 My name is Rob, I'm Senior Learning Technologist in the Teacher Enhancement Unit and over the next little while we're going to be speaking a little bit about the loop grade book and specifically we're going to be speaking about the loop grade book and how we can use it to combine and calculate overall student grade. So let's get into it then folks. So the loop grade book, what is it and what does it do? It allows editing teachers to manage the grades for loop activities, you know, things like assignments, things like quizzes, where the grades have already been kind of graded and released to the students. The grade book also allows you to control the visibility of grades and you can also manage the way grades are displayed to students. So the grade book can be used to organize and manipulate the grades from across your loop module page and you also have the option then if you have lots of different graded activities on loop to organize your grade book into different categories, which can be useful for things like consolidated modules or very large or very long modules etc. A couple of specific things to know about the loop grade book. Each loop module page has its own grade book. As you're going through, as you're using loop, as you're adding activities to loop, a space is automatically created in the grade book for that relevant grade. So probably the most important thing people use the grade book for is to set the different weights of their graded activities and by setting up your grade book correctly and by, you know, setting up the weights correctly and using the grade book to organize your students' grades. It means it kind of saves you some work at the other end of the spectrum because it then means that you can automatically import those grades into the mark's entry system at the end of the semester. So another good thing is obviously, you know, if you use loop for assessment activities, if you're using the grade book well and you haven't set up correctly and if you do this over time, you know, each semester, by having that kind of grading data in loop, you can then get a really good insight into how students are performing and a lot of these can be exported out to excel if you want to do your own statistical analysis. There's this concept that I like to term of double entry when it comes to loop. So original grade is always in the original activity and grade book is where you're organizing and manipulating them. The grade book is a wonderful tool on loop. The grade book is really, you know, you only need to use it in a very simple way. And I'd encourage you all, particularly for starting out, just to use it in a very simple way. It is a hugely powerful tool. You can do lots of complex calculations with it and lots of complex set up, et cetera, et cetera. But in reality, you know, you only need to concern yourself with a fraction of what the grade book can do. The two main things you need to concern yourself with are the grade visibility. So keeping items hidden from students so that they don't see their grades as they're being graded. The other thing is obviously the weightings as I mentioned, assigning the proper weights to your different activities. And then perhaps, you know, if you have a consolidated module or a very large module, you might want to add some grade categories just to keep your grade book organized. A couple of tips of good practice around grade book. I would advise people to set up their grade book early, kind of at the start of the semester. Go ahead and, you know, maybe set up your assignments, your quizzes, whatever you're doing with students, set them up at the start of the semester and set your grade book up early as well, just so you have it out of the way and it's all done and dusted. The important thing is, you know, your weightings in the grade book, you need to make sure they are all set up correctly and that they all add up to 1.0. Okay, important thing to keep in mind is loop is only concerned with coursework items or continuous assessment items. Okay, so all of that needs to add up to 1.0. Now the good practice is obviously as your grading students, as you're working through, hide the items so that students don't see the grades until you're ready for everyone to see it. Another few tips for you. Again, as I mentioned, if you do have like a consolidated module or if you're very large module or a module that runs over two semesters, you might want to think about organizing your grade book into categories. You don't have to, but it's a handy little tip if you've got a busy grade book. Another really good tip that I'd advise you to do is anytime you make a change to the grade books, anytime you change your weight or you make something, you know, invisible or visible, always quickly jump and look at the user report because that will show you what the student sees and that's a really good way of checking is everything okay with your grade book if you can see what the student sees and if everything looks correct. It's important that all students have grading data in loop, particularly if you're going to use the importing function into the marks entry system. So even if a student has not submitted something, you know, you should record a zero for them. And again, you know, we'd really encourage you, obviously, the benefit of using grade book is that it saves you time at the other end of the process and you can do that importing into the marks entry system. Where can you go and get help? Obviously, we in the teaching enhancement unit, we run clinics very regularly most week, so you can check out those details in our events calendar, lots of resources on the loop staff support page, all are in grading and so on, including a specific resource around how to work with the loops grade book. We also have instructions here on how the marks entry system importing process works. And then of course, if at any stage you need help, you can log a ticket at ISS and just note that obviously we in the TU, our remit is to help with loop grade book queries and set up and so on, all to do with the loop end of things. However, if your query relates to the marks entry system, inputting of marks, etc, the academic systems unit are the unit in the university who look after the marks entry system. Okay, so I'm going to go on into a quick demo now of all of this. So I'm over here now on my loop page. So we can see the page looks like it looks like any other. Let's go and look at the grade book. How do we get to the grade book? We look at our course top menu up along here and we click grades and that brings us into the grade book. And as I mentioned before, the grade book is very, very complex and has loads and loads of different areas. So I'm just going to focus on the kind of the two or three bits you need to know about. So when you first come into the grade book, you land on an area here called the grader report. Okay, and the grader report is just a great big essentially electronic spreadsheet of all the students on your module and all of the grades that they've gotten for all other different activities on the loop page. Okay, so that's fine. I don't look at that now. The first thing I want to do is go straight into my setup. All right. So the grade book setup is really where you're obviously going to go and do your manipulation and your configuration of the grade book. So this little area here towards the upper left is our little navigational drop down. So if I just click on it here, we see I have a couple of other options now to go to different areas of the grade book. And I obviously want to come down here to grade book setup. So I just click on that. And now I'm looking at my grade book setup. And what