ARCHIVED: In Oncourse, what is the Online Gradebook?

The following is an overview of the Oncourse Online Gradebook.

What it does

At its simplest, the Oncourse Online Gradebook is where instructors can record and post grades, and students can check them. New gradebooks are invisible by default. If you are a student and can't see a gradebook that you know should be available for a course you're taking, your instructor might have forgotten to make it visible.

Instructors can import and export gradebook files to and from a spreadsheet such as Excel.

More complex Gradebook features include automatic calculation of running totals, averages, final grades, and course distributions. This enables students to see their current grade (in terms of points or percentages) for the class at any time. You can also disable this feature, so that students cannot see their running grades or statistics.

Note: The Total Grade (Default) grades are pulled from the running grades of a selected gradebook. The running grade is the average of the grades that you've entered, and does not take into account outstanding assignments for which you have not entered grades. Subsequently, the Total Grade (Default) grade may not accurately reflect a student's final grade if there are outstanding assignments.

Instructors also can arrange to assign and automatically record grades for Course Mail messages and Discussion Group postings. As of fall 2004, they can also use the gradebook to submit final grades.

As an instructor, you can create multiple gradebooks for your course. This is useful particularly if you plan to assign a combination of individual and group projects.

New gradebooks are private by default. As an instructor, you will have to deliberately make your gradebook visible before your students can see their grades. Once you make your gradebook available to individual students, they will be able to see their own grades, but not each other's.

Key concepts

Manual setup: As an instructor, using a manual gradebook is a lot like using a paper gradebook in that the features are minimal. When you need calculations, you can transfer files back and forth between Oncourse and a spreadsheet. Using manual setup, you can quickly make changes to your test or assignment structure. This allows you to build some flexibility into your grading scheme.

Automatic grade calculation: As an instructor, if you know exactly how your grading scheme will work (i.e., how many and what kinds of tests and projects you will assign, and how many points you want to allocate to each) you can use the Gradebook Wizard to set up your gradebook for automatic calculation.

Grade scale: Oncourse uses the term "grade scale" to refer to the scheme for converting points or percentages to letter grades.

Assignments: Oncourse uses the term "assignment" to refer to anything that gets graded. An assignment can be an essay, a test or quiz, a participation score, or anything for which points are assigned.

Categories: Oncourse refers to the types of assignments (such as essays, quizzes or tests, participation scores) as categories. As an instructor, if you are planning to use Oncourse's automatic grade calculation feature, you will have to set up your categories ahead of time, and decide how much of the final grade you will allocate to each category.

Points versus percentages: As an instructor, when you use the Gradebook Wizard, one of the first decisions you face is whether to scale your grades by points or percentages. Except in special cases, points offer greater flexibility, and percentages can be calculated automatically from point scores.

Things to consider

• How many gradebooks should you create? As an instructor, if you have several discussion sections, or if you would like to have separate automatic and hand-graded sections, you may want to use more than one gradebook per course. Multiple gradebooks also can help you track attendance or grant extra credit. They are almost a necessity if your course contains graduate and undergraduate students in a combined roster, with separate assignment categories.
• If you need to check your gradebook as your students see it, don't rely on the Tools menu's "Switch to Student Mode" feature to give you a realistic view of the Gradebook. Consider editing your class roster to add a Guest account for a non-existent student; assign grades to that non-existent student, then use the Guest account to log in and see what the student would see.
• Manual setup or automatic grade calculation? If you would like to leave room to change some aspects of your grading scheme, it is safest to set up your gradebook manually. If your entire grading scheme is fixed and immutable, you can set up automatic grade calculation.
• Points or percentages? Choosing a point scheme will allow more flexibility if you need to change aspects of your grading scheme later on.
• To grade Course Mail or discussion forum posts, you will need to include these ahead of time as gradebook assignments.