Setting up The Gradebook in Moodle2

Welcome to Mastering the Gradebook. In this short video, I will introduce you to some of the features of the Moodle Gradebook. We will learn how to navigate the gradebook, how to add categories, and how to weight grades. This is a blank course before anything has been done. In your course page, locate the settings menu. Depending on which of the themes you use, the menu may appear on the right instead of the left (as it does in the theme I’ve chosen). Also, if you’ve collapsed any of your menus, the settings menu may appear as a tab on the left-hand side of your course page. Once you’ve located the settings menu, look down the list to locate and click on Grades. You will be taken to the Grader Report, which is your gradebook. The students will appear in the furthest left-hand column. The names can be sorted by either First name, or Last name. The column furthest to the right will contain the course totals for each student. In the upper right of that column is a small box that contains a symbol: either a plus sign, or a dash, or a circle. Clicking in the box will change the symbol and change the way the gradebook displays grades. The plus-sign will display only the grade. The dash will change the gradebook display to only the aggregated totals. The circle will display a full-view of grades. We do not have any grades currently in our gradebook, so it’s a little difficult for us to see exactly how this works. Understanding this small little feature can be quite helpful with very large gradebooks, because selecting this little box will collapse whole categories, allowing you to see category totals instead of each itemized grade. . Once your gradebook has several grades in it, you might want to test these symbols to understand how they work. Finally, the up and down arrow symbol provide you with the ability to sort the gradebook by grade, as opposed to student name. Another nice feature is the ability to mouse-over a grade in the gradebook, and be able to tell which student it belongs to and what it refers to This can be extremely useful when our gradebook is quite large. It avoids the need to scroll back and forth to check column and row labels. We’re going to create a gradebook that contains categories, each of which will be weighted. To begin, look in the upper left-hand corner for the dropdown menu labeled “grader report”. Click on the menu to expand it. Then, under Categories and items, select Simple view. This will take us to the editing view of the gradebook-- the simple view of this area. The first thing we’re going to do is look at the option for aggregation. By default moodle uses a simple weighted mean of grade. What this means is that the weight of an item is based on its associated grade. So, an item that’s worth 10 points has a lower weight than an item that is worth 100 points. In fact, and item worth 100 points is weighted 10 times more than an item worth 10 points. For this gradebook, we want to use a Weighted Mean of Grades, not a Simple Weighted Mean, so we need to expand the options for aggregation. We do this by clicking on the dropdown menu. In the expanded menu you will see a number of options, most of which are self-explanatory. You will see the option for Weighted Mean of Grades. Select that option. At the bottom of this slide I put a link to a Moodle page that will give you much greater details about each of the aggregation options. I will also put this link on our course page. The next thing we are going to do is create a category for our graded Forums. To do this we need to click the button labeled “Add category” In the window that opens we’re going to name the category and set some of our options. In the field labeled “category name” we’ll type Forums. Next, we are going to set the aggregation for the category. We want the average of this category to be the grade that is weighted, so we will set our aggregation to be a “Mean of grades”. You’ll notice an option labeled “Grade type”. Moodle allows you to use a number of “Grade types” which include outcomes, scales, text, and values. In my sample course, I’m going to have 5 forums each of which will be worth 10 points for a total of 50 points. So, I’ll set the Maximum grade to 50. You’ll notice a couple of buttons in the upper right-hand corner labeled “Show advanced”. Clicking on these buttons will reveal some additional options. We’re not going to use the items in the advanced features, but I’m going to show you them just the same, so that you can be familiar with them. In the Grade category, the most important option is the “Aggregate only non-empty grades”. By default, this is generally selected. This insures that non-graded items do not get averaged into the overall grade, because they would be averaged in as a zero. In the Category total area, you’ll notice some additional settings which include the option for how grades are displayed. In addition to “Real”, which is the default setting, you can choose to have grades displayed as letters or percentages. When you’ve set up your category the way you would like, click the button labeled “Save changes” You will be taken back to the editing page for your gradebook and you’ll see the category you added. The last thing to do is to set the weight. For a category weight of 50% (that is: Forums are 50% of the final grade) a decimal of .5 is entered. Now we need to add a category for Assignments, so we select the “Add category” button again. We’ll continue in this manner until we have created all of the categories we will want. For my example, you’ll notice that I have two categories: Forums, which are 50% of the grade and have a maximum grade of 50, and Assignments which are also weighted 50% but have a maximum grade of 100. You’ll also notice that the final course total is 100. Moodle will do all of the calculations for you, to come up with proper a grade. Now, we’re going to be building assignments, forums and other graded items in our course, however we are not going to select “add a graded item” because when you add a graded item to your course page in Moodle, it automatically adds it to your gradebook. The only time you need to add a graded item manually, is when you do not add it to the course page. Now let’s go back to our gradebook. Click on the dropdown menu in the upper left-hand corner, and select “grader report”. Now you’ll notice, in your grader report that you have two categories: Forums and Assignments. You’ll notice that these categories have the same little icons or boxes in the upper right-hand corner that allow for changing the display of the gradebook. Well, you’re ready to begin setting up your own gradebook. I hope you found this tutorial helpful. We will be learning more about the gradebook as we progress through the workshop. Thank you for your time and attention.