Seattle Academy

Seattle Academy

Seattle Academy is an independent secondary school of approximately 560 students. The upper school has had a laptop program for all students since 1997 and has used Moodle since 2005. Here we document how we have configured and customized Moodle 1.9 to best serve students and faculty in this environment.

Note:  These are draft recommendations by Gary Anderson of Seattle Academy.
They will be reviewed for final approval by our technology people in consultation
with the other teaching faculty.

Server Configuration

Default Settings

These settings apply to Moodle 1.9 beta2 which is still in development.
In some cases, the default settings may change and so some of these
customizations may not need to be changed and would be for reference only.

Site Administration Block

Grade category settings

• Hide forced settings - off

While this may be a useful setting for institutions that have uniformity in grading practices (as it could simplify the choices), our school, like most, give faculty considerable freedom in determining grading standards, hence we do not hide forced settings, using the default settings instead to ease course setup.

• Aggregation - Simple weighted mean of grades -- not advanced

Moodle core developers have come up with a new method of calculating grades, and call it mean of grades and have set it for the 'out of the box' default. It essentially converts each activity or graded item to a percentage before determining averages. Hence a 100 point assignment is worth the same as a 10 point assignment. Simple weighted mean of grades does the more common computation for schools of having the average be determined as point earned over points possible, hence it is the mean of points as opposed to the mean of percentages. We rename these strings accordingly.

• Aggregate only non-empty grades - yes -- not advanced

Again, Moodle core developers have set the rather unusual 'out of the box' setting of treating all ungraded items as zero, rather than just not factoring these items into the grade. The means that most students will see a very low average until all items (including those not due yet are graded, typically at course completion. The change of the setting to yes means that averages are only calculated on items that have been graded; teachers put in a score of zero when they want that computed into the grade.

 Note:  We are urging Moodle core reconsider the decisions prior to 1.9 going gold.

• Include outcomes in aggregation - no, advanced

Our school does not use outcomes, so we hide these settings under an advanced setting

• Aggregate including subcategories - yes, advanced

We typically don't anticipate the need for subcategories, but if a teacher uses them, they will probably divide things link homework into "first-half" and "second-half", so including these in the overall average seems appropriate.

• Keep the highest - none, advanced
• Drop lowest -none, advanced

Scales

• Remove: Separate and Connected Way of Knowing

This must be here for historical reasons in Moodle's development. We don't know what it is and will not use it.

• Added: Not Submitted, Submitted

Seattle Academy faculty are expected to, at a minimum, let people know the status of a student's assignment submissions in Moodle. With this setting, activities can be marked as satisfactorily submitted or not. Potentially, submitted could be treated as 100% for that assignment and not submitted as 0%, so the percent of submitted assignments could be reported.

Grader report

• Students per page - 100

Classes at Seattle Academy or normally under 20, but sometimes multiple sections brings the number higher; our largest is our Chemistry class with about 90 students. This setting lets a teacher view all grades at once without scrolling, and does not have too serious of an impact on the server.

• Grades Selected for Column Average -- Non-empty grades

This is an important setting as otherwise averages for assignments only make sense when all grading is completed, otherwise assignments not yet graded or those coming due later count as zero. Recommendation: This default for Moodle as it ships should be reconsidered.

• Show column averages: Yes. This is a common enough setting so the teacher can see how the class did on an assignment.
• Show number of grade in average: yes

Especially with the above settings, having a count of graded assignments is helpful.