Gradebook Futures: Kill All the Clicks!

[cwruck]

​Tap/click map to enlarge

Christi Wruck

Instructure - Higher Ed & K12

When it comes to time spent grading, fewer clicks, more bulk actions & more automation is what dreams are made of. We'll talk about making Grading more flexible and intuitive. Joins us to review big projects that solve mountains of little problems. Please plan to post your questions and feedback here. We'll have a lot to cover and may not have time to field questions during the presentation.

[cdh5049adm]

Probably a dumb question, but will the presentation will be uploaded?

[TKim]

Bulk Grade adjustments is a great idea!

[cau]

Will the comment mode comments be exportable via csv?

[TKim]

One problem currently with "treat ungraded items as zero" is that those zeros don't factor into student view. My gradebook says that student Bob is getting an 87% but Bob looks at his grades and see a 94% because unless I manually put a zero in an ungraded assignment, that zero doesn't factor into Bob's view. Can this be fixed? Thanks

[daguado]

Whoohoo! To Total grade adjustmental!

[dhulsey]

Hey, Kristi! Could you answer a few questions for me?

Will it be possible to message students from context cards?

Would you consider allowing rules for late assignments, muting etc. to be set by category for those of us who use weighted grading?

Is there any chance that we could message students who for the total grade or that message students who will have more filters: message students who have missed x number of assignments for instance.

Will the new commenting tool in speed grader include saving comments for reuse?

Will  Arc function I'm Speed grader to leave video assignment comments?

Thanks!

[#8]

Great session! We're thrilled with the progress in grade book. We especially like the speed grader facelift with the compact and speedy layout. Definitely a time saver!

[kroberts]

Thanks for all the great work -- these designs/features in progress will be major improvements.

I have a couple of questions about total grade adjustment:  1) can adjustments be made via import? 2) can adjustments be made in the GPA scale (if that was selected for the course grading scheme)?  Grade scales applied to assignment categories will be efficient.  Will the selected grade scale be clearly visible in the assignment, without lots of clicking deep into the settings?  About the 3 totals (which seem clear to me as described in the text), will the values be the same in the UI, export, and API?  Currently, some values are client side.

[daguado]

Hi Christi,

I wasn't able to stay after the session to ask you about notifications.  I'm hoping you were referring to announcements.  We would love for announcements to be differentiated just like assignments.  Where you can choose the section to send the announcement to.  If this is not your area, would you be able to point me into the right direction? 

Thanks for an incredibly informative session.

[Jeff_F]

I have the same question as we couldn't hear but half of what was being said. 

Suggestion to the AV crew for next year:  needed speakers in the middle or back of the room as it was a very long room.

[s_eberhard]

Thanks for a great session and I can see you and your team had put a lot of work, research, design and thought into these changes.

A few quick questions/suggestions:

1. Post Grade setting as automatic (which is what we have now) vs manual - would there be an account level setting that admins can set which one as the default for the account/sub-account?

2. Total grade adjustment, in the future, there's plans for private comments for staff, could a student feedback/comment be considered as well - so staff can provide reasons for students to improve communication and transparency as needed. (Of course, if these can be imported and exported would be wonderful!)

3. Is there any plan for an individual assignment gradebook; that is, a gradebook works like the normal gradebook for the course, with all students listed, except it only shows 1 particular assignment of interest. When you do export/import, also only does it for that 1 assignment.

Thank you!

[s_eberhard]

Student view has a little checkbox to toggle between the final score and the current score.

Go to one of the gradebook and click on an individual student's name, that gives you the look and feel of what the students see.

On the RHS, look for the checkbox next to "Calculate based only on graded assignments".

Default is the current score. The idea is great and hopefully once students have learnt how to use these features, it would motivate them to work harder! All part of the learning process.

[s_eberhard]

As for notification, it'd be great to see notifications for mark changes for staff. So they can be notified when marks are changed, and they can choose their own preferences from notification settings.

