Gradebooks

What is a gradebook?

One of the grading methods available to course administrators in the LMS is a Gradebook.

The gradebook streamlines the process of incorporating weighted grades into objects, while also enabling the assignment of grades to objects that wouldn't typically accommodate grading or evaluation.
As course creator / administrator the gradebook helps you to:

Define the components that contribute to a gradable object within the CPKN LMS.
Assign appropriate weights to each component in relation to the overall course grade.
Establish a minimum passing grade for the course.
Apply grades to items that may not be typically accessible during the grading process.
Manage various revisions of the course's grading schema effectively.

Enabling Gradebook

1) Create a course or Navigate to an existing course, our test course is setup as follows

Figure 1. Shows an example of a course. It contains 2 groups, an exercise and a PDF

2) Navigate to the Learning Progress tab, then navigate to the Settings Select Manual by Gradebook and click save.

Figure 2 Shows the learning progress settings page.

3) Navigate to the Gradebook subtab that should have now appeared, you will be presented with an area to set up your new gradebook.

Figure 3 shows an overview of the grade book from the course administrator's perspective.

Legend:
1 – Revisions dropdown: A new revision of gradebook will be created when the administrator modifies aspects of the gradebook weighting / layout.
2 – Passing Grade: The grade required (post weighting) to pass a gradebook, in previous iterations of the gradebook course administrators had to manually set the users status. The gradebook now determines status on passing grade. A user will achieve a status of passed if they’ve completed the course (100% progress) and their grade is equal to or above the passing grade and failed if their grade is below the passing grade. A user will remain in progress if their progress is less than 100%.
3 – Toggle and weighting: to enable an item in the gradebook you first toggle an item from off to on and set a weight for that item in the input to the right of the toggle.. All items must add up to 100% for weighting for each level.

Weight input indicators:

Green: Indicates that column totals to 100 and is valid
Orange: Indicates that the column hasn’t been saved yet (when the Save button is clicked, the field will validate and switch to either red or green)
Red: Indicates the columns on this level does not equal 100, so saving is not possible until this issue is corrected

4 – Groups: groups can either be grouped together or be separate items depending on weight. You can change the grouping of groups based on colour. Groups of the same colour carry the same weight, and a user must be a part of at least one group per colour.
5 – Save: click this to save your completed gradebook.

Scenario 1 – creating a new gradebook.

Figure 4 shows a sample course we will use in our scenario. It contains 2 groups, an exercise, a PDF and a folder containing a test and a PDF.

We will start with the above course structure. We will enable a gradebook with the following parameters:

Passing Grade will be 75%.
Exercise 1 will be worth 20% of the student’s mark.
Paths 1 and 2 will be worth 30% of the student’s mark.
PDF – Reading Determines the Learning Progress will be worth 5% of the student’s mark.
Folder of Gradable items will be worth 45% of the user’s mark.
- Test 1 – What did you learn? Will be worth 90% of the Gradable Items folder’s mark.
- Test-2.pdf will be worth 10% of the Gradable Items folder’s mark.

Upon hitting save, this will create the first revision of the gradebook.

You can now use this to grade students.

Drag and Drop sorting:

Within a gradebook, on each level a course administrator can drag and drop an item to determine the order that the item is displayed in the gradebook as well as the students learning progress view. To drag and drop simply select an item in the gradebook and drag it to a display new order.

Figure 6 shows the Gradebook being sorted in a different layout by using the drag and drop functionality.

An item will be highlighted yellow when dragging and dropping the order. Order does not create a new revision of the gradebook.

Revisions:

As mentioned in the above gradebook will create a new revision of the gradebook when the course administrator:

The weight of an element changes in the gradebook.
A new object is added to the gradebook.
A previous object is removed from the gradebook.
A change in the arrangement of groups.
An item determining the current gradebook layout is deleted.

For example, from scenario one if the course administrator decided to change the weight of Exercise 1 to be 25% and change the folder of Gradable items to be 40% and hit save.

A new revision will be created and will be added to the dropdown. You can switch between revisions to see what has changed by selecting a revision in the dropdown and selecting load.

Figure 7 Shows the Gradebook with a the dropdown indicating a new revision.

When grading a student, students who have no previous grades attached will be set to the latest revision. (In this scenario: revision 1), students who have grades on a previous revision will be locked to that revision unless the course administrator moves them to the latest revision.

Grading a student:

Navigate to the Grade by Student subtab. If you are using groups, you will be unable to continue grading if all members aren’t at least part of one group per color (as set up earlier). If this is the case, you will receive the following error:

Figure 8 shows the error received when a student is not part of a required group in the course.

After assigning Test Student to the Path 1 group, you can now go back and grade this student.

Figure 9 Shows the student grading area within the LMS

Legend:
1 – LP type: this is the learning progress type for an item, which also denotes if an item is gradable within the gradebook UI. Only items that have learning progress disabled on the item itself.

Icon	Description
	Automated learning progress. This means that the learning progress is automatically generated in the object itself. To grade this item you can navigate to the item itself by clicking the item’s like under ‘title’.
	Learning progress is disabled / not available within the object itself, this item can be graded directly in the Gradebook.
	Learning progress for this item is determined by its children. This appears on container objects (folders, groups) that contain weighted items in the gradebook. In our example above test 1 and test 2 will determine the grade of the Folder of Gradeable items.

2– Depth: This is the depth of an object within the gradebook. The gradebook will always show children as the next item in line of their parents.

Figure 10 shows an example of depths of items within containers within a gradebook.

In our example, test-2.pdf and Test 1 – What did you learn? Have a depth of 1 because they are contained within the Folder of Gradeable Items.

3 – Weight: The weight of an item towards a student’s grade as set when configuring the gradebook.
4 – Actual: Depending on the LP type this is either a grade reported back from an object with automatically determined learning progress or it is an input for entering a grade to grade an item directly in the gradebook.
5 – Adjusted: The adjusted grade of an item which is the actual grade of an item with the weighting towards the overall course grade applied.
6 – Status: When you’re grading within the gradebook itself, this is where you set the status for an item for a student. Not Attempted, Passed, Failed, In Progress.
7 – Revision: this shows the current revision the user is being graded on. To switch to a new revision select a revision in the dropdown and click change.

Figure 11 Shows the confirmation area for changing a student's revision in the gradebook.

On change, any graded items that are transferrable to the new revision will be automatically graded in the changed revision.

Figure 12 Shows a fully graded Gradebook.

Student View:

When a student navigates to their learning progress tab in a course with Gradebook enabled, they will be given an overview of their grades and overall progress.

Figure 13 Shows the Students view of their grades.

Course participants:

The course participants’ view gives the course administrator an overall view of all users in the gradebook.

All fields are the same as other views just at an overall level. The difference here is that Adjusted Grade is also the grade with the weight applied, however, in cases where a user has yet to attempt an item within the gradebook, it is presumed to have achieved 100% in the Adjusted Grade section.