Brightspace enables you to make engaging content to help change the way your learners interact with course materials. It's important to be aware of the various assessment options available to you in your courses. Consider the following tools and features to make the assessment experience simple for both faculty and learners.
Standardize the way you evaluate learner work with Rubrics
Create or use existing rubrics to evaluate an activity or item based on a predefined set of criteria. Rubrics help ensure that activities and items are evaluated fairly and consistently and deliver effective feedback for learners. Using rubrics as part of your course assessment options streamlines the grading workflow.
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Want to take it a step further? Use Learning Outcomes or Competencies to map course content to standards. Using either method of assessing students allows educators to track student progress as they work toward achieving the desired learning outcomes.
- Use the Competencies tool to create competency structures to help assess students’ learning objectives and determine if they have acquired the intended knowledge, skills, and abilities from a learning experience.
- Use the Learning Outcomes tool to map standards to course content and then assess students against these standards.
Outcome achievement appears in the Mastery View tab of the Grades tool.
Important! The name of the Learning Outcomes tool and some menu items and links therein depend on the language term defined by your organization. Based on that setting, the Learning Outcomes link in Content might be labeled Competencies, Expectations, Objectives, or Standards.
Tip! An important difference between the two tools is that assessment of the outcomes can be done on a holistic scale (such as Meets Expectations) in the Learning Outcomes tool and can only be measured as achieved or not achieved using the Competencies tool.
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Connect your grading system to Assignments, Discussions, or Quizzes
Set up a grading system in the Grade book of the Grades tool for an entire district, school, or individual course. The grading system can be set up to connect to course assignments, discussions, or quizzes. It takes a bit of effort to set up the grade book for your course, but once you’re done, the Grades tool records the grades you assign learners for any of the associated learning activities in your course site and calculates each grade contributes to the learner’s final grade. The Grades tool can even record the grades you’ve assigned to learners through Rubrics. It is also possible to record grades assigned to students for learning activities that occur in-class, such as an oral presentation or an art display.
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View all ungraded submissions in one place using Quick Eval
In the Quick Eval tool, you can see a summary of the assignment, discussion, and quiz grading work you have left to complete. You can sort submissions by course, learner, and activity so that you can grade learner work however it suits you. You can use Quick Eval to navigate quickly to the activity evaluation page, where you can evaluate grade items and publish feedback.
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Evaluating grade items in their respective tools
Quizzes
As a best practice for storage, organization, and easy access, we recommend that you create all your questions using the Question Library. Then build your quiz based on questions within the Question Library. The quiz tool allows for many question types including arithmetic, multiple choice, short and long answer to name a few, and can be used as a diagnostic, formative, or summative assessment activity.
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Discussions
In the Discussions tool, you can review and evaluate discussion topics and individual participants without changing your workflow.
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Assignments
You can use the Assignments tool to create and edit assignments, see users’ submission times, view submissions on the Evaluate Submission page, associate assignments to rubrics and competencies, and return submissions with grades and feedback. Starting in August 2024/20.24.8, you can delegate instructors in large classes and have single or multiple shared evaluations to reduce bias.
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Monitor Student Progress
The Class Progress tool allows educators to quickly view, compare and track student performance at a glance.
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Monitor and report on assessment initiatives
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Note: Brightspace Insights (and the Assessment Quality Dashboard) is only available to clients who have purchased the Performance+ package.
Use Brightspace Partner Tools to further your assessment journey
D2L has partnered with many companies that provide additional solutions for assessment needs. Contact your sales representative to inquire about add-on solutions.
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