Obviously we can get quite creative here and add lots more flexibility, but to start off, just some notifications for staff would be great!

Currently we still struggle with the security around mark changes given the combination of grade history shows 2000 grade points and no grade change notification for staff; some large courses (with over 1000 students) and some small (~200 students) but lots of quizzes (20+) with 3+ attempts each, finally 48 hour default log off (which we are reviewing).

[cwruck]

I'm told that we'll be posting recordings of the presentation next week!

[cwruck]

Eventually, yes. We would like to make export/import more granular and allow comments to be both exported and imported.

[mikescheid]

It was a bit unclear, to me at least, the timeline for the different things we saw in this session. Is there information as to when these features will be implemented in the production grade book?

[kona]

mikescheid​, I think this is probably the page you could follow to get updates on this information - Canvas Studio: Gradebook Enhancements

[cwruck]

Glad you think so Tommy! Not something anyone explicitly asked for, but one of those great features that arise out of hearing stories first hand from instructors in User Interviews. Shout out to all the institutions that let me sit with their instructors!

[cwruck]

1. Yes it will be possible to message students from context cards. We're not sure exactly what that looks like yet, but that is a large part of the motivation for the Student Context Cards.
2. Yes! I think we will eventually get to a point where we will be able to allow more granular control over late rules so that you can apply the late rules to groups of assignments. But our first attempt will be a bit smaller in scope.
3. 'Message students who' from the total grade is actually in my designs already! I only highlighted a few things in the presentation, but we are planning to add that and for the exact reason you illustrated. Message students who have missing assignments, have a total grade below X... etc.
4. The 'draft state' in Speedgrader is not a 'comment bank'. We're working on designs for a comment bank that will allow you to manage your saved comments, but we're not quite there yet.
5. Well, yes and no. You can currently use Arc inside of Speedgrader, but not in the way you're thinking. The Assignment comments which are over on the right side will still be there, but you'll also be able to use the Arc commenting inside of the Arc frame~ sort of the way that you can mark up an assignment using Crocodoc and leave comments on the page, but still leave assignment comments with speedgrader. Does that make sense?

[cwruck]

So happy to hear that! It's a small change, but we feel like it will have a big impact.

[cwruck]

I expect two things to fix this, Tommy.

1. Late/Missing rules will allow those zeros to automagically be entered for you.
2. We're actually getting rid of the 'Treat ungraded as Zero' feature. All this feature does is toggle between Current and Final grade. In this new UI we're making that more clear and easier to navigate.

[cwruck]

Glad you're excited for it. It's just the V1 of this feature, with Public/Private comments coming later, but I feel like it's a good step towards a bit more flexibility for our users!

[Renee_Carney]

Hi daguado​

I was not able to make it to Christi's presentation, however I do know that the notifications project she is working on is separate from announcements.

You may want to follow this feature idea, which has been officially addressed by product, and is on our radar! 

[cwruck]

Hey Karin! So glad you made it to the Gradebook presentation! Sorry I missed you in Keystone!

1) Total Grade adjustments via import may eventually be possible, but that will probably come in a later project where we revamp the import/export process.

2) Total Grade adjustments will work with any grading scheme as the adjustment will be made via percentage or points and then translated in the Total Column to the corresponding Grading Scheme.

3) Glad you like the Bulk Grading Scheme application. For now, seeing which Grading Scheme is applied to an assignment will work as it always has. We are working on making the Assignment Creation page a bit more efficient. I think this work will cover what you're asking about~ being able to see selected Grading Schemes when you're creating the assignment without any clicks. 

4) Yes! the 3 total grades will be the same in the UI, Export and API.

[cwruck]

1. It's a good idea to add an Account level setting for Posting Grades. It's not something we had planned for our first version, but we'll see if its something we can squeeze in.
2. Yes! We'd love to do both. Our first pass will allow for the adjustment with a note to the student about the adjustment, but ultimately, we would like there to be good communication about the details of this adjustment with the student!
3. There are plans to do import/export on a more granular scale, but we don't currently have plans to do single assignment based grading.

