This before That.
Anyone game to share their tips on things that work better in BrightSpace if you do 'em in the right order? I'm thinking gradebook here. And maybe competencies. Other examples welcome.
Answers
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Hi Lynda,
In my personal experience with the gradebook, it depends on how you operate. Do you have all your assessable activities already laid out at the beginning of the term AND all the directions for those activities? Then, the order does not really matter too much. When you create an assignment/quiz/discussion a grade item will be created, and then you can organize them as you see fit.
But, if you ONLY have the names and values of all the gradable items right now, setting up the grade book first (with categories to make things organized if you have categories) THEN as you are building the assignments/quizzes/discussions you can link them to the grade items you already setup in advance.
If you DON'T have the names and values of all the gradable items right now, but you DO have the categories of the items, then going through the Setup Wizard is a good place to start, and then having the categories there so when you are building your activities, you will have those buckets to place the grade items in.
You did not mention rubrics, but if you do grade with rubrics (which I highly recommend, because it makes things much easier), I should build those out first before creating your assignments. That way, as you are building the assignment, you can just attach the rubric, versus building the rubric as you are building the assignment.
As far as Competencies, I would have anything that I was going to attach a competency to (quiz score/quiz questions, grade items, rubric) built out first. In fact, I would probably have this mapped out in a spreadsheet outside of Brightspace. Then, when I was ready to start attaching (which I like to set aside time to do all the attaching all at one time,) it would be much quicker to go through it all.
Hope this helps.
Best,
Andrea
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Thanks for the tips. I recently built a whole certificate program using rubrics for marking and we're enjoying the clarity and efficiency of marking with them. For an introductory level course.
Really interesting what you recommend about competencies. I have limited experience with those, but the one time I tried to use them in a big serious way, with a course I was instructing, I got bogged down in creating the structure for everything and abandoned the effort as too time consuming. Sounds like bottom up, based on existing assignments and quizzes, might be better way to go.
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Personally, I prefer the Learning Outcomes tool. Competencies is our legacy tool, and there is no active development on that tool. It definitely was a great tool when we initially developed it, but the Learning Outcomes tool is significantly better presently. We also just announced yesterday at our Fusion conference our Achievement+ package, which uses Learning Outcomes, so I am much more invested in that tool now.
Learning Outcomes is a much easier to use tool in my opinion, and I personally prefer the features that go along with it - like the Mastery View of the Gradebook, adding outcomes to assignments as I am building them, adding outcomes to quiz questions as I am building the quiz, and aligning outcomes to course content to ensure coverage. Overall, it is just significantly easier to use for me, and much less time consuming, especially now that you can upload a CSV file to create all the outcomes.
