Delegated Grading and Tutorial Groups
This week I’ve been getting to grips with Blackboard’s Delegated Grading tools, with a particular object in mind.
For many larger papers at Otago, the traditional way to handle assignment marking is that the set is divided amongst a team of tutors, each of whom marks her own students’ submissions. The tutors are also usually given access only to the submissions they are required to grade. Then the lecturer has final sign-off on the complete set from all tutors before the grades and comments are released back to students.
A combination of the Delegated Grading and Groups functions in Blackboard can replicate this traditional picture quite efficiently, although the initial set up requires a few fairly straightforward steps. In this blog post, I’m going to go through those steps.
- First, set up groups in the Blackboard paper. Initially these groups can just be empty placeholders. These Blackboard groups should be named according to a predictable convention, and should have a one-to-one correspondence with the tutorial groups of the paper – so it is fine to call them ‘Tutorial group 1’ or ‘Jane Blogg’s students’ or similar. In the group settings, it is important that the groups be made ‘visible to students’. Some more detailed instructions on creating groups can be found here.
- Now we want to populate those groups. The most efficient way to do this requires an excel sheet that contains the student usernames for the paper, correlated against the tutorial group each student is in. In other words, you need a sheet that has at least two columns: one with username, and one with tutorial group. If you don’t already have a table such as this, one can be generated using Business Objects. This information can be used to copy into a template excel sheet, exported from Blackboard’s groups menu, and then reuploaded. More detailed instructions for this step can be found here.
- In order to have each tutor given access to only her own student’s submissions, her role in the course should be set to ‘Grader’. If necessary, the roles of any of the teaching staff can be adjusted using the Blackboard Staff Administration Application. Some more instructions on this step can be found here.
- With the groups set up and the tutors’ roles assigned, we now just need to set up the assignment with Delegated Grading. In the assignment settings page, open out the grading options menu, and select the delegated grading check box. Then assign each tutor to have access to her own groups. As you can see from the screenshot below, Julie is assigned to mark the group “Julie’s Students”, but not to see any other markers’ work. And only Tosh has the ability to reconcile grades. I also suggest hiding the grades from students until you are ready to release them.
Executing these steps makes it straightforward for a grader to mark the submissions from a given tutorial group. It also has the benefit of increasing the privacy of student submissions – now each student’s submission is able to be viewed only by those specific people who are required to see it for marking purposes.
eLearning will be happy to help if you want support in following these steps – please contact the ITS Service Desk for more information.
Blackboard Paper Administration Upgrade
We would like to announce an upgrade of Blackboard Paper Administration. We have scheduled the upgrade to happen between 5 pm and 7 pm Wednesday, 21 June. This will mean that there will be no access to Blackboard Paper Administration during this time frame. Blackboard itself will still be available as normal.
This upgrade includes:
- Email notifications to coordinators
- When students will lose access to the Blackboard paper.
- When other staff will lose access to the Blackboard paper.
- Some bug fixes.
You can keep up-to-date with news about this update by following the ITS Service Desk notices (http://www.otago.ac.nz/its/servicenotices/) and here on the eLearning blog (www.otago.ac.nz/elearning).
Automate, automate, automate
eLearning is pleased (let’s be fair I’m pretty ecstatic) to announce that on Wednesday, 8 February 2017 a new version of the Blackboard Administration for Staff application is being released. We’re very excited about this release as it introduces a lot of new features designed to save everyone a lot of time and provide a better experience for users.
Did you know that our current rollover process goes a little something like this:
- Staff member requests a rollover by filling in a rollover form online.
- Rollover form details get sent by email to the ITS Service Desk.
- ITS Service Desk copy all the details from the email into an Ask IT call and double check things.
- The Blackboard Administration team get the Ask IT call and copy the details from there into their Blackboard Administration application, then they do lots of mouse clicks and a little bit of magic (70+ mouse clicks) and finally they let the requester know it’s finished.
- Then rinse and repeat at least 1500 times a year.
The new application automates a lot of this process – but don’t worry, if you need help there is still a real person you can call for help.
The new features include:
- Request your own Blackboard rollovers – if they’re standard ones they’ll finish in 15 minutes rather than 5 days.
- Register new Blackboard papers – again if it’s a standard request it’ll take 15 minutes.
- Check the status of your Blackboard paper – easily see when your students are going to get access.
- Find out how much space your paper takes up on Blackboard.
- And much more…
Who wants a sneak peek at what things are going to look like? Go on…
On the home page you can see all the Blackboard papers you have access to as well as all your Blackboard requests. From here you can request rollovers, new papers and manage the staff in your papers.
This screen shows you how easy it is to request a new Blackboard paper. Find your class lists and select the dates for when your students need access. Click submit and wait 15 minutes. Voila!
This screen shows a rollover request. Simply select the class lists for the new paper and update any of the other details, click submit and off you go.
eLearning received a lot of help from end-users so we’ve been able to work closely with the application developer to make it user friendly and intuitive. Hopefully you’ll find it as easy as we hope you will.
You’ll be able to find information on how to use the new features on the Blackboard help site and within the application itself: Blackboard Help site – Blackboard Paper Administration Application .
