Taming the grade centre with colour

One of those “why didn't I know you could do that” moments that I thought was worth sharing. This is where I find out that I'm the only blackboard user who didn't know about it but here goes anyway.

At the recent North England Blackboard User Group Meeting (NEBUG) there was a really useful presentation from Adam Elce (North Notts college) showcasing the blackboard templates and VLE audit framework they use. His presentation may be worth another blog post in itself but he casually threw in the fact that you can colour code student scores in the grade centre.

Now I've always found the grade centre in blackboard to be an unwieldy beast at the best of times…. very powerful but unwieldy.

In our Legal Practice course we make extensive use of MCQs but the default grade centre just displays numbers that could be out of any total, the quizzes may vary from 3 questions up to 30. A quick visit to the” manage” tab in the gradebook, drop down to “grading colour code” tick the box to enable colour coding then just build your own criteria and colour scheme.

It just so happen in this one we have gone for purple for very high scores, the reds are less than 50% (a fail), dark blues are in progress and various shades represent the grade ranges in between. This was a 30 second job to set up, .

Now the whole grade centre becomes a lot more useful as you can easily see a student’s progress across the quizzes without having to remember what each score was out off. You can of course toggle colour on and off if it all gets a bit too much.

Gareth Bramley, University Teacher on our LPC course writes "the colour coding can usefully be adapted so that it highlights various grade boundaries, and the colours make it a lot easier to assess how the students enrolled on the module have performed in each quiz"

Hope this is useful if you didn't already know about it. Next time I’ll be delving more into reporting from the gradebook and quiz analysis tools.

Handy App: Post-it Plus

Here at the University of Sheffield my role often involves working with colleagues to brainstorm and discuss ideas. To help facilitate this, I often rely on post-its enabling participants to share ideas and skim through the responses of others. If you use post-it notes in this way, like me you probably take a picture of the post-it notes after the event so that they can be shared more widely. One of the problems with taking a picture is that it is difficult to add, edit, or reorder the post-its once you have your picture. So I was pleasently surprised when I came across the 3M post-it app (only available in the App Store), which allows you to do just this.

The app allows you to take a picture of or upload a picture of a 'bunch' of post its. It will then recognise each note in the picture (or let you outline where a note is if the app is struggling to do so). You can then:

• Edit a note
• Reposition each note
• Add a new note

The picture below is from a TEL meets session that we host monthly at the University, the event brings together learning technologists across the institution to network and share ideas. In a recent event we asked delegates to consider what discussion points they would like covered in forthcoming sessions. After uploading an initial picture of the post-it notes to the app,  I have been able to shade out the names of people that suggested an idea to anonymise them (in red).

You can move around each note individually or automatically align them. 

Finally, you can see that I have added some new post-it notes using the keyboard and my finger (for a freestyle look) (see the light yellow post-its in the centre below). 

You can also export the changes that you have made (as an image, powerpoint or word) or share your notes with other users. I stuck with the free version of the app, but for a fee you can have the option to change the the colour of different post-it notes. 

Would you find this app useful? Is this something you will use? Add a comment and share your thoughts! 

University Sheffield International College and technology enhanced learning: Developing MOLE Courses and the working relationship

Over the past few months the Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) team here at the University of Sheffield have been working in close partnership with the University Sheffield International College (USIC) in developing their courses on our Blackboard 9.1 VLE (Virtual learning Environment). The VLE here at the University is branded My Online Learning Environment (MOLE). 

Previously, USIC were users of the Moodle platform, and at the point we started working with them, had limited or no experience in the Blackboard 9.1 environment. 

My main contacts for USIC were Barbara Gardener (Learning Technologies Manager), Tom Pyecroft (Learning Technologist) and Laura Murray (Academic administrator). They are all employed by StudyGroup. 