we're seeing here is exactly what we saw on my module page. These are great items for each one of those activities that we saw on my module page. First thing to check in your loop grade book setup is scroll down the end here. And you want to look down here and make sure that your grade book is set to this particular calculation method, which is called weighted mean of grades. Now by default, your grade book should be set to weighted mean of grades. Because this is set to weighted mean of grades, what that means is I have a little column here, as you can see, and a little box in each one. And this is where I just simply set my weights. I set whatever the activity is worth relative to the module total. So let's look at my first item here. This is my Zoom classroom. So this is where I've been doing my online classes with students. That's not worth anything. They don't get any grade from the Zoom classroom. So I'm going to leave that weight at 0.0. So if something is formative, if something does not contribute towards the module, we give it a weight of 0.0. Next, they have a discussion forum activity. And this is graded. I do want this to contribute to the module. And this is going to be worth 10% of the module. So in here, I put in 0.1. So when I add these up now, I get 0.2 and 0.2 is 0.4 and 0.1 is 0.5, scrolling up again, 0.7, 0.9, and then 0.1 makes 1.0. I just go to go down and click Save Changes. And there we go. My changes have been saved. My weights have been applied. It's as simple and as straightforward as that. Okay. I'm going to go on now to show you how to make grade items visible and invisible. I need to go follow my own good practice that I was sharing with you earlier. Remember, as I said, whenever you make a change to the grade book, you should always check the user report. We're applying these weights here. Now I want to see what does the students see. So again, I'm going to come up here to my navigational drop-down menu. And I want to go this time. I want to go from the grade book setup. And I want to go to this area here called the user report. Okay. So the user report allows me to see the grade book from an individual user's point of view, an individual student's point of view. The first thing I'm going to do is select a user. I'm going to select a student. I'm just going to click. I'm going to select Annie here who's the first student in my list. Okay. And I want to make sure that I'm viewing the report. I can either view the report as Rob, the teacher, or I can view the report as Annie, the student. So just make sure you're always viewing it as the user. That way, then you can see what they see. So here's what Annie sees when she looks at her grade book. And then when we come down, we can see what's her overall total. Her overall total across everything with all the weight and supplied is 54% for the whole module. Okay. So I'm happy with that. Like I've gone through, I've looked at my weights, everything looks fine. That's why the user report is really, really useful for just verifying and double checking that everything looks the way it should look for your students. Okay. We jump back to the grade book setup now. So the next thing I want to tell you about is visibility. So this is something that you should be doing kind of on an ongoing basis really, you know, let's say a student, you know, let's say you had your students submitting assignments, you know, back, you know, on the 31st of October. Well, you know, before you go and you start grading them, you should come in and you should hide the activity in the grade books. That's really, really important. Before you start grading students on loop, hide the item in the grade book, because that is them what controls the visibility for the students. And let's say students have just submitted assignment B and I'm going to go and I'm going to start grading it now. Well, before I start grading, I want to make it invisible. So I'll find assignment B here and I just come over to the right hand side to this edit link and I click edit and then I click hide. It's as simple as that. And I've just hidden that one specific item. And when I scroll back down, can you see it's a bit faint, but you can just about make out that it's kind of in gray. The link is in gray. So that means it's hidden. But like I always said, every time you make a change to the grade book, go to the user report and verify things from the student point of view. So by default, the loop grade book will not show the total to the students if at least one item is hidden in the grade book. And I'm ready for them all to see the grades. Well, then again, obviously, you need to come back into the grade book, you need to then make assignment B visible again. So click on the edit link, click show. And then again, now that law will be visible to the students and you can go ahead and you can send out an announcement. I'm going to move on to the third thing now, grade categories. Okay. And grade categories are just a useful way of organizing your grade book. So again, staying within the grade book setup, which is where I am, I'm going to come to the top and I'm going to click this button here to add category. Okay. And the only thing I really need to do, there's a few options here, but all you really need to do is just give the category name. So I'm just going to call this topic one course work, and come down and click save. And now I'm going to add another category for topic two. Call this topic two course work and go ahead and save that. Okay. Now when I scroll down my grade book, I can see at the bottom here, I've added two new grade book. You can see I have a little folder icon here and a category called topic one, another little folder icon and a category called topic two. So this idea of categories in your grade book is kind of like the idea of folders and subfolders on your computer. You're now creating some categories in my grade book. I now have a new column over here on the left that allows me to tick and select a couple of items. There we go. I've selected those and then I come down to the end and I want to go move selected items and I'm going to move them to the topic one category. And there we go. Now I can see in my topic one category, I now have these four items are kind of indented and they're sitting in here within that topic. So I got topic one, all my different bits in there and I have topic two, all my different bits in there. What I need to do now then is as I mentioned before, everything in the grade book needs to add up to 1.0. So if I'm using categories, my categories need to add up to 1.0 because that's the total the grade book looks for. And then within my categories, the different items need to add up to 1.0. So you're kind of just introducing a new hierarchy into the grade book if that makes sense. So if I look at my topic one category here is set to 0.0, but I now need to set this to 0.5 because topic one is worth half of the module. And then again, topic two is worth half of the module. So that also needs to become 1.5 or 0.5. And then of course within the categories, I now need to change because these items in the category are only adding up to 0.5, but they all need to add up to 0.1 because when I add the two categories together, they add up to 0.1 to give me my total. So hopefully that makes sense. It's just that hierarchy. Everything needs to add up to 1.0 along the hierarchies. So essentially, all I have to do is I just have to double these. So these now and then again come down here and choose save changes to save those changes. And then like I said before, when we make a change, we check the user report. So that's all I really wanted to share with you here today.