[ARCHIVED] Ideas for teaching new faculty how to use SpeedGrader and practice grading?

[franke]

Hi all,

For the past two years I've been revising and updating a course for online faculty called "Teaching Online Effectively" which is designed to teach new faculty how to teach online at our college as well as how to use Canvas and complete the steps to get their course ready for students for the upcoming term.  Faculty are enrolled in the course as students and they have to complete various assignments throughout the three week period and it is moderated by an instructor that we hire.  The last revision to the course was based on giving faculty a chance to "practice" using the SpeedGrader tool as we got a lot of feedback requesting that since they were students in the course they couldn't do that.  Here's how I set it up so that they could practice grading:

• I created a separate SpeedGrader Demo course and enrolled all faculty in it as "teachers." In the course I gave each faculty member a module with their name on it with 2 assignments--one discussion and one assignment.  I masqueraded as 2 students and submitted to both assignments in each module.
• I created an assignment in the "Teaching Online Effectively" course that directed faculty to go into this "SpeedGrader Demo" course and grade all of the assignments within their module to practice the SpeedGrader features in Canvas.
• The instructor of the course "Teaching Online Effectively" could then check in the "SpeedGrader Demo course" to see if those faculty had completed their grading successfully and if so, they would receive a "complete" score for this assignment.

This new addition worked relatively well, but could use some tweaking.  We ran into some issues with faculty that were confused since there were two courses (and didn't know how to get back to the original)--but this was a minor issue.  Mostly, the tedious part was this most recent run we had 20 new faculty members, so I had to create 20 modules and 40 assignments, then masquerade as 2 students and submit to each. Talk about time consuming!   It was especially painful for the instructor who had to grade each student and go into each faculty member's module to make sure that they had completed it.  Since everyone was a teacher as well, he couldn't really set up a notification for when teachers had done the grading, so he had to go into each module and check periodically to see if this was completed.

Does anyone have any ideas of a more streamlined approach to teaching these faculty how to use the SpeedGrader and letting them use it?  Anything that would help us with making our process easier would be appreciated!

Thanks in advance for your help!

[sbastian]

I tried something similar and came to the same conclusion as you - it's tedious!

One thing I've done recently, is to have the faculty go into student view, submit a dummy document to an assignment (they'd need to create one first), then exit student view and grade the assignment in SpeedGrader.

This has the added benefits of getting them used to using student view and in creating assignments.

The caveat is that the assignment needs to be published first and if the course is "live" that could confuse students if no other assignments are published yet. The workaround I use then is to give each faculty member a "sandbox" course site they can play around in.

I then encourage them to use student view and that graded assignment submission in class to show their own students how to access the instructor's comments as we find many students don't seem to understand intuitively how to do that.

I'm interested in what others have come up with!

[biray]

Have you checked out Mobile Series: Speed Grading without Crashing​ ? This might prove to be a great resource to train instructors on using the mobile version of SpeedGrader.