Gradebook setup - Moodle Tutorial

- [Instructor] In most courses, it's important to track the progress of the students. This allows you as the instructor to see whether the students are learning the material and to identify any skill or knowledge gaps that exist. It's also important for the students so they can see their progress and get feedback on whether they're understanding the content. In Moodle, you can track student progress. Moodle has a powerful gradebook built into its platform. And here let's take a look at how to get started with using it. Now, first of all, from my course homepage, I'm going to go up to the gear icon in the upper right, and then go to Gradebook Setup. This will bring me to my Gradebook Setup page. If I scroll down here, you'll notice that there are some assignments in here. Now these aren't ones that I've manually added. They were automatically populated. Anytime you create assignments or assessments inside of Moodle that are worth points, they will automatically be populated to the Gradebook. And this makes your life much easier. Now, one thing I want to apologize about here is that I was practicing with some assignments adding them, and you can see in here that deletion is in progress. So there are several of them showing up here that will not be in my gradebook soon, but they are still going through that deletion progress. Down here, I do have two of them that are active, and you'll notice it's the leadership and communication assignment that we created earlier. And the communication and leadership quiz that we created earlier. I want to go ahead and click on one of these. I'll say the leadership and communication assignment. Now, when I do it brings up this assignment so I can see it right here. And when I go to the bottom, we'll get this grading summary. First it tells me, is this hidden from the students? It's not, how many students were assigned it? How many have submitted it? How many still need grading? When's the due date and how much time has remaining? Now, from within this gradebook, you can actually grade the assignments. This is extremely convenient. Now, even though students haven't submitted this assignment yet, I'm going to go ahead and click on grade so we can see what it looks like. Now, once I do that, it brings me to the first student here, Victor Gonzales, and it would show their assignment inside of this box. If it's a file that they uploaded. Now, if it's one that we had them answer as text, it may appear over here on the right, but as you go through this, you can look at their assignments, make any marks using this rich text editor and then give it a grade. So here let's say that Victor did have an assignment here and I graded it a nine out of 10. Down below I can leave feedback, and then when I'm done, I can click on save changes or save and show next. I'll click save and show next. And it brings me to the next student or in here, I could go ahead and grade the students. Leave feedback if I wanted to and so on. So you can grade assignments right inside of this gradebook and have those grades populate into your gradebook. So when I'm done, I'm going to click save changes, and then I want to back out of here. So I'm going to go back to this page up here. Up here we'll go back to gradebooks set up and I want to point out a couple of other things. The first thing I want to point out is how we can add categories. Right now, you'll notice that all of these deleted ones I have at zero points, there are only two assignments here worth points. That is the leadership and communication assignment, which is worth 10 and the quiz worth 15. Now in the column, next to that, it is the weights it's telling me that because of total points, this is 40% of the grade. This is 60%. Now we don't yet have any categories created, but we can create one by going to the bottom and clicking on add category. Once I do that, I'm going to name my first one and I'll title it assignments. We can decide on some of the different settings for this, and then I'll click save changes. And now at the bottom, you'll see that I have added this assignments category. I'm also going to add another one and I'll title this one, assessments, I'll click save changes. And now we have an assessments category. So what I want to do just to keep everything organized here, I'm going to go to the leadership and communication assignment and click on the box on the right hand side. Now, once I do this at the bottom, I want to click move item two. And then it's asking me where I want to move it. And I want to move this to assignments. Just like that, it will be added to the assignments category. Now down below, I have assessments and I do want to add this quiz to the assessments. I'll check the box over to the right. Down here I'm going to click move selected items to assessments and it's added there. Now you'll notice these percentages for the different categories that exist. One thing that's really neat here too, is that if you want to change one of these, you can click on the box and let's say we want assessments to be worth 70 points. When I click enter, notice what happens here to the other one. It automatically went to 30% to keep that 100% total. So the Moodle platform is very intuitive and will adjust that for you. Now, finally, the last thing I want to mention here is what happens if you have an assignment that you don't do on the Moodle platform, but you want it to count for a grade? Well, that's not a problem. You can still add it to your gradebook. I can go down here at the bottom and click on add grade item. Once I do that, I give it a name. And let's say for instance, that students had an elevator pitch that they had to do, but it wasn't an assignment that was submitted on the Moodle platform. Here you can decide on the value scale or text. Put on here the maximum grade, I'll say this is worth 10 points, scroll down. We can decide where we want to put this in, in this category. I'm putting it in assignments and I'll click on save changes. Now, once I did that, if we scroll down, you'll see under assignments, we have our elevator pitch assignment that is worth 10 points. So I was able to add that. Now Moodle allows you to customize your gradebook and you'll see up here that there are a ton of different tabs. I'm not going to go through all of the settings, but I do suggest that you spend some time customizing this. It does require some work upfront, but it will save you a lot of time and headaches down the road. Next, let's check out what the actual gradebook looks like and how we can generate user reports.