Month: December 2016

Feature Request: Text Fields in Gradebook

I had a mini-crisis in Canvas this week (not being able to enter letter grades for my students: Part 1), which led to researching the many features requests at Canvas about this problem (which I collected in Part 2), and then I just had to vent about numeric grades (for which I made a meme: Part 3). I’ll finish up the series today with my thoughts about a feature request I want to propose at Canvas, and I would greatly appreciate feedback and suggestions, especially from anyone who has successfully proposed a feature request.

I’ll need to do some more research first; as an LMS minimalist, I never thought I would be making a feature request… but I want to try. Based on all the failed requests I found, I’m guessing that I will not succeed either, but at least it will be a chance to connect with others exploring better ways to grade, and I will benefit from that personally, regardless of what happens in Canvas. 🙂

Feature Request: Text Fields in the Canvas Gradebook

It would be very useful if instructors could create text fields in the Canvas Gradebook.

Text fields v. current “Notes” field. Right now, there is a Notes field, but its usefulness is limited because there is no toggle to make it visible to students. There is also only one Notes field, when what we really need is to create multiple text fields, defining a specific purpose for each one, and making each one visible to students or not based on that purpose. Finally, the Notes field is not part of the CSV import/export of the Gradebook, which makes it useless for those who want to experiment with alternative grading systems.

Specifications:

1. Multiple Fields. Instructors should be able to create multiple text fields, based on their specific needs. The fields can be short in length; the Notes field is available for longer entries.

2. Visibility. We should be able to make each Gradebook text field visible to students or not.

3. Export/Import. The Gradebook text fields should be part of the CSV import/export of the Gradebook as other columns are.

4. Sortability. The Gradebook text fields should be sortable in the Gradebook as the other columns are.

5. Messaging. The Gradebook text fields should be available for use in messaging students as other columns are. A simple “not empty” criterion would work, equivalent to the “haven’t submitted” option for assignment columns.

6. Searching/Filtering. If/when the Gradebook finally becomes more fully searchable and filterable on multiple columns (as I hope it will), the Gradebook text fields should be integrated with those advanced searching and filtering options.

Outcomes:

1. Letters without numbers. Instructors could use a text field to record a letter grade or other text-based mark manually in the Gradebook without any number-based scheme. (That is what I expected to be able to do, based on my previous practice in D2L; I cannot use a Canvas grading scheme because my course is based on choices, not zeroes, and students always have a score of 100%.)

2. Complex grading/analytics. Instructors could use a text field to support a complex assessment system in an external spreadsheet, importing the resulting text-based mark from the spreadsheet back into the Canvas Gradebook. This would work for final grade calculation, and also for other kinds of highly customized data analysis. For example, you could set up a formula in an external spreadsheet to alert students to having missed “more than x” number of assignments in “the past x weeks,” and display a resulting text message to the student in the Gradebook via a custom text field for that purpose.

3. Student alerts. Instructors could use a text field to manually enter important information with students. For example, in D2L I used a text-based field to alert students what stage their project had reached so that they would know what they had due in any given week (my students’ project assignments vary based on their individual project schedule).

4. Fields-as-flags. Instructors could use a text field for flagging purposes. D2L offered a single on-off flag toggle that I used for different purposes at different times during the semester; a simple text field can serve the same function as a flag toggle, so the text field option would give us the equivalent of flagging.

~ ~ ~

Okay… that is my first attempt at drafting the request. I’ll do some more research and keep thinking on this, and then learn just how one goes about reviving an old feature request (I am not the first person to have made this request), and also strategize about the timing. My guess is that this would make a good winter break project!

Feedback and suggestions very welcome! I would like to do a good job with this; it’s not a challenge I expected to tackle (being an LMS minimalist), but I am excited to give it a try. My only experience is with D2L, and the D2L text fields are what gave me this idea. I would be very curious to hear from Blackboard and Moodle users what text field options are available in those Gradebooks, and I will also research that online to see what I can learn.

And to close, here is a growth mindset cat for inspiration:

Obstacles teach you to leap higher.

 

Update: And speaking of obstacles, when I went to submit my feature idea today, December 9, I found out that Canvas shut down the Feature ideas just two days ago. No more voting on new ideas. I am cursed! They will be announcing a new process in 2017. Well, whatever it is, I hope I will be able to move forward with this; they said to go ahead and submit new ideas for commenting, so that’s somethign at least. I’ll do that! You can read more here: Changes Coming to Canvas Community Feature Ideas.

