How can you enable staff and students to easily view their grades across Moodle courses, in a single view?
This is the challenge Jessica Gramp and the team at the University College London (UCL) faced back in 2014.
In her MoodleMoot UK & Ireland 2017 presentation, “View and compare assessment feedback in Moodle”, Jessica shared the goals she and her team set:
- Raise visibility and feedback for students and staff.
- Display feedback in a single view so students may identify common areas for improvement. Prior to this, students didn’t know how to access their feedback and some weren’t viewing them at all.
- Help personal tutors support their students. In their regular meetings there were no conversation starters for students and tutors and a tool was needed to facilitate that.
- Increase staff adoption of Moodle to provide fast, high-quality quality and consistent assessment feedback.
Enter the “My Feedback Report Plugin.”
The “my feedback report plugin” is an an open source plugin available from our Plugins directory. Essentially, the plugin is a reports menu allowing students to see an overview of all their grades and feedback for assessment activities such as Moodle Assignments, Turnitin Assignments (v1 & v2), Workshops and Quizzes.
It provides their visible grades, a link to their submission and any feedback that has been released to them.
During the MoodleMoot presentation, Jessica recapped her institution’s journey with the plugin. Development first began in late 2014, based on an assessment project code. UCL assigned an internal developer to oversee the project the following year.
Jessica explained that the plugin was initially piloted by 850 engineering students in 2015 for one year. In 2016 it was launched into UCL’s Moodle and is now available across the entire institution.
But what does the plugin show?
Jessica explained that the feedback report plugin show:
- Moodle Assignments (including offline and group)
- Turnitin Assignments (v1&2)
- Quizzes
- Workshops for peer assessments
- Manual grade items
The plugin also allows for code adjustments, enabling the feedback report to show further modules of an administrator’s choosing.
Jessica shared the benefits of the my feedback report plugin:
- Students can view their feedback across all modules in one place.
- Tutors can see their students’ feedback (for the courses they teach) and if the students have viewed the feedback.
Let’s take a closer look at what the plugin looks like for students:
This includes:
- An assessment summary table.
- Academic year filter
- Show/hide column filter
- Column filters
- General feedback column
- Self-reflective notes
- Links to contextual feedback
- Viewed columns which indicates when the students first viewed their feedback.
Now we have seen it from a student’s point of view, let’s explore what the my feedback report plugin is like for teachers and tutors:
Delving further into the features of the report, Jessica explained that when they clicked a student’s name, the teacher was taken to a course. If a student has not looked at their feedback a cross will appear next to their name.
Personal tutors also got an overview of all their students!
For example they could see how many students have submitted an assignment, the number of late submissions, how many assignments have been marked. This can be broken down course by course for a more indepth look at how a student is performing.
However, this feature was not implemented as some students suggested that seeing this information could demotivate them.
Additionally, department administrators can set up access across a category of courses for the entire department, with breakdown similar to the modular tutor view, at a higher level.
Here is what their dashboard looked like:
Making feedback visible.
The feedback report plugin was released into UCL’s Moodle site in 2016 and by February that year, 14% of users had viewed the report.
Jessica commented that the biggest issue identified by the UCL team for the implementation of the plugin is that the feedback is only as good as the assessment feedback within Moodle. This means that without that feedback, students and teachers could not use the plugin.
This issue was combatted by working with UCL staff to explain a way to put feedback into Moodle in a way which makes it visible in the report. Jessica and her team shared a publicly accessible PDF with teachers and tutors. The PDF explained how to:
- Enter grades into the grade boxes
- Use Moodle Assignment rubric/marking guides rather than PDF
- Upload marked files (with comments/tracked changes) into Moodle Assignments
- Provide overall quiz feedback for different bands of grades, pointing students to view the feedback for each question in their attempt
- Grant extensions to Moodle Assignments and Quizzes, so students with extensions don’t see their work marked as late in the report
- Uploading manual grade items directly into the Moodle Gradebook.
What did the UCL team learn?
Takeaway lessons from the UCL team:
- Communication – most staff did not know that the plugin existed or how to use it.
- Turnitin feedback – the feedback could not be displayed directly in the plugin report, so could only be linked.
- Personal tutors could not access the assessment unless they are enrolled on the course.
Technical tips
Jessica concluded her presentation by sharing technical tips about this project:
The my feedback report use the Moodle parent role to map students to their personal tutor. This can be automated by the user role assignment and the external database plugin can automate this.
Department admin access requires the legacy category enrolments plugin.
Permissions need to be set at a site level (as the report is site wide), so applying them to the student or teacher roles (course level ) do not work.
The archive feature is not recommended for production installations.
Want more information about the plugin? Watch Jessica’s full presentation below:
If you would like to join the 260 + institutions currently using the my feedback report, you can download it here.
For your chance to see presentations such as Jessica’s find a MoodleMoot near you.
