With the semester quickly coming to an end, you may have a long to-do list to wrap-up your courses. This teaching tip serves to give you a few tips to save you some time submitting your grades to reduce the end-of-the-semester stress. If you would like one on one assistance, schedule an appointment with an instructional designer at e-LIS

Using Grading Features on Moodle 

One of the biggest time commitments for faculty is grading student work. Luckily, Moodle has a few features that allow for quick grading: rubrics, bulk insert of grades, and easy grade submission. 

Using Rubrics to Grade Assignments

When grading papers, creating a rubric or grading guide in Moodle can really streamline your process. Using these grading tools may take a little bit of time to set up initially but once you have your rubric or grading guide set up, you can grade all of your students’ submissions directly in Moodle. No need to download and re-upload files. For more information about grading guides, view this grading guide support document. For more information about rubrics, view the rubric support document.

Bulk Insert Grades

If you need to bulk enter 0s for assignments, you can quickly and easily do that with the single view option in the Moodle grade book. If you are looking to view all the grades for a single student or a single assignment, then Single View is the place for you. 

Go into your Moodle gradebook, select Single View from the drop-down menu and from here, you can select individual students or individual assignments. 

From this view, instructors can bulk insert some grades, especially zeros, because empty grades don’t count against students. When faculty are finalizing their gradebook for the end of the semester, this can come in handy to bulk enter in any 0s for missing assignments to make the gradebook total accurate before submitting grades for the end of the semester. 

To bulk insert grades, select an assignment by clicking select a grade item above, then scroll down to the bottom of the page, select empty grades, then insert new grade as 0 and click save.

Submitting Your Grades

The last thing to save you some time as you gear up for the holiday break is submitting your grades. Instead of jumping back and forth between Moodle and Banner (SAIL), you can simply export your grades to Banner (SAIL) using a few mouse clicks. 

Navigate to the gradebook, then in the drop down menu, select export, ensure that the grades on the screen are correct for your students, then check the box to the right of their name and click save. To see these steps in detail watch the grade export to banner video.

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About the Author

Chad Bousley is an Instructional Designer at e-LIS, who helps faculty with online course design, creating interactive activities and implementing online teaching best practices.  Outside of the classroom, Chad enjoys learning foreign languages and playing guitar. 

Edited by Rachel Smydra, Faculty Fellow, Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Oakland University. Image by Katerina Holmes. Others may share and adapt under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC.

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When planning content for the students in my online programming courses, I always consider strategies to improve my lesson effectiveness. One such strategy that I have found useful is to add pseudostudents or what I call pseudents into my lesson building.  

Pseudents are imaginary students that I use to facilitate my awareness about what real students' needs are in learning course content and how I explain my ideas. More specifically, I think about questions real students might ask, how I would respond, and what they might misunderstand. 

Employing this creative process reminds me that students are novices who need explicit instructions and of the importance of recognizing how my own expert blind spots may interfere in communicating course content to students.

How to create pseudents

Pseudents become part of my online courses by working alongside real students to model behavior and learning. Typically, I embed four pseudents with distinct personalities in each class. 

To create my pseudents, I license images from eLearningArt, which is one of many extensive databases for online instructors. Using an editor of my choice to crop and resize images, I create poses and images that reflect different emotions such as satisfaction, excitement, frustration, and so on.

Why use pseudents?

In planning my lessons, pseudents help me predict student reactions and emotions and manage my content effectively. A more extensive example of embedding pseudents into lessons explains more about pseudents and includes suggestions for mitigating problems with worked examples.

Inserting these images into lessons is intentional,  especially when it comes to showing students how to work through problems by modeling critical thinking and problem solving.   

• Pseudents work through examples and make mistakes similar to real students. The lesson content demonstrates to students how pseudents discover, diagnose, and correct programming errors, but there may be risks; for example, students  could mistake pseudent errors for correct procedures. Therefore, it is important to remind students how the pseudents serve as tools to aid in their problem solving strategies. 
• Pseudents model the way I like real students to act. They encourage and help each other, ask challenging questions, and are always respectful. They are skeptical but not rude.
• Pseudents can oppose social stereotypes. For example, the most excitable geek in my programming courses is a woman.

References and Resources 

Nathan, M. J., Koedinger, K. R., & Alibali, M. W. (2001, August). Expert blind spot: When content knowledge eclipses pedagogical content knowledge. In Proceedings of the third international conference on cognitive science (Vol. 644648, pp. 644-648).

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About the Author

Kieran Mathieson is Associate Professor of management information systems in the Decision and Information Sciences department of the School of Business Administration. He studies ways of creating effective and scalable online courses. He's an old curmudgeon who loves dogs more than most people. 

Edited by Rachel Smydra, a faculty fellow in the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Oakland University. Others may share and adapt under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC.

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