After a recent US Department of Education financial aid review, we were told that their interpretation of "regular and substantive interaction" with students is that faculty must grade every assignment within 7 days of submission. To be compliant with this, it has taken our faculty and staff hundreds of hours of manually going through each assignment to find those that are missing. We are told by USDE that any school that does not meet this 7 day grading requirement is at risk of losing their aid for that course.
A data slicer report doesn't address this need, because we need each faculty to easily see which items have been submitted but not yet been graded. Here are a few options of how this issue could be addressed.
- When we click on finalize course, it says something like "There are 162 unentered assignment grades." You could just make that hyperlinkable to a report.
- You could also potentially make a report of ungraded items on the alerts section of the course.
- You could have some mechanism of identifying ungraded assignments in the gradebook. Then faculty could just click on a hyperlink from the gradebook that would go directly to the assignment.
- A longer-term feature might be some type of faculty monitoring dashboard (similar to your advising dashboard) with configurable green, yellow and red based on number of ungraded items, items graded late, frequency of faculty login, etc.
We recognize that most students submit items in a given week, but some students submit late (for a penalty). It is mainly the students submitting late that is causing this to be difficult.
After talking with USDE, I would guess that nearly 100% of your online schools are not compliant with USDE's standard in this domain. It is too easy for a faculty member to miss a few assignments where they end up grading them late. As mentioned in my support request, I believe that nearly all of your online schools to be in violation of the law creating potentially millions of dollars of liability for them.
While I recognize that some of the more advanced features requested above could take a lot of effort by Populi, others might only take 10 hours to develop and could save schools tons of time and potentially millions of dollars of liability. Please at least add some basic functionality for this.
