 Good morning. My name is Nancy Hoke, and I am the Instructional Technology Coordinator at Califa University in Abu Dhabi, the UAE. But I didn't win the Greatest Distance Come contest. The folks from Australia come further than I did. So not fair. Califa University is a relatively young university in a very relatively young country. We have two campuses currently in both Abu Dhabi and the Emirates of Sharjah. Our current enrollment is about 1,500 students. And at top, once we really reach our full capacity, we will not be any bigger than about 2,000 students. 80% and probably now closer than 90% of our students are Emirates, as they are called. And it always becomes the question, and it's not there. But everything on campus is taught in English. We have a very diverse staff and employees representing over 40 different nationalities. The university is aimed in engineering, where we have both graduate and undergraduate programs in a wide variety of programs. Very strong emphasis on research, the interdisciplinary programs, and specialized centers of excellence. Moodle at Califa University has been our choice of an LMS since Califa University started, which was only in 2007. We are integrated with Banner, which has been our student management system now for about the past six years. As the registrar's office creates our courses in Banner, it automatically creates the course in Moodle itself. It is also responsible for adding in all of the students and the faculty into those courses. And the one thing that would, I assume, would never happen here in the United States, happens in, as we call it, the UAE. We are very, very closely scrutinized and watched by the Ministry of Education. And because of that, every course, final grades, are reviewed by the department chair and are approved or returned to the faculty member for further thought. Therefore, what we have done in our Moodle is, number one, we require that every single faculty member use the Moodle grade book to compute their final course grades. We are currently in 2.7, and we've been doing this now in Moodle since for about the past four years. The most common things that happen is that the course and the grade book are not computing correctly. We do allow our faculty to change the letter scale. And we do allow them to use Excel and to do a upload of the grades at the end of the term. I'm really hoping that part changes. This is the most common issue I have encountered. And I always want to say I love my faculty dearly, but I can't tell you how many times I deal with this issue every single term. The first question in regarding using the grading rubric, and especially when they go to set up the grade book because there's just no way, I and my colleague can possibly set up every single grade book in the term. But they confuse the add a category button in the grade book with the add a graded item. And I can't tell you how many grade books I look at that look like that. And it's category after category after category. And the math doesn't work. I have tried various things, but what I do when I go to fix it and they come to me is the first thing I ask them is for the course rubric. What is the final calculation going to be done? How many things have additional elements to it? The quiz category, how many quizzes are there? Then if they've got grades in them, I export the grade book just because I do something and those grades disappear. God forbid. And then I go ahead and open categories and items. This is the most often problem I see. I go ahead, I just add the graded items to it. Then I make the faculty transfer the grades into the correct one rather than doing it for them. The other part they do is they mix up. The most common aggregation we use in the grade book is weight of mean of grade. I would think 90% of the grade books are set to weight of mean of grade. And especially for our faculty, and as I mentioned in the beginning, we have a very diverse faculty coming from all over the world. They mix up what is the maximum grade and what is the weight. And they're more likely to put the weight for the final calculation into maximum grade instead of putting it into the weight category. And so that one's fairly easy to fix because I have a lot of conversations about what is the highest grade a student can get on this particular element. And the great thing about the Moodle Grade book is it can be 20, it can be 100. But a lot of times, and especially for those faculty members who are not native English speakers either is still the communication problem. And how are they interpreting what is that highest grade? So once we get those fixed and things start looking fairly similar, the excellent part of course about Moodle is if they get the grade book right and they don't make too many changes as to how the grade book is going to come together, it can then be duplicated into the next term's courses, which turns out to be a very, very big added value. And the weight versus maximum grade, whoops. I'm gonna put this on the wish list. That little button right up there by the top of the grade book that changes the view. If you've ever tried to talk a faculty member through the process to find that button over the phone, it is too small, it is not unique and people don't see it. And if their mouse is rolled over it, if they have done something and they go, I can't see the final grade. The final course total isn't there. It's most likely they've done something that the view is now in aggregates only and graded items instead of being in full view so that final column is in display. We tried to enlarge the button and make it a different color, but my IT staff couldn't get it to work without affecting other things in Moodle. It's too little. We do have a couple of policies and this is one of the main reasons why we do use the Moodle grade book that affects students' final grades. Number one is grades, especially the final grade, are rounded up. And then also the faculty on our Moodle site is the official grading scale for Califa University. Our faculty have the authority to change that scale up to 5% without chairs permission. So what we have done, and I know there was a lot of talk about this on Moodle.org and we did make this work, is that as you can see, our grade boundaries go past the decimal point and that allowed us to integrate into Moodle the rounding up which was required by us so that the faculty didn't have to do it anymore. And it was a fairly easy thing to do. The other one we've done is that because this grading scale is now available and editable in every single course, that allowed each faculty member to have that flexibility, something that wasn't available if they just did the grades in banner itself. The other one, and I understand in all the updates for Moodle that this is the one that's going to get fixed, is when they have manually manipulated the grades in order to show that Moodle turns that column, a light tan, a light yellow, whatever your monitor is showing. At least in our current version of 2.7, in order to get those grades back to the original number, each one of them has to be opened up through the settings link and then uncheck the overridden box. And I know from my experience on Moodle.org, this is a very common request to be able to take the grade book if all of the grades have been checked as overridden that you can release that and have them all returned to the original calculation. The great thing about Moodle can also drive you crazy is that there are so many places within the Moodle structure to hide things. And especially when the faculty member comes to me and says the students cannot see the grades. In