columns we need.
Also there have been cases where multiple blogs have been set up (such as for groups) but one column is desired for the marks, but this is more of a rarity.
We have our own internally-built online Assignment Submission system which is in use.
Manually-created Grade Centre columns are actually automatically populated by some process IT came up with from the Subject Outlines system which contain an assessment name, due date and value: e.g.
Essay 25/03/2017 20
Presentation 06/05/2017 20
Final Exam 30/06/2017 60
creates 3 new GC columns, named with the name of the assessment, with a value of the value of the assessment and the due date populated.
Any Blackboard assessments in the Subject Outline do not get automatically populated by this process (I think) as columns will already be there for them.
Students get marks and feedback back through our internally-built online Assignment Submission system. They can also see the marks in their My Grades in Blackboard.
Hope that helps.
Our faculty have recently been charged with creating and maintaining a Bb grade center for all courses both online and face2face. Several of the faculty do not use Bb for anything in their course but are now faced with creating a grade center, so all of the colmns in the grade center are created manually.
Manual grade columns are used for anything where something is not submitted electronically. That could be an assignment physically submitted in the F2F class, presentation, participation, group work, etc.
Journals are graded holistically in Bb so if an instructor wants to give a weekly journal grade, they could create separate manual columns.
I've used a manual column to create an attendance grade and attached a rubric to keep track of the days absent and it auto calculates. A Hospitality instructor also attached a rubric to a manually created column to assess a practicum lab.
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Yes, we have a column that can trigger a completion as an instructor override, and the instructor manually enters a value. There are a handful of situations where this is useful, none of which is the student "getting away with it."