If you are using Moodle, you are likely to deliver some form of course content or provide resources to others. You might do this to support learning, training, or for other educational activities. Many online courses, qualifications, or educational resources have a final goal, which is likely to include assessment or required elements to be completed. The Gradebook can be a valuable tool that will help the teacher manage the online course and track students' progress through assessment and required activities.
This chapter will introduce you to the Gradebook and the key features it offers. It will outline the benefits of using the Gradebook, the activities that can be graded and used within the Gradebook, and the types of grades that can be used. You will be given an overview of how it can be used to show progress before moving on to the rest of the chapters that will help you set up the different elements. In this chapter, you will learn:
All courses in Moodle have a grades area, which is also known as the Gradebook. A number of activities within Moodle can be graded, and these grades will be automatically captured and shown in the Gradebook.
To get to the Gradebook, view the Administration block on the course and then click on Grades under the Course administration heading.
The following screenshot shows you an example of the teacher's view of a simple Gradebook with a number of different graded activities within it:
Let's take a quick tour of what we can see:
The Gradebook captures all the assessment information on one screen.
Users who have the roles of teacher, non-editing teacher, or manager will be able to see the grades for all students who are enrolled for the course. Students will only be able to see their own grades and feedback.
The advantage of storing the grades within Moodle is that information can be easily shared between all teachers in the online course. Traditionally, if a course manager wanted to know how students were progressing, they would need to contact the course teacher(s) to gather this information. Now, they can log in to Moodle and view the live data (as long as they have teacher or manager rights to the course).
There are benefits for students as well as they will see all their progress in one place and can start to manage their own learning by reviewing their progress to date, as shown in the following example of a student's view:
The grade report shown is of that of Bayley W. Bayley can see each assessment on the left-hand side with his grade next to it. By default, the student's grade report also shows the range of grades possible for the assessment (for example, the highest and lowest scores possible), but this can be switched off by the teacher in the Gradebook settings. This also shows you the equivalent percentage as well as any written feedback given by the teacher. The options for customizing reports will be explained further in Chapter 7, Reporting with the Gradebook.
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