Can an award be triggered on some but not all quizzes or dropboxes?

Question

We have a client who would like learners to reflect either via dropbox or Written Response. These will not be graded and they will only need to complete 5 out of 8. Therefore there will be 8 quizzes or dropboxes to choose from and will only need to pick 5. Is there an option for D2L to release a certificate using an intelligent agent having only completed those 5 quizzes or submitting to only 5 of the dropboxes? Like a pick and Mix…

Sarah.W.901 · Answer

I created a partial workaround for this. We have a non-academic wellness course which has "awareness" type content, so the awards are used more as motivation than for high-stakes work, such as a conventional academic course.

This method could be used for "cheating", so I don't recommend it for a high-stakes activity. For low-stakes activities, there is little incentive for cheating, and the consequences are minimally harmful.

How I did this:

* Make a checklist for the activities (this also helps students track what they are doing, as the site we used this in goes over a whole year)
* Have a release condition on each checklist item that triggers the activity. For example, if the checklist is:

Complete 2 of the following 3 items:

1.  Complete Quiz 1

2. Complete Assignment 1

3. Complete Assignment 2

the release condition on Quiz 1 is visible if the checkbox for #1 is checked, Assignment 1 is visible if the corresponding item is checked, etc.

This also reduces visual clutter, so students don't see a huge list of activities unless they are going to actually do them.
* Create a one-question quiz with one multi-select question that is a duplicate of the checklist items, set the score to be "Correct Selections (1 pts per answer). The total points per question is the number of answers, in this case, 3. for example:

Please check off the items you completed:

a. Quiz 1

b. Assignment 1

c Assignment 2

Points: 3

I also set the quiz to only appear if at least one checklist item is checked. Students could still click through this to "cheat" but it slows them down a bit.
* Create the award with the release condition on the Quiz score. In this example, the students have to complete 2 of 3 possible activities, so they get the badge if they achieve 66% on the quiz.

Another caveat to this method, you need to be extremely clear with the students or audience on expectations, because the badge can only go by percentage, and it can look weird if you have something like 2/5 items required so the passing "grade" is "only" 40%! For folks accustomed to academic scores, that sounds like a "failing" grade, but it's not in this context. :)

Johnny.B.962 · Answer

@Laura.O.66, the release conditions in Brightspace are either ALL listed or ANY listed. There isn't really an option to just pick 5 out of 8 as you are describing…. directly. Now the way I would suggest approaching this is trying to add something else as a middle ground to facilitate the condition. For example:

* Create Groups
* Use Intelligent Agent to enroll students into group following completion of a quiz/submission in assignment (The action is "Enroll user in a course", but you can use that to enroll in any Org unit)
* Award release condition based on ALL enrollment in groups, or create another "Completion group" with enrollment into it based on the other groups

This will get a little complicated based on how many of the scenarios you want to account for (quiz 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, not 2, 7, 8, etc.), but that's what I would do.

Or someone will have to manually check things on occasion and then manually award it.

-Johnny

D2L LAM