Our faculty and staff are spending hours each week looking for a "needle in the haystack" of missing assignments that need to be graded. I understand that faculty can find this information from alerts, but we also need a better interface to find this information quickly by staff monitoring faculty grading.
Ideally, here is how this would work.
If a student submitted an assignment, but it was not yet graded, then the gradebook would show a link to that assignment where it could be graded (possibly with some type of image symbol). That way, either faculty or staff could quickly view an entire course and see what items have been submitted by students, but not graded.
It should be noted that this is also a critical function that will be needed by any school that is audited by the US Department of Education. Right now in our audit, they are requiring that we very closely monitor when students submit assignments. We have faculty manually taking attendance based on if students submit any gradable work in a week. Our faculty are only about 95% accurate. This 5% error will result in $10's of thousands of aid to be paid back, so we have to manually correct it.
A report that quickly shows all students grades and assignment submissions would help a lot with this. It should be noted that all online only schools should be doing this type of monitoring, so this should be pretty critical functionality to online schools.