Crossposted at OU Canvas Community.

The Tyranny of the Percentage: Part 3

I learned a lot when I explored the Canvas feature requests related to the inflexible Canvas Gradebook which offers numeric grading only (see yesterday’s post). Tomorrow I’ll strategize about how I might be able to re-open one of those feature requests; in this post, though, I want to share some of my thoughts about the evils of grading on a 0-100 scale. I am opposed to any kind of grading (I vote for feedback, not grading), but the percentage scale strikes me as especially harmful. Here’s why:

It promotes a false sense of accuracy. When you see a numeric grade like “87” (or, even worse, “87.3” … decimals!), the number gives the impression of scientific accuracy, but that is only a faux accuracy. Unlike real measurements that are based on a scientific standard (temperature, time, etc.), there is no standard for numeric grades beyond the assessment instrument itself. An “87” on Mrs. Cathcart’s French quiz last Tuesday has nothing at all to do with an “87” on Mr. Diggory’s spelling test last Friday.

It promotes a false sense of precision. Just as numeric grades pretend to be accurate, they also pretend to be precise, when they are not precise at all. Sometimes that imprecision is because the grading process itself is subjective, but even for “objective” assessments, we all know student performance can be highly variable from one iteration to another; just ask the student who had a migraine on the day of a test, etc.

It makes trivial differences seem real. Grouping students as “A” or “B” or “C” students is bad enough (my school has no pluses and minuses, thank goodness; so at least we are keeping the absurd herding to a minimum), but pretending that a student with a grade of 87 is “better” than a student with a grade of 86 is just silly. Students know this, which is why they are so quick to complain (understandably) about receiving a B for an 89 as opposed to an A for a 90. 

It promotes the illusion of perfection. In my opinion, perfectionism is one of the biggest pitfalls in academic life, and there is nothing like a 100-point scale to promote that dangerous illusion of a “perfect score” (and I say that as a recovering perfectionist). For more on growth mindset versus perfectionism, check out Carol Dweck’s great talk on this topic: On Being Perfect.

Numbers are poor quality feedback. As I mentioned above, I believe in feedback, not grading. A number scale might make a student feel good or bad (even very good or very bad), but the number itself is useless as feedback, positive or negative; it does not communicate to the student what to do next to improve and extend their learning.

The curse of “100” has been with us for a long time (see A History of Grading by Mark Durm and The Case Against Percentage Grades by Thomas R. Guskey), and I have no doubt that it will be with us a long time to come.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Crossposted at OU Canvas Community.

 

The Tyranny of the Percentage: Part 2

So, I’m still kind of in shock at this nothing-but-numbers approach to grading in Canvas (see yesterday’s post). To make sure I understand things correctly I re-read this archived/failed feature request: Allow Grading Schemes where Range is based on points not percentage. The commenters note that this problem is part of a more general failure in Canvas: the lack of variability in setting grading schemes. That conversation led me to another archived/failed request: Can’t a letter grade just be a letter grade? And as I follow this White Rabbit through the various twists and turns, I see that this is a long-standing — very long-standing — problem with Canvas.

The conversation at Can’t a letter grade just be a letter grade? expresses many of my same concerns about the tyranny of percentages and number-grading only: even if you set up a scheme that assigns letters, “you cannot hide the number grade” as one commenter points out, and this concern was echoed by others.

As for it being a long-standing problem, consider this comment: “Consistently since 2011, our faculty have been seeking a way to decouple letter grades from Grading Schemes and to import certain grades via .CSV only as letter grades.” That commenter provides links to a half-dozen previous attempts to request that Canvas do something about this; they go back to a previous community forum that Canvas ran in the past, so unfortunately those conversations have been lost, but you can get a sense of what they were like from the titles:

  • https://help.instructure.com/entries/23293805-Show-Letter-Grade-without-Percentage
  • https://help.instructure.com/entries/21681059-Letter-grades-only-in-the-grade-book
  • https://help.instructure.com/entries/20680607-Submit-Grades-Using-Letters-Only-no-numeric-value-
  • https://help.instructure.com/entries/57781700-Displaying-only-Letter-Grades
  • https://help.instructure.com/entries/35209404-Create-a-Text-Column-in-Gradebook-that-students-can-view

In the current Canvas Jive forum, the idea comes back again here: Allow final grade to be letter grade only and here Grades without points. And who knows: perhaps there are other instances. That is one disadvantage of the free-for-all approach to feature requests; apparently there’s not a good system for helping people explore past requests before making a new one.

