Recently at a meeting I walked away with a to do list that included:
- find a digital drop box plugin
- find a way to grade items without giving them a permanent grade (ie give them a letter grade that you can then go back and change at a later date).
Here are some notes on my progress.
Digital Drop Box Plugin
Essentially it seems like the professor just wants a place to store files. There are number of ways to do this here at Wheaton outside of Moodle.
There is a plugin that allows you to upload files, and if you want share the files. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work with Moodle 1.9 yet. There are a number of posts on how to get it to work. Once I get a test system I’ll try out the options on that (rather than something that is in production
Posts on making the plugin work:
- http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=91089 — farther down on the page it discusses some of the issues people have experienced as well as possible solutions.
- http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=442 — the MyFiles download page. the layout is weird…so you’ll have to scroll over to get to the link
Moodle Gradebook Plugin
What are Outcomes
Moodle has something called Outcomes. Essentially an outcome allows you to assign a point, letter, or other type of value without actually assigning a grade. Students can see these outcomes if the professor chooses to show it to the student. The professor can then go back later, say at the end of the semester, and assign a numerical grade.
The Moodle admin has the ability to create an Outcome scale for use by all classes on Moodle. I created one outcome scale, Letter Grades as Outcome. The scale is the usual letter grades assigned by professors.
F-, F, F+, D-, D, D+, C-, C, C+, B-, B, B+, A-, A, A
Professors can choose to use the outcome scales supplied by the Moodle Admin, or they can choose to create their own outcomes.
Using Outcomes
- In the administration block on the course page click the
Outcomes button. Here you can choose to use the supplied outcomes or create your own outcomes under the edit tab. - When creating the assignment (or by editing the assignment) you can choose which of the Outcomes scales you chose in step one you would like to use for the assignment. Note: It is possible to use multiple outcomes scales for one assignment. This might be something you would do it you wanted to grade content separate from grammar/spelling.
- Enter the gradebook for you class and choose the assignment you are using outcomes for. You can then assign outcomes for each student. Below is an image of this:
- You can then go back at a later date and assign a grade value to the assignment.
There is also a video about this. How to Use Moodle Outcomes
Removing The Lowest Grade
Moodle doesn’t remove the lowest grade per se, however it is possible to remove empty grades. So after assigning grades find the lowest/highest and change remove the grade.
For calculation, go into the My Report Preferences and change the settings at the bottom, specifically the “Grades selected for column averages”. An image of this is below:
This seems a little clunky, but I’ll search around and see if there is a better way to do this.