[cwruck]

The good news is we're working on expanding grade history right now!

I got a feature suggestion while I was at Instrcturecon that sounds like it might be useful to you, as well. The suggestion was that we find a way for an instructor to lock down grade changes~ sort of like moderated grading. If a grade is going to be changed by someone other than the moderator, it would have to be approved before it's released. What do you think?

[mikescheid]

Christi,

Is there any way we can get more detail that what is in the Canvas Studio Page about what Enhancements are coming when? We are a bit anxious about the canvas grade book as we are looking to solely use it this coming year and have a newly created SIS Sync do the work of syncing our grades to our SIS. Our anxiety revolves around the fact that this will be new and a big change for our Teachers, Students, and Parents this coming year.  We are hopeful things will go well but also looking for a number of the enhancements to be ready ASAP like the Statuses and the navigation/column features. We could really use a bit more info on when some of these features will hit... Both for training and testing purposes. Is there any that you can commit to having ready by the time school is starting mid next month? I know that is a big ask

[lindalee]

Hi Deactivated user

It was nice to meet you at InstructureCon! These are really exciting changes coming to the gradebook!

Will the Post Grades feature function like Post Grades in moderated assignments? And if so, will it be tied to the Moderated Grades permission? Or will it be available to anyone with edit grades permissions?

Thanks,

Linda

[cwruck]

Posting grades will function more like Mute and Unmute functions and less like Moderated Grading functions now. But I had some interesting conversations about grade change/posting permissions for TA's and Instructors at Instcon. I'm thinking it might be a string to pull on. Something I'll probably throw into my next gradebook research project.

[dhulsey]

Thank you! I think the part about Arc makes sense.

[kroberts]

Hey Christi,

Yes, sorry we didn't get to catch up at Keystone! You and your team are welcome to come back to UW anytime, of course!

To clarify re #2 -- since our faculty grade on a 4.0 scale for all undergraduates and most graduate programs, they don't want to adjust final grade by % or points, but by 0.1 or 0.2.  I'm hoping they will be able to enter those so-called display grade values, and not have to do the calculation of figuring out how much percent or points to add to get the final desired grade.

Please oh please add adjusting total grades via import to your roadmap as soon as you can! We have lots of instructors/departments whose grading workflow won't be (efficiently) supported until they can do that (e.g. intro to chemistry that uses T scores and Z scores and normalizes across all lecture sections....)

[junyang8]

I didn't get to go this one. I'm wondering when the presentation or the .PPT will be made available? 

Thanks.

[kona]

It's up to the presenter whether or not to post their presentation file. As for the video, it normally takes them a couple of weeks after the conference to get them converted and available.

[daguado]

Thanks Renee, very helpful.  Hopefully there will be a simpler way of sending announcements based on sections.

Regards,

Daniela

[MikeM]

This idea is a currently be voted on here. Please go vote!

Idea: to be able to message students who are in a particular section. This is helpful when there are several sections merged into one Canvas Shell.

[Stef_retired]

Voted!

[biray]

This session recording is now available here:

[de_millington]

Hi Christi,

CSV export will be essential in the event teachers/lecturers need to download results prior to courses archival. Will these column comments report back the respective posts to the learners, or will it be privy only for Teachers/lecturers? Also, I assume the option is in Beta testing now. As our intuition is new to Canvas, would that mean we can request a trial through our Canvas Account Manager now or do you have another timescale for Beta release? Thanks.

[cvmitchell]

How can I access the crosshairs? As it stands now, I can not easily verify that I am on the correct row of student when I am inputting grades into the gradebook. It's incredibly frustrating that the student name is not highlighted or somehow isolated. Where is the crosshairs setting?