Meanwhile, again and again the commenters point out the bureaucratic problems the numbers-only grading creates for them and also the way it confuses and even upsets their students. The specific details depend on the different approaches people are taking, if they curve, if they use rubrics, etc. The main takeaway is that for many different kinds of grading approaches, this Canvas limitation is a serious problem.

This general statement by one commenter sums it up pretty nicely: “Instructors simply want a “decoupled” alphanumeric column in their gradebooks that they can type just type letters into for purposes of final grades, and import of those grades into the SIS.”

One person facing exactly the same problem that I face uses the same (ridiculous) workaround is apparently my only choice: “The only way I can report this information in the gradebook is to create a new assignment. Then Canvas reports the letter grade that I enter along with a numeric score that it makes up. (I’ve attached two screenshots–one in which the letter grade “assignment” was worth 1 point, one in which it was worth 0 points.) The numeric score is meaningless. It would be a lot less confusing if the gradebook just showed the letter grade without any numbers attached.”

Entering meaningless numbers simply in order to generate the display of a letter grade is exactly what I refuse to do.

I have a lot to say about this myself, which I will save for a separate post later today. For now, I will let this post stand for now as documentation of the discussion trail at Canvas.

And as soon as I finish my follow-up post, I will begin the process of resubmitting this request, and I will contact every interested person I can find in order to see if we can (finally) manage to do something about it.

Maybe I will fail, like those before me, but I have to at least try:

I can accept failure; I can’t accept NOT trying.

Crossposted at OU Canvas Community.

The Tyranny of the Percentage: Part 1

Last week, I wrote about how pleased I was that Canvas allowed me to have true blanks in the Canvas Gradebook so that my students do not see zeroes. They only see the assignments they have completed, and their total points accumulate assignment by assignment. Because there are no zeroes, the percentage is always 100%. And that’s just how I want things to be.

So… imagine my surprise this morning when I tried to display my students’ final grade in the Canvas Gradebook. The class is over this Friday at noon, and many students have the points they need to be done with the class. So, I’d like to have their final grade display in Canvas, in addition to their total points.

But as it turns out, this is impossible.

Why?

Because Canvas only supports percentage-based grading schemes. You know, the arbitrary absurdity that declares 90% and above to be an A. Or maybe 93% and above is an A, if you’re being “rigorous.” Or maybe 94% is an A. If you’re being really “rigorous” (yes, those are snark quotes).  Here is what I see when I try to add my grading scheme to the system:

grading-standards

That’s it: percentages. Only percentages.

I was thinking maybe I was just missing some obvious points-based menu, but when I asked the Canvas support team at my school, they could not think of any way for me to use my points-based grade scheme in Canvas. What they told me to do was to convert my points to percentages based on total points, but I cannot do that: my students choose what assignments to complete (or not), and their percentage is always 100% … which is why I liked having all those blanks in the Gradebook to begin with. I repeat: choices, not zeroes.

I’m still hoping I’m wrong (Canvas gurus, please enlighten me!), and I’ll take some more time tomorrow to research this (hence the “Part 1” in the title of this post). But this archived feature request seems to confirm the worst: Currently, you can only setup a Grading Scheme by setting the Ranges as percentages.

screenshot-2016-12-06-at-10-11-09-pm

So, I hope that somehow I am wrong… but if I am not wrong, you can believe I will have a lot to say about this in Part 2! 🙂

Growth mindset cats break through the barriers.

20283780362_a5d7f10d37_o

Crossposted at OU Canvas Community.

Blog Index / December 4, 2016

Here is the round-up of the posts at this blog so far, with a new category to reflect the focus of last week’s posts: Grading with Canvas.

New posts are in bold:

Practical Canvas Advice

Grading with Canvas

Canvas Content

Posts about Students

  • Student Tech Support for Canvas. Based on student feedback, these are the Canvas features I am supporting and promoting: Calendar, Notifications, Profile, and Mobile App.
  • Student Voices about Canvas. These are the results of my Fall 2016 mid-semester student survey, with lots of advice from students for instructors using Canvas.
  • Time Management Brainstorms. I got some big ideas from an ILED studio session on helping students with time management.

