Reporting Grades in Two Separate Classes without a manual process

[j-vanwagner]

I submitted this as a ticket and I still have not gotten a response from support. I'm hoping I can get support here as I'm meeting with this group tomorrow.

We have created a manual course for a non- degree required, non-credit, but part of curriculum. I have faculty asking the following question: We are wondering about the best way to set up our Lab Safety Course (manually created) so that multiple courses and course sections can easily use modules from the Lab Safety course and so we can also most efficiently track the training status of hundreds of students. For convenience, it may be easiest for individual instructors to import the safety modules they will be using for their course. But if the modules are exported to individual courses how would we be able to track the training in one course or location? Our faculty do not have permission to cross-list, I saw that may be a plausible solution. However, I am only a department of one and will not have the bandwidth to do that every term. Is there a possible way where the scores could be recorded in both the manually created lab course and the official required course for credit? They will want this to be as automated as possible. However, I know our limitations here. I was unsure if you had any recommendations on what to do.

[KyleighBecker]

Howdy! 

Could creating program level outcomes work for that? And tracking the students based on the outcomes? 

I don't think* there's a way to auto-populate scores from one class to another. My university does have a department that tracks student progress in the program via program level outcomes. If you are tracking competency, that could possibly work. Each instructor would just have to always go in and make sure they're marking the rubric for the outcome, though. 

To make it easy for faculty to get whatever modules they need, you could upload all the modules to Canvas Commons and direct instructors where to find them, and they could import as needed. There is a way to restrict to institution-only, I believe, if privacy is a concern. 

Good luck! 

[j-vanwagner]

Kyleigh, thanks for the idea! I can see if they want to try something like that. We are still newer to Canvas and have not focused on using Outcomes yet. I appreciate the feedback on using it!

[jb2483929]

If Outcomes doesn’t work, you could do an export/import of the gradebook, but there are caveats. (Any automated solution would involve programming using the APIs.)

-Export the gradebook once everyone has completed the training.

-I would say to just import the gradebook file from the manual course into each section. And while you can tell Canvas to ignore all the students that are not in the section you are importing to, unfortunately you have to do this one by one for each student each time you upload the file. That would be a lot of clicks. See image.

-So instead, you would need to export the gradebook from each section, then copy/paste the lab safety column from the manual class’s gradebook csv into each section’s exported gradebook csv. Then import/upload into each course.

It would probably be easiest if you have access to do this in each Canvas section, especially to avoid any FERPA concerns about grades.

Let us know if you get any better ideas from support!

[paul_fynn]

We use Zero Credit modules for this purpose which are 'real' non credit bearing units managed within and reporting to our Student Information System. These have wide application and whilst they do not have effect on credit, being incomplete can be used to stop a student from graduating (eg where non credit external funding requirements need to be signed off by the student).

The alternative would be to look at badges or credentials, but arrangements for these seem quite fluid at the moment.

[j-vanwagner]

Paul, the issue we have is that anything "non credit/manually created" is not in our SIS and "will never be." I met with the group and I think we figured a work around. They are going to manually add students to this course, and monitor from there. They will just have to "pull" their grades from the manual to the actual course. Kind of cumbersome, but it's about the best solution we could come up with.