eLearning Blog

Month: April 2021

Grade Submission Options

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Grades

As we near the finish line of a challenging spring semester it’s a good time to review the options instructors have for submitting their final course grades. Read on to learn more about using the Canvas gradebook or Banweb to accomplish this.

Submit Grades from Canvas Gradebook

If you keep your Canvas gradebook accurate (with no muted or ungraded assignments and a correct grading scheme in place) you can choose to have Banner extract grades directly. The grading scheme validates Michigan Tech letter grades so they can be used in the Canvas gradebook. The Total column of the Canvas gradebook automatically calculates grades based on all published assignments in the course (including any weighting established with individual assignment groups). This column can be used for final grade submission, but this is a calculated column and cannot be manually adjusted.

To provide flexibility, all Canvas courses are created with an unpublished assignment called Final (course grade) which allows instructors to enter letter grades directly in Canvas. Once grades are entered you can choose to extract final grades from this assignment column by selecting it when using the Canvas grade submission tool. Details on submitting grades from Canvas are available in this knowledge base article.

Submit Grades from Banweb

You can also submit grades directly in Banweb via the Faculty/Advisor tab. This options allows you to manually enter grades and works well for smaller course sections (less than 30). When you choose the grade submission option in Banweb you are directed to choose the course and then the final grade option to begin entering grades. Any “I” or “F” grades that you enter will require you to provide additional information about student attendance in the course. A Banweb submission knowledge base article details this option.

Regardless of the grade submission option you choose it’s important to make sure that the grade information in your Canvas gradebook is up to date and accurate so your students know their status as the term progresses.

Resources

Need Help?

Contact the elearning support team in the Jackson Center for Teaching and Learning if you have questions about Canvas, Huskycast, Zoom or other educational technology tools.

elearning@mtu.edu | 487-3000

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The Ally Course Accessibility Report

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Ally Course Accessibility Dashboard

Ally is a course accessibility tool that works within Canvas. It automatically scans Canvas course content and provides accessibility scores and feedback to instructors about specific accessibility problems, why they are important, and how to remove them. One valuable component of Ally is the course accessibility report. Let’s review this feature.

Overview

You access the Ally course accessibility report from the Canvas course navigation item on the left. The report has two main areas: an overview and a content detail page. The overview provides a comprehensive tally of all course content types including images, content pages, announcements, assignments, discussions, documents, etc. It also sorts course content into a group of easiest to fix issues, and a group with the lowest accessibility scores. These sorted groups help instructors prioritize items that can have the most impact for their students.

Content

The content view lists every item Ally has identified in your course and assigns it an accessibility score. These scores are reported as a percentage with an associated color-coded gauge.

Ally scoring gauges
  • Low (0-33%)- severe accessibility issues exist
  • Medium (34-66%)- somewhat accessible but needs improvement
  • High (67-99%)- file is accessible, but improvements are possible
  • Perfect- no accessibility issues identified by Ally, but further improvement may be possible.

When you click on a gauge Ally opens a preview of the content item (when available) and provides a prioritized listing of all accessibility issues. Ally also provides guidance about what the issues mean and why they are important. In some cases corrections can be made directly within the Ally interface (such as adding alternative text descriptions for images), while in other cases you would need to correct problems in the source document directly. As you make improvements to your content Ally updates the accessibility score immediately.

It’s A Process

Improving access to your instructional materials takes time. Ally can help you prioritize your limited time to make the most impact on your course. While it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the volume of problems Ally identifies, and you may not know where to begin, it’s important to just get started and make improvements. Over time this can have a big impact on your Ally course accessibility score, and, more importantly, remove digital barriers within your instructional materials so more students can use them effectively.

Check back for future posts about other valuable features of Ally in your Canvas courses.

Resources

Need Help?

Contact the elearning support team in the Jackson Center for Teaching and Learning if you have questions about Canvas, Huskycast, Zoom or other educational technology tools.

elearning@mtu.edu | 487-3000

Continue Reading →

Speedgrader’s latest feature!

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Here is some great news for instructors who would like to be able to hand back an assignment (within Canvas) to a student and allow them to revise their work and resubmit. The feature is known as Submission Reassignment and it basically allows the instructor to reassign an assignment (with a due date) back to an individual student and ask them to redo their submission. When an assignment is set up for Submission Reassignment, a ‘Reassign Assignment‘ button will be visible under the comments box in Speedgrader.

Speedgrader view

Example for using Reassign

A great example of where Submission Reassignment works especially well is a written assignment. Written assignments often go through varied levels of revisions before reaching the final draft. For some students that may only be two revisions for others it may be four revisions. The Submission Reassignment would allow the instructor to give feedback on areas to improve on and hand back the submission so that the student could see the comments. Students can then apply the necessary revisions and resubmit a revised version to the same assignment. This feature is certainly not limited to written assignments but could be used on basically any assignment as long as the Assignment type is defined as an online assignment with a designated due date within Canvas.

Items to keep in mind when using Reassign

  • Reassign Assignment is not available for External Tools, on paper or no submission type assignments…only online!
  • The number of submission attempts allowed needs to be defined in the assignment details and needs to be greater than 1.
  • This feature is only available for assignments with defined due dates.
  • The Reassign Assignment button will be ‘grayed out’ until the instructor provides comments in Speedgrader.

If you would like to learn more about Submission Reassignment or have additional questions about using Speedgrader, you are welcome to contact elearning@mtu.edu

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