7 Comments

Ahhh failing at bending Blackboard's gradebook to my will in a way that doesn't make several students panic-email me until I make a full-class announcement, sigh.

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I use Blackboard with SBG and Specs all the time! Anything I could help with?

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I had the first week of a weekly survey as a complete/incomplete graded column and then set up a separate column to count number of completed surveys, and the 1/13 showing up in that column was what prompted the emails. Now I'm looking more and maybe I should be using categories instead of setting up the running total by hand?

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Oh, fun! It sounds like you set a point value (13) for the "counter" column, which is why students saw 1/13? If you removed the point value or set it to 0, so that the column is a pure counter (not "out of" any total), do you think that would help? I think the ultimate goal is to remove anything that Blackboard can see as a percentage or partial credit. In my case, I usually upload counters like this myself, from a separate spreadsheet, and they show up as text.

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I'm adopting an ungrading approach for a UG project management module of ~150 students. Currently knee-deep in preparing my sessions with students and a technical solution to allow rapid feedback on many formative assignments.

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Ungrading with 150 students sounds.... exciting? What's your plan so far for the feedback? Also, I've been learning project management myself and I'm curious what you're covering and what the assessments are like.

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The topics for the module are mostly on the initial phases of projects such as identifying whether it _is_ a project, project constraints and scheduling.

Regarding feedback - we're using a OneNote class notebook, through which I'll share summative exercises for students to complete (independently or in groups as they wish). Each exercise is labelled with the learning outcomes which it allows students to develop and demonstrate. I have a team of previous students of the module that will provide feedback straight into the students' submissions on OneNote, which can be audio, written or drawn.

The exercises are as narrow as "here is a gantt chart with resources allocated, but some resources are overutilised. make some changes to avoid overutilisation and comment on how these changes affect the project contraints" through to "Individually or in groups, decide on a project, plan it and manage it, completing this form as you go to record you actions".

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