 Well this is the final session of the day so I am honored and humbled that you chose to stay here instead of heading off to some other some other things and I'm going to talk to you a little bit about backward design strategy with Moodle Gradebook. I will be talking about this from the perspective of more traditional education environment where we have teachers and K12 well in the US we say K12 you say primary here I think in Europe and higher education so we'll be talking a little bit about that but the strategy really is the same no matter what context you're offering assessment and for students. The first thing that's very important to understand is that Moodle Gradebook is a student-centered grade tracking system. I've worked with a lot of faculty in higher ed who said I have trouble with gradebook it's you know I what why does it work this way why does it work that way well it's because gradebook is built to provide a consistent experience for students that have many different teachers. Now teachers need to be free to define their own grading strategy that matches their pedagogical intent that will be different from course to course to course. Different teachers have different ways of conceptualizing the way that they provide feedback to students that is a good thing we need to support that. However those students need to have a simple clear and centralized progress reporting across classes. I've heard a lot from higher ed faculty especially well my grading strategy is in the syllabus and they should be able to figure out their own grade. Now while I respect that I really do and I believe that students ought to be able to figure out their own grade from a syllabus. The reality is that a student at any given time has four to six different faculty all of whom have their own mathematical idiosyncrasies in the way that they calculate their grades. This can be difficult it can add stress it can add frustration and confusion to a student's working memory when they really should be focused on the content rather than calculating their own grades. Now if you're in a math class maybe it's appropriate that they need to calculate their own grades but if you're in a literature class or a social sciences class or something like that you really want to focus on that content rather than figuring out what your professor has put into their syllabus and calculating your own grades. So first let's give a quick anatomy lesson of the Moodle Gradebook. Here's all the pieces of the Moodle Gradebook and how they fit together. Quick note the gradebook in all categories in this are using the natural aggregation method not mean not weighted mean that some of the older aggregation methods this is natural aggregation method. So if your gradebook does not have one of these columns think about changing the aggregation method of the category or the gradebook itself. So first of all we have categories here we have homework exams and projects and those are it's a little bit hard to see with this but they're nested in here as well as colored as I go through this. So the items are the grades themselves homework one homework two exams outline slides etc and then finally the category totals are the last one. So homework is here homework total exams exams total project etc. This is the max grade column this tells you how many raw points each category and or item is worth represented in points and this is the weights column this tells you what percentage of each level your your grades are worth. For example homework one and homework two are both 20 points ergo they are 50% of that category this one exam one is 20 exam two is 40 ergo exam one is 33% and exam two is 66% well and two-thirds. So let's talk about grading strategy now there are two primary ways that I've seen higher education faculty reckon their grades first of all is sum now in a sum grading strategy you have points and they add up to a certain total in this example on the board here the sum of the whole course is 200 points I have 40 points for homework 60 points for exam and 100 points for project so homework is worth 20% exams or 60 etc right it's based on the total points that you have in these areas I have had faculty say to me yes this is very simple my grade book is very simple they just have to add up the points and that tells them how much things are worth I do respect that the percentage strategy is a little bit different strategy where we say well of overall homework is worth 20% exams worth 30% and projects is worth 50% that adds up to 100% of the points these are the same grade book okay this is exactly the same grade book they're just aggregated according to different ways of thinking about the numbers so in the natural aggregation method in Moodle's grade book some is represented in the max grade column and percentage is represented in the weights column that's the same grade book they're just conceptualized in different ways so you can do both and in the natural aggregation method one thing that I want to point out as a learning designer and this is where things I've seen especially during the pandemic go really sideways with the sum strategy is when you need to eliminate a piece of homework let's say you have 10 homeworks there are 10 points each that adds up to 100 points over the semester when you eliminate a homework you have to change the grade total of all of the other homeworks to some very strange number because you have to account for the rest of that 100 points so you wind up with grades that okay well now class we're grading out of 12.23 or something and if it wasn't frustrating already it definitely becomes frustrating at that point okay and you have to do very weird mathematical gymnastics to get around this now if you're using percentage grading strategy it doesn't matter you eliminate that that homework it's still indexed to a percentage so you can have nine homeworks that add up to 20% or you could have 15 homeworks that add up to 20% or you could have 15 homeworks