Granular Grading: The Power of Plugins

(Time to Read: 3 mins.)

The eLearn­ing team was recent­ly chal­lenged to meet some com­plex require­ments from one of VCC’s pro­grams. In this post we’ll talk about how we met the chal­lenge by lever­ag­ing and expand­ing on our LMS’s suite of tools. This is a sto­ry about a plu­g­in, so let’s start by explain­ing this term.

Moo­dle is the LMS of choice at VCC for many rea­sons, one of which being that it is mod­u­lar (Fun fact: Moo­dle is an acronym of “Mod­u­lar Object-Ori­ent­ed Dynam­ic Learn­ing Envi­ron­ment”). But what do we mean by “mod­u­lar”? Mod­ern soft­ware tools are often made up of mod­ules – indi­vid­ual parts that per­form spe­cif­ic tasks, and which com­mu­ni­cate with oth­er parts to pro­vide the ser­vice that end-users (in our case fac­ul­ty and stu­dents) are look­ing for. The advan­tage is that it is eas­i­er for Moodle’s capa­bil­i­ties to be extend­ed by adding new mod­ules like Lego bricks, cre­at­ing a rich­er, more com­plex struc­ture that can do more things, or do things bet­ter. And no sin­gle devel­op­er has to think of all the new ideas or devel­op these them­selves — part­ner devel­op­ers around the world can do this by cre­at­ing add-ons that are col­lec­tive­ly known as plu­g­ins.

Many of the fea­tures of a Moo­dle course that you may already be famil­iar with are in fact plu­g­ins, added to the basic, out-of-the-box set of Moo­dle tools that are includ­ed when the plat­form is first installed. These include the Atten­dance and Sched­uler tools that many fac­ul­ty use to add func­tion­al­i­ty to their cours­es.

Some­times a plu­g­in is so use­ful that it actu­al­ly becomes a part of the Moo­dle ‘core’ suite of tools — this hap­pened for exam­ple with the Moo­dle Book resource back in 2012, when Moo­dle ver­sion 2.3 was released, and has hap­pened more recent­ly with H5P.

Plugins extend Moodle capabilities

Some­times our pro­grams and instruc­tors need to do com­plex things with Moo­dle. A recent case in point is the shift in assess­ment strat­e­gy in our Den­tal Hygiene pro­gram. In the past, stu­dents have been assessed via a high-stakes exam, but the depart­ment want­ed to move to a more reg­u­lar assess­ment of stu­dent per­for­mance dur­ing fre­quent clin­i­cal ses­sions. In these ses­sions, stu­dents are assessed on a vari­ety of com­pe­ten­cies. Usu­al­ly when assess­ing a range of com­pe­ten­cies, we’d use a Moo­dle Assign­ment activ­i­ty with a rubric for mark­ing, and that’s the approach we took here. In the forth­com­ing term we’ll be pilot­ing the new grad­ing process, where graders will have the option of grad­ing stu­dents dur­ing the clin­i­cal ses­sions via a rubric, using a tablet. So far so good…

But there is a catch — the Moo­dle Assign­ment plus rubric set­up allows us to cap­ture a final grade for an assess­ment, but the indi­vid­ual grades for each com­pe­ten­cy are not imme­di­ate­ly vis­i­ble. And that’s a prob­lem, because we want to see if a stu­dent is strug­gling in a par­tic­u­lar area, even if they are ‘pass­ing’ the clin­i­cal ses­sion over­all.

Enter the plugin

Out solu­tion was to use a plu­g­in called Rubrics Report from Brick­field Edu­ca­tion Labs. This plu­g­in allows instruc­tors to drill down past a student’s over­all mark to view all their grades for each cri­te­ri­on from the rubric. This gran­u­lar lev­el of detail is invalu­able for under­stand­ing stu­dent per­for­mance on a deep­er lev­el. Now when an assign­ment is grad­ed using a rubric, the Rubrics Reports plu­g­in cap­tures detailed infor­ma­tion for each stu­dent, help­ing instruc­tors iden­ti­fy areas where stu­dents excel or need improve­ment.

Using a com­bi­na­tion of Moo­dle Assign­ment + rubric, the Rubrics Report plu­g­in, and a cus­tom spread­sheet to col­late all the data, Instruc­tors can now see a stu­den­t’s pro­gres­sion from ses­sion to ses­sion, and can inter­vene where nec­es­sary, pro­vid­ing tar­get­ed feed­back that sup­ports learn­ing pro­gres­sions. So in the near future, when you are under the care of a recent den­tal hygien­ist grad­u­ate of the VCC pro­gram, you will be able to thank Moo­dle plu­g­ins for the supe­ri­or care you receive!