As there would be no direct migration of courses from Moodle to Blackboard either, we found ourselves in the position of having to start course building from scratch. On the face of it, this sounds like a bad thing, but it represented a great opportunity for us and the module developers in USIC to be able to rethink their curriculum delivery. 

At the start of discussions it was clear that USIC wanted a consistent approach to course design across their programmes. This consistency would help a) ensure students experience with the VLE was uniform and of high value and b) help make course management more efficient. USIC had a number of module developers available to them who would be in charge of developing these courses. These staff, as mentioned above, had some limited or no experience on Blackboard.

So, the first question was... How would we develop this consistent approach to course building, whilst giving the module developers some hands on time with blackboard? ...The answer came in the form of a full day training session for the module developers, at the Corporate information and Computing Service (CiCS) training room (and Hicks Building due to availability!). 

We split the day into two sections, morning and afternoon, with a much needed lunch break in the middle! 

The morning session was dedicated to the “nuts and bolts” of course building in MOLE. We demonstrated the basic elements of course navigation and structure and building/deploying content in the system. Nothing too advanced was attempted, and this was important as often the key to good course design is in making it simplistic.

Staff in the group session wrestling with course template design - Image courtesy BGardener - StudyGroup and USIC

The afternoon session was all about building USIC course templates in MOLE. Barbara had very kindly put together a cards activity that really helped invite discussion and debate. 

The cards activity involved attendees being given a set of 40 cards. These cards contained a single item relating to course design and delivery. For example we had: “All items include descriptive information”, “All grades available through grade centre”, ”A class wiki”, “Formative tests”,”Adaptive release”, “Content collection”. Attendees were then asked to put them into three separate piles:

1.  Launch - These items should be available at the launch of the courses 
2. Intermediate - These items could be delivered in the near future but after launch 
3. Exemplary - These items would require more thought and investigation but are items that in an ideal world they would wish to have in the courses.

Cards used in the session - image courtesy BGardener StudyGroup and USIC

The activity generated some really useful discussion around the key elements that needed to be in the courses from the get go, as well as the higher level content that would take more time to implement. A couple of the key areas covered as being essential (and therefore launch) were:

•  Use of the content collection in managing overarching programme content 
• Directing students learning through effective use of adaptive release.

Importantly the theme of exemplary course design (something we are having a real push on in TEL at the University of Sheffield) was woven into both the morning and afternoon sessions. This theme was highlighted in another activity we devised, which involved attendees being enrolled in both an “exemplary course” and a “bad course”.

They were split into two groups and asked to do the following:

1. Try and improve the bad course
2. Provide feedback to the group as to what they would do to improve it, if they had the time 

The best thing about this activity was the fact that both groups had some really good ideas around what a MOLE course should achieve. The main idea being to avoid it being a file repository and instead have it enhance learning and encourage collaboration. Both groups again agreed that consistency across courses was key. For example: clearly labelling content with descriptions, formatting, chunking up learning content into manageable sections and displaying it correctly through combined use of the navigation menu and content pages. 

 We finished at 4pm tired, but with a sense that we had achieved some clear ideas about what the USIC courses will look like, and of course it also aided the forging of a good working relationship between TEL and USIC. But we weren't finished there….Day 2 beckoned... 

 The following day saw the TEL team train USIC staff on the use of PebblePad, with demonstrations of the versatile ways Pebble+ can create templates and workbooks, and ATLAS, the institutional space where assignments and assessments can be managed. Some valuable discussions were had at how the system can be used for logging achievements and capabilities, and how workbooks and webfolios can be used to aid student reflection and learning. 

 The module development team also took part in a workshop introducing Smart Notebook software which will be available in all USIC classrooms and enables valuable collaboration opportunities. The team had seen the interactive whiteboards and software previously at a classroom technologies drop in session run for all the teaching and professional service staff in March. 

Many thanks to Barbara Gardener  and Pete Mella (University of Sheffield TEL team) for their contributions to this blog post. 

Stay tuned for more developments over the summer on this topic! 

James