Welcome to the Avenue to Learn Assessment Tools - Grades workshop. This is a blended workshop - meaning that before you attend the in-person session, you will have viewed the resources on this page, tried some of these tasks in a course shell and then attended our face-to-face working session where you will put what you've learned into practice. We strongly encourage you to bring materials that you might use for your course to the session, that way you will be able to use that time for developing your actual course. If you do not have all your materials prepared, that's fine, bring what you can to the session. The outcomes for this course are:
- You will be able to configure the Grades tool to display the grades that are listed in your Course Outline/Syllabus.
- You will personalize how the grades in the Grades tool are displayed.
- You will understand the mechanism for exporting a CSV or an Excel spreadsheet to capture the information you will need for a variety of different purposes.
Here you will learn how to set up your gradebook, create grade items and input grades.
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When you receive your course, you might typically setup your Content and News. The next thing that should be setup is your Grades. If you setup your Grades before you configure Discussions, Dropbox, Quizzes or other digital assessment tools, you can connect the two tools within Avenue. When you grade online, the marks will automatically appear not only in the assessment, but in the Grades tool as well. When you first access the Grades tool, you will be asked to go through the Grades Setup Wizard. The Setup Wizard will help with general configuration of your course gradebook. Here is some more information about the process: https://documentation.desire2learn.com/en/grades-setup-wizard
There are two types of options that can be created in Grades; Categories and Items. A Category is an organizer for grades, and allows you to group grades together. Grade Items are the things that you would actually mark. For most gradebooks that have four or five items for marking, Items would be sufficient for your needs. However, when you have more complex grading methods, you may need to create a grade Category to solve your needs. How do you know if you need a grade Category?
There are two reasons that you might want to apply a grade Category in your course. The first reason is that you have a series of items with difficult math to calculate. In cases where you have a series of 7 quizzes and each of them are marked out of 15, however the quizzes make up a total of 25 percent of the overall grade of the course, a category might make a lot of sense to help easily calculate what each quiz is individually worth. The second case is when you have a series of items (say 7 quizzes), and you want to drop a mark (for example to keep the best 6 of the 7 grades). Categories can drop Items within them, especially if configured to do so.
Once your gradebook has been set up, you will want to start creating some Grade Items. Most Grade Items will be numeric however, there are other types of Grade Items that you can create (selectbox, pass/fail, formula, calculated and text). Here's how to create a numeric Grade Item: https://documentation.desire2learn.com/en/creating-numeric-grade-items
Below is a video to help demonstrate the process of creating a Grade Item.
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After you have created grade items, you will be able to associate online tools such as Quizzes or Dropbox folder, to individual grade Items. NOTE: you cannot associate grade Categories with other assessment items.
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When it comes to inputting grades, you can either enter them directly in Avenue (https://documentation.desire2learn.com/en/entering-grades) or you can import them from a spreadsheet (https://documentation.desire2learn.com/en/importing-grades). If you choose to import them from a spreadsheet - we suggest that you first export a constructed gradebok from Avenue first to CSV.
INSERT INSTRUCTIONS TO EXPORT TO CSV/AND IMPORT
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For questions or concerns, Avenue support is available from Monday to Friday, 8:30 AM to 4:30 PM at (905) 525-9140 ext. 22911 or email support.avenue@cll.mcmaster.ca.