and then you could have 13 and then later you could have 24 and it would all still be 20% so you're kind of future-proofing your course and if you put your percentages into your syllabus instead of your sum you are keeping your contract with the students and the syllabus intact as you are changing out grade items in those particular categories right so I strongly recommend some in terms of a mathematical grading strategy okay although like I said I do respect sorry I recommend percentage not some wow no I strongly recommend percentage that's my own personal preference but again I do respect people that want to that want to do it by some but just make sure that middle grade book is calculating it for your students and they don't have to do it themselves so we've talked about the technical aspect here but what about pedagogy what about our teaching intent and how does that inform the way that we set up our grade book well let's talk about backward design there's this book understanding by design written all the way back in 1998 by a couple McTyne Wiggins and the one of the quotes there the best designs derive backward from the learnings sought so you start with the end and you work your way back to your learning object to your learning activities anybody that's a learning designer is probably familiar with this this is a pretty standard thing that we talk about in learning design and but what I want to do here is I want to start with the grade book and talk about how grade books frame desired learning for students now I really like this picture for this because you know we think about courses as like a linear place to place to place to place but what's really happening is we're giving students multiple opportunities to hit targets and get closer and closer to the center throughout the course we're not going from one topic to the next topic to the next topic it's just not how our cognition really works it's a lot messier than that so having targets that were repeatedly hitting shots at we're taking assignments toward these targets and getting closer for me makes a little more sense in my mind so in addition to tracking aggregating and reporting student grades grade books can be a place to start with backward design if we show our students our grade books it can give them the lay of the land and show them all the different targets that they need to hit over the course of the semester that's a grade book that's really useful for students and now we're going to talk again from McTynan Wiggins the twin sins of instructional design the twin sins of typical instructional design in schools activity focus teaching and coverage focus teaching neither case provides an adequate answer to the key questions at the heart of effective learning now how does this work with our grade book well let's think about instead of grade strategy design strategy okay this is an activity focus grade book because we have oriented our categories around the types of activities the students are doing homeworks exams and projects here is a coverage focused grade book it is focused around covering the content as it's presented in the text that you're teaching the students so you could think about it all you're going to do chapter one chapter two chapter three you could think about it all we're doing homeworks we're doing exams and we're doing projects but neither of these answers the fundamental questions at the heart of instructional design what is important here what is the point how will this experience enable me as a learner to meet my obligation again McTynan Wiggins understand by design so both of these grades books here could be for any course it could be for a math course it could be for a social sciences course it could be for a physics course it could be for anything right but they're both representative of those twin sense of instructional design I'm activity focused or I'm coverage focused what if we had a results oriented grade book what would that look like we would have a category for nonfiction comprehension a category for interpreting fiction a category for grammar and mechanics a category for composition this tells the students what it is they're supposed to be learning by looking at the grade book and moreover it reinforces it every time they look at the grade book students are emotionally vulnerable when they look at the grade book right they're doing self-analysis if you can use that time when they're already thinking about how they're doing to reinforce the actual topics that you're talking about you are well ahead of the curve getting them to think about how they are interacting with your material you're reinforcing your concepts as they're doing self-evaluation that is what we as teachers and instructional designers want you might could tell I started out as an eighth grade English teacher because this was my my grade book now here's a lot of information and it's very American the common core standards are the standards in the United States for K-12 instruction right and I've put this all up here so we have an idea of kind of what they look like these are our standards documents we have these but all countries have these it seems in one way or another so for me when I was teaching English language arts and literacy I have key ideas and details craft and structure integration of knowledge and ideas range of reading and level of text complexity and if you want to be really tight with your standards why wouldn't you take those and make them the categories in your grade book if you're teaching digicomp edu why don't you have digicomp edu standards directly in your grade book and if you start there then you start designing assignments that target those specific standards it's a way to put guardrails on yourself and keep yourself aligned with the things that you're supposed to teach your students and that is really the the the point of the short little presentation a results focus grade book can be your catalyst for creative and authentic backward