Grading-book for eLearning with drupal

By Eagle-i on 5 Apr 2006 at 23:33 UTC

And now concerning the gradebook....:

on one website i came across a grading system roughly with the following outline:

- 100 points for answering questions relating to subject (10% of total grading)
- 100 points for actively participating in class discussions (30% of total grading)
- 100 points for posting pictures concerning project (20% of total grading)
- 100 points for writing an essay reflecting personal understanding of the subject (40%)

I am not looking for just a quiz to get answers from my students because they could glean from the posted study material or books. For me it is important that they understand the subject and i need to evaluate their growth.

Somehow a table should connect the userid, node-id and a grade given by the teacher. But how do you implement the extras such as "weight" of a grade of that specific node-type? Would you add an extra field with a weight percentage? And then maybe an extra table with totals, or let the grading-module do a new calculation everytime a teacher / student requests to see the gradebook?

As i said, i am not a php programmer, so maybe there are some out there that can help us :).

Comments

better way to express that

cel4145 commented 6 April 2006 at 01:08

I wouldn't look for a solution for that implementation. That's a pretty uncommon grading scale. Teachers I know who think like this just go ahead and make the 100 at 10% worth 100 points; the 100 at 30%, 300 points; 100 at 40% 400pts; and so forth. It's much easier for everyone (teacher and students) that way. LOL

Fine with me

Eagle-i commented 7 April 2006 at 18:12

as long as it is clear that students score more at certain activities then others. More at comprehension then just remembering.

Your point at first starting with a non-linked gradebook might be a way to go at the beginning but certainly needs to be linked on node- / activity level later. At node level (blog) seems to be easier done then at grading a users participation in forum activity.

My thoughts go toward some new module based on modules as myworkspace, tagnode and hof.module. But maybe i am making it too difficult.

Building webblog portals & communities with drupal

What do teachers want?

cel4145 commented 7 April 2006 at 18:32

"maybe i am making it too difficult"

I think you might be. I've run workshops for teachers, first using Blackboard and more recently Drupal, for the past five years. With Blackboard which does have assignment features, most teachers I worked with just wanted to load their course calendar without completing a different assignment form for everything they want students to do. That's very time intensive. Now that I am running workshops on Drupal, I show teachers how to use the book module for loading course materials. Here's an example of how I do it from a distance ed class. The assigment calendar, you will notice, is broken up by weeks. Most teachers just end up putting the entire semester up as one page. I suspect it's more work than they want to spend to break it up. Imagine what we are asking if every assignment has to be posted separately?

So the real appeal for an assignment module will have to be if it can be made super easy to use. I suspect that setting up a solid assignment module that integrates well with quizzes and gradebook, provides space for private evaluation, and allows for importing and exporting assignments is much harder by at least an order of magnitude than creating a good gradebook. It's much more complex and with the downside that it may not even be used nearly as much as the gradebook or even the quiz module. IMHO, it's going to require a lot of thinking about workflow and involving teachers and students in usability testing to get a very usable design.

RE I suspect that setting up

bonobo commented 8 April 2006 at 05:18

I suspect that setting up a solid assignment module that integrates well with quizzes and gradebook, provides space for private evaluation, and allows for importing and exporting assignments is much harder by at least an order of magnitude than creating a good gradebook.

Actually, both require a fair amount of work. Trust me :)

But, it is effort well spent. The integrated assignment/gradebook functionality, while it's difficult, is necessary. It's complicated by the need for enough flexibility to accomodate different teacher needs. Some teachers might want to just show grades, where others might want to use the gradebook to show individual students precisely how a grade is earned. The eventual gradebook solution will need to accomodate both types of users -- and all those in between -- with a UI that is clean and intuitive.

So, not an impossible goal, but one that requires some careful planning. As we develop and test our code for managing assignments, we are looking toward our gradebook. But, we want to make sure we get the pedagogical side (the side that allows for quality interactions between all class members) right before we begin to solidify the assessment piece.

Part of this is philosophical, while part is pragmatic. We want to develolp tools that put the emphasis on learning. It doesn't hurt that, as we develop learning tools, we'll be increasing our focus on effective assessment tools as well.

Cheers,

Bill

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http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers

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http://www.funnymonkey.com

separate gradebook from assessment

cel4145 commented 8 April 2006 at 07:41

I'm not sure how to explain this, but I would separate out thinking about gradebooks from assessment. A gradebook is a place to record and calculate grades--many teachers use Excel for this now--and allowing the student to check that grade is a nice feature of the LMS. Assessment methods are very particular to the types of assignments, the discipline, and the methods of the teacher and/or program. Also, it's problematic to separate out assessment from pedagogy. Tools for pedagogy involve methods of giving feedback, and the same tools will sometimes function for assessment. For instance, most writing teachers I know that work with electronic documents instead of paper use the Word commenting feature for giving feedback on drafts. This then becomes the assessment tool as well.

Userpoints?

Muslim guy commented 6 April 2006 at 03:43

Userpoints?

Tabular view of user profiles?

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