Our faculty and instructional staff are struggling to find a way to control when students see their grades on an assignment. I know the main categories affecting it are Student Progress Visibility and having assingments Published. What we want to be possible is to enter grades into Populi but control the date and time that the information is viewable to the class as a whole. Put another way, the functionality we are looking for is to be able to enter grades/feedback/uploaded assessed files, etc, into Populi and set the availability for a date and time in which every single student will see it appear at the same time.
Why the current options don't meet this need:
Student Progress: It controls the entirety of the course. For assignments assessed on hard copy, removing Progress Visibility is an okay option, as students get written feedback and grade numbers throughout the term in their handed back papers, but only see the cumulative grade information on Populi at the end of the term. What this doesn't work for is any assessment feedback entered or uploaded into Populi. If Student Progress isnt visible, there can be no continuous assessment feedback for assignments that aren't hard copies. The former model is how we worked before adopting Populi, and Populi is meant to move us away from hard copies eventually, so the current options don't meet that need.
Publish: Currently, an instructor cannot enter grades into an unPublished assignment. This means any grade entered into Populi are immediately visible to students. For our teaching content and methods, it is generally important that all students in a class receive their grades at the same time as their classmates and that the time at which they receive their grade information online coincides with seeing the written feedback on hard copies or uploaded materials. It would be great if Assignment Publishing could have a subset date and time option. Instructors should be able to enter all grade information for an assignment in its online gradebook entry, but set the date and time of visibility for students. That way, you can grade enter the grades of 70 students on Assignment #1 over the two weeks it takes, but set visibility for the start of the classtime when everyone has had their papers handed back to them.
None of the current options allow the combination of A. Using the online grade book to enter grades B. Individual assignments having different progress visibility C. An entire class receiving feedback & grades at the same time.
What some of our instructors have had to do in order to approximate this option is to keep an offline spreadsheet of grades and feedback, then enter all of that into Populi the day before assignments are handed back. It is an unfortunate amount of duplicated work and still leaves a gap between students seeing their grades and hard copy feedback at the same time. Its important for us to communicate the "What you got and why you got it" assessment at the same time, and as we move more and more towards uploading feedback on Populi rather than hard copies, grade visibility will be that much more important, so that half the class don't see their grades before the other half a week later.
I'm not sure if this concern is unique to our institution or not. I'd love to hear how other schools make use of Student Visibility and Publish to meet their grade release preferences.
Thanks very much,
Kj Swanson
