Bonus grade items in a weighted grading system

When working with a weighted grades system, any bonus items that are not part of another category should be standalone items and not part of a category (i.e., do not create a category that only contains bonus items). This is because each category in a weighted grade system must have a weight. For standalone bonus items, the weight should be the maximum amount of grade weight you want changed if students successfully complete those bonus items.

Training videos from D2L

Earlier this semester D2L released free all of their training videos on how to use their various tools. The videos are captioned, effective, and listed alphabetically by tool title on the following web page:

https://community.brightspace.com/resources/videos

Attendance and Grades

I have found the following steps to be a good way to use the Attendance tool and the Grades tool. Unfortunately data from the Attendance tool cannot be pushed directly to the Grades tool. Here are the steps I take in my face-to-face history class:

1. Create a grade item that covers multiple class meetings (in my case I do two, one for each half of the semester).
   
2. Create attendance registers that match the grade items (each register will have one session per class meeting).
   
3. After the last date for each attendance grade item, export the data from the attendance register (click on the name of the register to view the data and then click the Export All Data button). This creates a .csv file that can be opened in MS Excel, where the "% Attendance" field can be used to determine the grade for that register.
   
4. Follow the export and import steps detailed in the Importing Grades post in this blog (it might be helpful to export only the attendance grade item to make copying and pasting data from one Excel file to another easier). Be sure to follow exactly the directions regarding file format.
5. The import process takes a few steps, and the third step previews the data before you import it to your grades tool.
   

View Grade for Dropped Students

The grades for students that were dropped from a class cannot be exported from a class but are available on a student-by-student basis. To see them, click on the Enrollment Statistics button on the Classlist page.

Then click on the action menu for the student and then View Grades.

The attempts for quizzes and dropbox folders are not visible unless the student's user is enrolled in the class.

Grading Discussion

The summer 2014 update to D2L introduced some changes to the discussion tool that affect grading. No longer can discussion be graded in context and can only be done by looking at all of the posts for a user via the Topic Score dialog.

The embedded video shows the process that I now use to make things a little bit easier. It involves periodically switching between the Grades and Discussion tools.

Here are the steps that I take in the video:

1. Go to the Enter Grades page for the grade item that is associated with the discussion topic that has new messages.
2. Click on the View Submissions icon that indicates unread posts from this student.
3. Grade the submissions using the Topic Score dialog that pops up.
4. Switch to the Discussion tool to mark that student's graded posts as read.

The greatest risk is that I will miss a student's contribution that happens to occur during grading.