With the launch of Quick Eval and the move to Daylight we've been asking ourselves what position Assignment Grader should have in our future roadmap. Quick Eval brings assessment of Assignments, Quizzes, and Discussions into one handy place where you can easily find and prioritize your evaluations. We’ve recently added the ability to dismiss activities, allowing you to ensure that you’re staying on top of your workload and focusing on the most important tasks first. Coming soon is additional support for Anonymous Grading in the submission tab, so you can be more confident that any unconscious bias isn’t playing a role in fair evaluations.
So, we're curious – has the launch of Quick Eval filled the need that Assignment Grader was originally intended to serve? Although we are not currently announcing end of life for Assignment Grader, we are intentionally investing in other assessment experiences and would like to engage with clients on those decisions.
Assignment Grader was launched in 2011 as an app for tablets and unfortunately its age is showing:
Figure: The Assignment Grader.
Assignment Grader is a tablet app that provides a native mobile experience for grading assignments.
Our UX design and development teams strive to create the best experiences for your most important workflows, including the recent addition of the Quick Eval tool that streamlines assessment and grading, and making sure they are optimized to work on every device.. Since its launch, Quick Eval has been a huge success, and we’re just getting started! We’re collecting your feedback, planning the next updates, and looking forward to Quick Eval taking over as the go-to hub for all your assessment needs.
The launch of our responsive Daylight UI including Quick Eval and our New Rubric Experiences has shown us that fewer of you are relying on the Assignment Grader app to grade assignments. The amount of daily active users for our Android and IOS apps has been steadily declining:
Figure: Chart showing active users for the Assignment Grader.
Assignment Grader active users for the past three months. This counts the number of unique people who open Assignment Grader in a given time period – 28 days, 7 days, or 1 day.
What’s next for Assignment Grader?
We’ve been doing the math, and it would take a lot of re-work to give the app a Daylight makeover that includes adding support for all our recent assessment features like Annotations, anonymous grading, observational assessments, rubric improvements, and more. We believe this effort would be better spent creating delightful, accessible, and consistent grading workflows within Brightspace that you can use to grade ALL assignment types, from any device you choose!
If you haven’t tried Quick Eval, we recommend you give it a try today. If there’s something missing, please let us know in the Product Ideas Exchange, as we’re actively working on creating the best assessment workflows for you. Want to keep the discussion going? Join our Quick Eval and Assessments Group
Over the years we've partnered with you, our Educators, to learn more about the tools and workflows that make it easier for you to grade on-the-go and provide the best support and feedback to your learners. We see Assignment Grader as a product that has offered an increased degree of freedom and flexibility for our educators to work from anywhere at any time. When we built Quick Eval, we partnered even more closely with our clients to learn more about traditional and non-traditional evaluators. As we grow with you, we hope you'll continue to offer us your feedback and perspective on how we can make our next gen features and tools the best ever!
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