Did you know that in the new version of Blackboard, regardless of how you order your columns in your Grade Center, the grades that your students see in their My Grades view are displayed and ordered dynamically? How this works is that the grades in your students’ My Grades view are displayed as categorized items in the following order:
- Calculated Columns (including the default Total and Weighted Total Columns that replicate when you do a course export/import) will always appear first.
- Columns containing Submitted Work appear next and within this category, only columns that actually contain work submitted by students will display.
- Columns for Graded Work appear next and these columns will appear in the order in which they were graded by the instructor.
- Columns for Upcoming Work appear last. They will appear in order of their assigned due dates or in the absence of due-dates, in alpha-numeric order.
Your students can become confused by this new method of displaying information in their My Grades view (Show me how that looks!), but you can get a sense of it by logging into Blackboard as your Z-student and selecting the My Grades link for one of your courses.
Here are a couple of tips on how to reduce, if not eliminate, your students’ confusion:
- “Clean up” your Grade Center by deleting redundant Total and Weighted Total columns and by hiding from your students view any calculated columns (for example: Midterm Grade, Final Exam, etc.) that you don’t want your students to see until the appropriate time. (Show me how to do that!)
- As for the columns for Upcoming Work, you can either rename your assessments (tests, discussion boards, assignments, etc.) so that they appear in the order in which you want your students to see them (for example: Module 03 Quiz, Module 03 Discussion Board) or you can set the due dates for the columns in your Grade Center so that they appear to your students in the same order in which you see them.
If you would like to know more about this, you are welcome to attend a workshop that the Distance and Online Learning Office will be offering on how to organize your Grade Center in the new version of Blackboard. This workshop is scheduled for Wednesday, Oct. 2, from 10 – 11 a.m. in the BTC 1033 Lab; no RSVP is required. In the meantime, you should not hesitate to contact the Distance and Online Learning Office (629-7070 / DLHelp@hvcc.edu) with any questions that you may have about cleaning up or reorganizing your course Grade Center.
Published: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 11:58:59 +0000 by m.petersen