Development talk:Gradebook improvements

Aggregation of hidden grades

Overlook problem partially solve after the database freeze - workaround was to recalculate the grades on the fly so that users that can the hidden grades are ignored. This approach is expensive and can not be used in conditional activities, grade exports, etc.

Solution is to add new flag into grade categories - aggregate hidden grades. Having two values for each grade would be too complex, selective agrragation should solve most of the problems and should be reasonably backwards compatible.

--Petr Škoda (škoďák) 11:56, 8 December 2008

Exports: more flexibility

Two aspects of the 1.9 export plugin have been criticised by some of Catalyst's clients:

• the fact that grade exports are tied to a course
• the default user profile columns are not all needed and some custom ones would be necessary

Therefore I propose the following changes:

• removing the export plugin dependency on a single course by converting to an array of courses (see MDL-17420)
• making the user-related columns customisable (see MDL-17346)

--Francois Marier 06:42, 9 December 2008

Gradebook does not consider groupings functionality

Student in gradebook view all grade items, but must view only grade items thats belong to his groiping (see MDL-13868).

--Artem Andreev 11:07, 9 December 2008

Common frustrations

Below are some of the most often reported usability issues in the 1.9 gradebook, which we are trying to address. Several of these are grouped as sub-tasks under MDL-16913.

Assigning weights to categories and grade items

This is the most common frustration. Weights are used extensively in many institutions, and were used in 1.8. However, they are difficult to understand in 1.9, and difficult to set up. This issue is discussed extensively in MDL-15680.

Moving items to categories

Currently, the Edit categories and items page lets you move only one grade item or category at a time. It takes two page refreshes and two mouse clicks per move. This is very tedious and time-consuming when many items have to be moved around. MDL-13775 and MDL-12502 address this problem.

Removing the overridden attribute of individual grades

When grades are imported into an existing gradebook, or when grades are manually edited in the grader report, these grades become overridden, which prevents linked activity modules from updating this grade. Removing this attribute is very time-consuming, since one must enter the edit page of each individual grade, untick the checkbox and submit the form. This issue is discussed in this forum thread.

Viewing the overall contribution of each category and item to the course aggregation

The tracker issue MDL-13777 reports the difficulty in seeing the contribution of each grade item and category to the course total. Calculations and weights may apply, which are not visible in any of the current reports except in each individual category or item's edit page.

--Nicolas Connault 12:41, 4 November 2008

Some more that it would be great to see fixed:

Setting grade to pass

Takes a lot of clicks and the edit icon looks like it's part of the main mass of editing icons for the grades table itself, so it's hard to find. This is a very useful feature (at least once MDL-13830 is fixed) as it shows at a glance how many items a student has failed to pass. Seeing a row of red entries is a great way of quickly knowing who to target for extra attention in class. Quite obscure at the moment though, especially seeing as it cannot be done from the module itself. -Matt Gibson 07:36, 22 January 2009 (CST)

Its not possible to see whether or not a student has submitted work which has not been marked

If the modules could send a special grade e.g. -1 to the gradebook as a placeholder that could be used to add either a css class to a cell, or display a special character to show that work is waiting. Then it would be possible to use the gradebook like a normal one, in order to evaluate students' deadline-meeting for writing reports. At the moment, this is probably the biggest problem in our institution's use of the gradebook. - Matt Gibson 07:36, 22 January 2009 (CST)

Impossible to tell whether work was submitted on time or late

This is vital for K-12 teachers who are writing reports on students and really needs to be added somehow. Gradebook database changes are needed, so it must be planned as part of a major release. MDL-12111

Patch for Edit Categories and Items page

Following is a proposed patch to the Edit categories and items page in the 1.9 gradebook. It addresses many usability issues while remaining simple. The following features are currently implemented:

Simple features

• Items and categories are displayed in a table instead of a list. This improves readability and will make drag and drop easier to implement.
• All advanced features are hidden by default, so that the interface by default is almost identical to the original
• An additional column has checkboxes for grade items. All selected items can then be moved to one of the existing grade categories for the current course. Javascript "Select all/Select None" links replace these checkboxes for categories, to make it faster to select or de-select items.

Advanced features

• Grade category aggregation type: changing this reloads the page, because the grade item weights/extra credits only apply to some of these aggregation types.
• Weight or extra credit: depending on the parent category's aggregation type, each category and grade item may have an input field or a checkbox for weight or extra credit. All these can be edited, then submitted with one click.
• Grade range is displayed for information purposes, but cannot be edited through this interface (it is most often controlled by the linked activity)
• Aggregate only non-empty grades
• Aggregate including sub-categories
• Include outcomes in aggregation
• Drop the lowest
• Keep the highest
• Multiplicator
• Offset

All these settings can be changed then submitted with only one page reload. Just be mindful that changing a category's aggregation type will reload the page and you will lose any non-submitted changes you made to the other settings.

--Nicolas Connault 12:41, 4 November 2008

Further ideas for 2.0

The following list is from a gradebook planning meeting on 4 September 2009 between Martin, Nicolas, Petr and Helen:

• Replace hiding as an activity setting with automatic/manual/dated transfer of grades to gradebook
• Duplicate most of the grade item settings into the mod_edit form for each activity (controlled directly by gradebook)
• Implement grading interface centrally for wiki as a test in 2.0, not other modules yet
• Workflow of raw grades in activity -> proposed/hidden grades in gradebook -> final grades released to students

What is the behaviour of hidden grades in calculated grades, exports, teacher view, student view, activity completion ...

• User overviews:
  1. Overview of one user (have it now but need to review the capabilities, perhaps one overall is enough but really should check each course
  2. Combine multiple gradebooks from one global group into one table of users vs courses, showing final grades for courses
• AJAX-based report to edit rows and columns at once, without reloads
• Adding more switches to turn off things (eg calculations)
• Improving documentation to make it clearer
• Gradebook tracker issues need some rationalisation, update all fix versions (perhaps move all 1.9.6 and 2.0 ones into subtasks like MDL-19131)

--Helen Foster 11:50, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Gradebook, groupings and group members only functionality

What about MDL-13868? This task have 31 votes but this page doesn't contain it.

- Artem Andreev 09:02, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

See also

• Tim's Gradebook thoughts