Posts about Instructors

Philosophy of Teaching

Canvas and Openness

And here’s one of the Growth Mindset Cats from this week’s posts:

trust

Become a Javascript Wizard in Canvas: HTTPS is the key

I’m taking a break today from the series of posts on Grading to share something fun: a Gaudium Mundo javascript for Latin holiday songs during the month of December. My school won’t let me teach Latin, but that doesn’t stop me from making javascripts and sharing them at my Bestiaria Latina blog.

In this post, I’ll explain the double-hack that mere mortals need to display javascripts inside Canvas. All it requires is the magic of HTTPS webspace so that you can host both the javascript and also the HTML webpage that you will use to sneak the javascript into Canvas. Here’s how it works:

1. Create your javascript. I use the wonderful free tool RotateContent.com to create my javascripts; I’ll write up a post later about just how that works. Zero programming required! You just create an HTML table of the content you want to use (date-based or random), and then RotateContent generates the script for you. For Gaudium Mundo, I made two scripts: one 400 pixels wide, and one 200 pixels wide. New songs appear automatically each day of December; I don’t have to do anything. It’s automatic! 🙂

2. Create an HTML webpage. Next, I create a vanilla HTML webpage which does nothing more than call the script. You can see the page here: Gaudium Java. When I said vanilla, I wasn’t kidding! All it does is call the script.

3. Use iframe in Canvas. Then, all you have to do is use iframe to embed the contents of the HTML page where you want it inside a Canvas page. For example, here I split the page and made the script display in the right-hand column: Javascript: Gaudium Mundo.

screen-shot-2016-12-02-at-10-37-53-am

If you are a Latin teacher and want to use my script and page, go ahead; I am glad to share! You will find the iframe code there on the Canvas page, and if you want the script for use in a blog where javascripts are allowed without the extra layer of the iframe, you can get the javascript here.

And whether or not you are a fan of Latin holiday songs, I hope this might inspire other Canvas users who have access to HTTPS webspace to experiment with creating javascripts and displaying them inside Canvas. It is a fun and easy way to add dynamic content to your classes! Plus, you can choose to share your scripts with others if you want. For more examples, see my Writing Motivation widget in Canvas, and … of course … the Growth Mindset cats in Canvas.

screen-shot-2016-12-02-at-10-36-08-am

Thanks as always to Reclaim Hosting for putting the magic power of HTTPS under my control. We can all be javascript wizards in Canvas this way!

screen-shot-2016-12-02-at-10-34-28-am

Crossposted at OU Canvas Community.

Here’s the script in action:

Points-Based Grading: Choices, not Zeroes

As I explained in yesterday’s post, the Canvas quiz system is not very congenial to my points-based system with student Declarations of work completed, but I am happy with my work-around: Canvas Hack: Repeated Quiz Content. What I want to write about today is one way in which the Canvas system really does suit me, and that is the way that a “blank” in the Canvas Gradebook is exactly that: a blank… and not a zero.

For me, blanks-not-zeroes is just what I need, and it is a big improvement on D2L for my approach to grading. Each week students have a long list of activities to choose from, and every assignment they complete brings them that much closer to their final destination. Their points accumulate, and their percentage total is always 100%. The grade is based on points, not a percent. Students get credit for the work they choose to complete, and it really is a choice. There is no penalty for assignments they choose not to do. There are no zeroes.

Of course, many people do not use a system based on student choice. Instead, the grade is based on a fixed set of assignments that all students must complete, and failure to complete an assignment is a zero that brings down the grade. When people realized this around midterm time at my school, there was a rush to inform people about this difference between Canvas and D2L (which we used until this year). Here is one of the messages we received telling us that we needed to enter zeroes manually: In Canvas, you *must* enter a 0 for assignments with no submission or the assignment will be dropped for that student. 

screen-shot-2016-10-13-at-3-32-11-pm

Of course, for me it is just the opposite: I say thumbs UP to the blank, and I say thumbs DOWN to the zero. That’s because I build my system on student choice, and I’ll have more to say about that in a later post.

Meanwhile, what I wanted to emphasize here is that the nitty-gritty of the LMS really does matter: is a blank just a blank, or is a blank really a zero? There are lots of possible approaches to grading and, just speaking for myself, I am glad that in Canvas the blank really is just a blank.

And now, a final take-away: the more conversations we can have about grading, both about the nitty-gritty and also about our personal philosophies, the more we can learn and grow! Share your thoughts at the OU Canvas Community or in the comments here or in your own blog or at Twitter. I’m posting with the hashtag #OUCanvasCommunity. 🙂

Learn to love the diversity.

learn-to-love-the-diversity

 

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