design moreover as your students interact with it over and over again throughout the semester it can remind them to keep their eyes focused on the results that they are meant to achieve that's it I thanks for being here and I think we have a little time left over for question well great presentation all right here we go you really great presentation thank you why don't you use competencies well you would but competencies exist above the course level and the grade book is really focused on the course level so why I would tie competencies so let's say that this yeah it can be yeah you could so let's say that key ideas and details outline one and essay one in this grade book are aligned with competencies in a site-wide way I would attach competencies to those and they would report up to the site but why not have them consistent in the grade book as well yeah yeah oh I think I can here we go will you be uploading the slides later I did upload them already I was a little delinquent in getting them there so they thank you so much they should be there wouldn't be a nice feature if the grade book could show different kinds of categories in which you would order your assessments in so for example like you presented and competencies and what kind of type it is oh so basically so great items could exist in multiple categories at one time that yeah I would that's not a feature in grade book right now and that is a limitation of the strategy in that if you're having really good synergistic assignments they're gonna address multiple competencies at once and that is one of the vulnerabilities of this grading strategy for sure but it is not a vulnerability of percentage based grading strategies though I will take that one to the grave do you have any strategies for integrating non-numeric grading and feedback into this yes I really should have included something like that in this presentation the you can create scales and Moodle that are semantic scales the problem well it's not a problem it's a feature one of the things with grade book is that there are numbers in the background behind those semantic scales so you have to either adjust the way that your grade book displays to students so they only see the words rather than the numbers but that's all possible even at the teacher level you can change the way that the user report looks so you don't get percentages and numbers and you would just use real if you're using grading just show the real grade and it will only be the words in there also speaking of emotional vulnerability when looking at the grade book feedback is open-ended and I always recommend that you show feedback and you like diligently put in open-ended subjective feedback for your students so that when they do see a grade they see some words from you the human teacher next to it so there they don't get reduced to thinking of themselves as having a value a numeric value in the course because that is not the way things work I don't know about other cultural contacts but I know that in the US students are hyper focused on the number so much so that they lose sight of what's really important and I would say grades are for the institution whereas feedback is for the students the institution needs numbers because that's the way institutions work students are humans they need they need semantic feedback so thank you for that question that's that's a really good one great any other questions before we wrap up doesn't I hand extra credit oh yeah go ahead and ask that again how do you handle bonuses extra credit optional homework is anybody experienced how dangerous it is to talk about extra credit at a Moodle move before I so Moodle does allow for extra credit right and what that means mathematically is that the credit is added to the grade is added to the numerator but not to the denominator of the equation that's going to produce the percentage for them right so I really like to especially if we're doing here let me pull back to this thing real quick and I can talk about it if we're doing something like this and I have a student who is struggling in integration of knowledge and ideas I can offer them extra credit and like check it in the grade book as extra credit and have it really targeted to integration of knowledge and ideas more than that I can make it remedial for them in that area so that they can improve their grade in that particular area that metacognition that self analysis is like oh I understand key ideas and details I can write well I can read complex stuff but this integration of knowledge and ideas thing is is where I struggle so that's where something like this really shines is that you can say you need extra credit in this area and the student can recognize that as a need and guide their development and learning so I would definitely use extra credit I'm sorry that bothers anybody I know there's you can't have more than a hundred percent I do understand that but the but it giving someone the opportunity to improve their grade in a particular area can be a really valuable pedagogical tool for a student that needs it and the second part of the question if you have like optional you have a bank of ten assignments and you ask the student to do only eight oh you have a lot of them yeah so this is one thing where you have to go into the custom grade book calculations and I've done this for I have a lot of fact I've worked with a lot of faculty that have done exactly that they say look I've got ten assignments but I only want you to be able to improve your grade by three percentage points at most that involves a custom grade calculation in that category where you can say or really a subcategory you'd have an extra credit yeah and you'd write the formula and the custom grade calculation would give you up to three percentage points of that category gets a little foggy especially if your faculty struggles with arithmetic but the you can you can you can you can help them bank at work yeah it's possible thank you very much