Recording Success (26th Jan 2012)
Everything is now in place. We have a logical schedule of work. We have materials in various formats. We have classroom techniques. Now all we need is a method of recording the success of our students.
This may seem a no-brainer. Obviously, we just create, say, a spreadsheet or a word processed document which has a table of their names and units. We stick that document in an area that only members of staff can see and then update it as we go. This is the tried and tested approach.
However, there is a difficulty. It's those pesky students again. How do they know what is missing. Simple, we gave them their coursework back on which we wrote lots of comments, so they can just check. Well, yes the could but we need that coursework plus the new version. That is not too bad if we are using Google Docs, but how do we know when they have passed the unit? We would have to trawl through the work for each criterion. There has to be a better way.
What we need is a program which allows us to enter the grades and the student to see which criteria they have achieved. Of course, we do not want to give students access to the grades of others on the course, but we do want them to be able to see their own.
The current system being used is called ND Grades and differentiates between staff and students on the basis of their login IDs. Staff IDs are the letters of our names, whilst a student ID is their enrolment number. You are shown a different screen dependent on your login. Staff will get a blank screen which allows them to select a class from a drop-down menu. They will then see the screen below which shows a summary of the grades by student and unit. This is useful in tutorials or when completing UCAS forms because one can see an overview.
Pressing one of the grey buttons under the unit name will take the member of staff to an overview of that unit. This shows the criteria achieved in this unit for each student in the class. Double-clicking on one of the boxes swaps its contents between "Y" and blank, so it is very easy to record that a criterion has been achieved. The overall grade cannot be changed directly. Instead, the overall grade depends upon the criteria achieved. It changes to "P" when all the pass criteria are signed off, to "M" when all the pass and merit criteria are in and so on.
We all make mistakes and it is sometimes nice to be able to backtrack to see who entered a grade and when. Double-clicking on the name of a student when in the unit overview form above will take you to entry log. This form (shown below) lists the login ID, date and time that a criterion was altered. It also shows which criterion was changed and what the change was.
Now, we come to what the student sees. Students can monitor their grades just by going into the ND Grades program. They will see the screen below which shows them the criteria checked off in each unit. Students are very good at reminding us if we have forgotten to check off a criterion or entered one incorrectly. This is good for them and good for us because there is someone else doing the checking.
Whilst all of this is a big improvement on the old system of a spreadsheet sitting on a shared drive, there are still improvements needed. The first is the parochial nature of the system - it only works for one course because that is all it was designed to do. Next, it would be a good idea to add a page that shows the overall result for a student. This is a three A'level equivalent course and the system could also show their expected result. This would help the students when applying to university.
However, there is a bigger problem. The program only works on our computer system. Wouldn't it be much better if it worked over the Internet? Students could then see their grades at any and even monitor them on their mobile phones whilst travelling in on the bus. Lecturers can already mark work at any time, but can only update the results when at work. An Internet based system would provide an improved service all round.
