Teaching Online at UTAS

This solution would suit scenarios like this:

• You/your tutors monitor students’ participation in weekly tutorials and workshops. Participation is not assessable; however, you wish to collect data about participation to inform the ongoing development of your unit.
• You/your tutors monitor students’ participation in weekly tutorials and workshops for assessment purposes. You would prefer to make a judgement about a student’s participation overall (rather than have MyLO calculate a score automatically), and record a mark based on your judgement.

Grading system and other requirements

This method requires the use of a weighted grading system. You will need to develop your own scoring system for tracking student participation. For example, a simple system might be as follows:

• 0 – indicates non-attendance;
• 1 – indicates attendance but minimal participation;
• 2 – indicates a reasonable level of participation; and
• 3 – indicates a high level of participation.

Your Category will initially need to be assigned a weighting (e.g. if participation is worth 10% of the unit, assign a Weight of 10). This will allow you to track how students perform over time using the Category Subtotal. This weighting is changed to 0% later in the unit, so that it does not impact on the Final Calculated Grade. If you wish to track participation, we suggest that you export the Category and Subtotal to an Excel spreadsheet before you change the Category weight to 0. This way, you will retain a record of the Subtotal. If you wish to manually generate a final overall participation mark for assessment purposes, you should create a Standalone Grade Item and record grades into it before you change the Category weight to 0.

When marking, you will need to record 0 as the grade for any un-submitted Quizzes or to represent non-attendance/lack of participation.

You will need to:

• Create one Category to represent the assessment task (if participation is assessable) to organise your weekly items. Use the options suggested here.
• Create one Grade Item for each week. Use the options suggested here. You must link each Grade Item to the Category that you have created.
• If you wish to manually generate an overall grade for the assessment task, we suggest creating another standalone Grade Item that is not linked to the Category you have created. Weight the Grade Item accordingly (e.g. if the assessment is worth 10%, record 10 as the weight). Use the options suggested here.

To see an example of what this solution might look like in the Grades tool, download this PDF.

You can download a printable copy of this whole page here.