Digital assessment using the Moodle Attendance activity

Moodle Gradebook can get cluttered quickly if you have periodical assessments in your course. For example, bi-weekly assessments, on an aspect of a course, over 10 weeks period would create five items in the Gradebook. Add with other common activities like weekly quizzes and you can end up with a cluttered gradebook. So how do you simplify things so that you and your students can quickly see where they stand, while still maintaining the ability for students to see a breakdown of their marks along with feedback? Enter the Moodle Attendance activity.

Dr Peter Neal is a project coordinator for ENGG1000: Engineering Design and Innovation. This course features more than 1,200 students working on one of more than 10 parallel design projects. Because each project has subtly different assessment items, the gradebook can become quite cluttered. In T1, 2019, 83 students took Peter’s project.

As part of the design process, each student must keep a journal to capture their thoughts, working and reflections on the project (e.g. in OneNote). This course aims to help 1st year students develop reflective practice in design and individual feedback is very important. These journals are marked manually at the end of week 5, 7, 9 and 11. By using the Moodle Attendance activity as an assessment tool, Dr Peter Neal was able to provide one mark for the periodical journal assessments in the Moodle Gradebook and allows students to see mark at each checkpoint along with their feedback.

The Moodle Attendance activity, as the name implies, is designed to allow teachers to track student attendance. This is achieved by creating one-off or recurring sessions (i.e. lessons), and then grading each student’s attendance status (e.g. present, absent, excused). There is also the option to keep notes on attendance for each student.

Peter realized that these sessions could be used to represent grading cycles and converting the attendance options into the levels of a rubric. This enabled his markers to easily grade journals by selecting appropriate level in the rubric and provide feedback in the notes field.

These are the steps I took to implement an Attendance activity as an assessment tool.

1. First, I created an Attendance activity. I also set it to be available but not visible to students (this is optional).
2. Then, I created a status set that reflected the levels in our design journal rubric (negligible, unsatisfactory, satisfactory and outstanding). Each status corresponded to a mark for that grading cycle. Unless you specify otherwise, the set-up shown below will return a maximum mark of 12 for four grading cycles.

3. In my project, design journals are graded in weeks 5, 7, 9, 11. To cater for these checkpoints, I created 4 sessions in an Attendance activity. You can associate sessions with separate groups (e.g. tutorials). In this case, I associated the sessions with my project group.

4. Lastly, I went into each session and “set status for all users” to NA (0 marks). This is because, when marking, the Attendance tool requires all students to have a status before the session can be saved.

Once this set-up was complete, my markers could go into the Attendance activity and provide each student with a grade and a comment.

Pros

• Cleaner Gradebook as it only presents the final (accumulating) mark for the entire activity.
• One place for students to see mark for an aspect of the course.
• Students can see breakdown of marking with feedback from the Attendance activity.
• Marks in the Attendance activity go to the Gradebook automatically.

Cons

• You can rename the Attendance activity as something else, but when students access the activity, the breadcrumb in Moodle displays as Attendance activity.
• The comments section is a small and while it can take extended comments, they are hard to edit for the marker in the interface.

To get started with the Moodle Attendance activity, please refer to the UNSW Teaching Gateway or get in touch with Dr Peter Neal.

• If you are working with multiple markers, you can create separate marking groups so that it’s easy to check the status of marking
• If you’re marking digital submissions, you will find it easiest to have one large screen or two screens. This will enable you to switch quickly between the attendance tool and the submissions.

Please get in touch with Dr Peter Neal for demos.