Instant Notifications - Grade Item updates when associated with assessment

Question

In D2L I have noticed that an Updated Grade instant notification is triggered when a grade item is associated with an assignment or discussion, even if the score itself has not changed.

In my test, I had a Quiz, a Discussion, and an Assignment all linked to the grade book with a test student having received a score for all three. The Updated Grade notification was sent to the student when their grade for each item was published (as expected). Then, as an instructor, I removed the grade item association for each of these assessments, the student did not receive any sort of notification from this change. However, when I re-associated each assessment with its corresponding grade item - having changed nothing else - this triggered Updated Grade notifications for the Assignment and the Discussion, but not the Quiz.

Is this expected behavior and if so can someone explain the reasoning behind it?

Steve.B.446 · Answer

This does feel like something that could be handled in a smarter way - if an activity is linked to a Grade item, the student doesn't really need two separate notifications that the activity has published and the gradebook has updated.

Matt.W.287 · Answer

#Unable to access PIE at the moment#: Apologies, I can't find that PIE number for you. But I can tell you that the specific settings are that the Final Grade is Auto-Updated and Auto-Released. This, in combination with the Notification set to include the grade value, results in the user getting a notification that they got 0% in the course.

There are a few possible workarounds:

1. Exclude the grade value from the notification

2. Drop Ungraded Items in the course so that nothing is presented to the Final Calculated Grade prior to an actual assessment

3. Find and up-vote the PIE Item for the feature request to prevent a notification in the case that the Final Grade is = 0%

Matt.W.287 · Answer

Hi John

The reason is down to a combination of Grades settings. The Notification is sent because Brightspace was told to (a) automatically keep the grades updated and (b) notify the user of updates to the grade value. In this scenario the change to the association triggers these conditions and results in the announcement.

Of course this is confusing as the learner gets a notification that they have 0% in something. I believe there is a PIE item for having 0% notifications filtered out. I'll reply back when I find it.

#UPDATE#: Apologies, I can't find that PIE number for you. But I can tell you that the specific settings are that the Final Grade is Auto-Updated and Auto-Released. This, in combination with the Notification set to include the grade value, results in the user getting a notification that they got 0% in the course.

There are a few possible workarounds:

1. Exclude the grade value from the notification

2. Drop Ungraded Items in the course so that nothing is presented to the Final Calculated Grade prior to an actual assessment

3. Find and up-vote the PIE Item for the feature request to prevent a notification in the case that the Final Grade is = 0%