the basic edit settings for the course itself is of course show the grade book to the students. But the other one that has happened to us is even in the grade book itself under categories and items, they'll end up closing the eye and not realize they've closed it. Their mouse just ran over it. I've also had the same thing happen every now and then with the lock that they simply have moved the mouse over it and the locking activity happens and they just don't realize it. When I submitted my proposal, I talked a bit about our integration with Banner. How many of you in here use Banner as your student management system? I will go over this very briefly. I will also caveat this with the fact that I am not the programmer. My background is much more education and I have an amazing IT staff that I always say makes me look very good. But we did this as part of our ministry requirements and to bring us through this process of having the chair review the grades and then have the grades sent to Moodle. So as we go through the term and if any of you are really interested in seeing this, I'd be more than happy to take you to our site and open up a course and really show it to you because there are only parts of it that are available depending on which part of the term we are in. As I mentioned, all the final grades are calculated in Moodle. We go into settings and set it so both the letter grade and the percentage shows in the course total column. In using, it was only about four or five PHP pages and Oracle, we create a series of buttons that appear for both the faculty and the chair of the department. As they get to the very end and once they have done their final exam and that final grade has been approved, let me step back a bit. The very last day of class, I and my colleague go in, we have separated all of the courses into categories that are based primarily, I beg your pardon, on the programs and also by the chairs. The programming allows me then to assign the chair to the courses that he or she will be approving. We then put up the message that includes the name of the chair and that the grade book is now set up for the faculty member to push that button to submit the grades. Once he or she pushes that, the grade book, Moodle adds the chair to that specific course and this little process came up because at first I just assigned all the chairs to all of the courses that they were going to approve and what they couldn't figure out is which courses have I approved, which courses haven't I done and the list got incredibly long, especially for a couple of our program chairs. So this allowed the system to tell the chair, this course is now ready, it sends them an email and adds their account to it. Once they have pushed the approval button, whoops, once they have approved it, it then also locks the grade book so no changes can be made within the grade book in case there are appeals from the students themselves. The process we've been using for about the past two and a half years now and especially coming out of this spring and last fall, we had, oh, probably less than 5% of the courses that were not functioning properly through the whole process. It's just been, for what we have to do in order to meet the requirements of our ministry, it has really been a very successful process. It also has been very instrumental in our grading appeals when the students come in and express concern either over a specific grade or over the final grade that has been reported to them. So I got through it quicker than I thought I would. Any questions? As someone whose institution is interested in doing this kind of thing, is the code that you've created to submit back to Banner, is that available for us somewhere? It isn't out there yet and we will be back in session by August the 16th. The woman who wrote this coding will still be on holiday until the 23rd. I asked them specifically if other people wanted to see the coding that we have used, will Khalifa share it and yes, we will and just get with me or send me a quick email and I will gladly put you in touch with Kamar and ask that Khalifa share that information. The only thing we would ask is you let us know if you are using it. Wonderful, thank you very much. You're more than welcome. What kind of support resources and or training programs do you put in place to help orient instructors to using the middle grade book? Until this January, it was me. But we're still a relatively small school. What I do after our latest policy is the moodle, the categories and items and the structure for the grade book is supposed to be set up by midterm. But like the librarian said, I don't wanna be the grade book police. And so we have run a couple of programs real quickly through Oracle just to see if the grade book is there and if not, I very sweetly contact the faculty member and offer the help, offer to do anything. I meet with all new faculty members at the beginning of the term but I know when it comes to this grade book they're not gonna remember it and they've got so many things to deal with, personal as well as just dealing with Califa at the beginning that then after it gets to just about midterm, I do a series of workshops. I have several videos. There's one even on our website that's just really basic that stresses the difference between the categories and the items. It does need an update. And as you can see because we're in 2.7, the one thing I really haven't looked at are the new releases to the grade book and especially this natural aggregation which from what little I understand of it at this point could really I think assist our faculty especially in making changes to make sure all the numbers are coming out correctly. Hi. I see like from your interface, the final grades go to the chair for approval but you did mention banner so when the final grade does get approved, does that go into banner? What it does, if I can, the final grades, oh and everything gets connected for us to the student through the student email because it is truly the only truly unique thing about them. The majority of our students have vastly the same first names and therefore using the names, their names can vary, their last name can vary, their email contains their student ID so we use the email. It creates an XML file that includes the student's ID, the banner course CRN as it is called in banner is used and then the letter grades that creates the XML file and then through the magic of programming that file is then connected to each one of those students and the final letter grade is then added into banner. In banner, do you store only the midterm and final grades? The only grade we store in banner is truly the final grade. About three years ago, we did a midterm grade but we did away with it two or three years ago. We did in the beginning but we don't store a midterm grade anymore. So throughout the students' progress, most of their grades will already be in the grade book, right? Yes. Do you get the instructors to do a backup of their grade book by any chance? I encourage them to definitely download it and I noticed what really caught my eye in Martin's presentation is the archiving because that is a grave concern to me but our students only have a, into the next term, they only have a window of like six weeks to appeal a grade from the term before. So it's a very, very short window in terms of all the individual grades and such. Did that answer the question? Thank you. Well, like I was saying, I am here all three days. If any of you would like to see the site and explore a little bit more about the grade book, I'm more than happy to meet with you and I thank you very much.