 A little bit about me, my name is Darryl Clarke and I'm here with a colleague, Michael Williams. We are from an organisation known as Upskilled, I'm the IT faculty head. And today I'm going to be presenting what we've done as a medium-sized private RTO in working with getting learning and assessments to be more than just information for the students but to be able to provide feedback so that the students can do more with their grades. Upskilled started in 2009 and we created Moodle in 2011 to deliver online IT training. So our IT training is two through to advanced ploma in IT faculty across the board. We've been trial and error a lot of different things. As a programmer myself, I haven't got into so much coding of Moodle but certainly trying different things and seeing what we can get happening. And so a lot of it is not hard code base and you'll hear that a lot of people have got the developers on board and programming Moodle to do what they need to do. What we've done primarily is just using Moodle Core and making that work as much as we can. And that's what I hope to get to present to you this afternoon. We're currently third party hosted and so we're unable to get in and do a lot of back end stuff. Running version 2.7 and we're currently are looking to move to 2.9 in the near future. We have two faculties currently using Moodle, both business and IT. And so we have both of these faculties sharing the same sort of structure and being able to deliver to two very different faculty styles. And what we've found is that one way of making that work well is by the use of the grade book. And so this afternoon, how does your grade book look is about how we can use that as a resource for participants and not just feedback about how they're doing. We're currently averaging around 250 unique logins a day. So we don't have, you know, 300,000 students and 18 development staff and 200 trainers. We are medium sized RTO. So again, it's not about having all of these resources to code Moodle, but to work the core as much as we can. What we're going to look at today is using the assessment and activity grading by having a look at what we can do with the scales and the letters. Having a look at the grade of view. OK, so as trainers and assessors, we go into the grade of view and how we can make that as easy as possible for the assessors. And then the grade book layout, which is what the users and participants can then see and be able to work with. And we've got a few little tricks that we've managed to plug in there. When you first install Moodle and you look at the grade book, that's what it looks like. It's very vanilla. It's just rows and the information, what the assessment or activity was and the assigned grade. What we've been able to do is to make it a little more functional and separate it for easier use for the participants. How do we do that? Well, firstly, let's have a look at the grading itself. We use scales. OK, it doesn't have to be a straight percentage. So we've created some scales. There's pre-course where we ask students to upload identification. And so we have a scale of not received or received. So when the trainer receives it and it's been authenticated, then we can mark it as received. And then that information is there for the participant to know that it's not a grade out of 100, but that it's actually been received. We've also got non-attendance and attendance that provides that feedback rather than a score. And being a private RTO, we work on competency. So we have not yet competent, competent and provide that feedback that makes it a lot easier for the participants to know exactly where they stand with their scoring. With the letters, what we can do, you can see on the left we have the percentage that is the upper percentage for a score. And then the middle column is the lower percentage. And we've rigged it so that we can actually provide feedback. If an assessor puts in a score of zero, that actually represents a credit transfer for that particular unit of competency. And so the CT means, sorry, NR means not required. We then have from 1% to 69.9 being not yet competent, NYC. We then have that middle mark at 70% where we can say, okay, you've been granted RPL. And then because we use assessments and they score marks, if it's over the 71%, then they get a competent grading for that. So we're not stuck to the standard zero to 100. We've actually provided levels in between that provide feedback for the participants about what they do. Now, you can change this to whatever you like. We've got, I was thinking that you could have, for instance, hair salon training where the assessment could be graded about a different hairstyle that was achieved. So for a score between zero and 20%, it was a particular style. Between 20% and 40%, it was another particular style. And by doing that and letting the student then choose what style they want to do, you've got the ability then with activities in the course to base the ability to access that activity on an assessment score. So if zero to 20 is you, I don't know why I picked hairdressing. I've never been to a hairdresser. But you've got the ability for the student to undertake a particular style. And then other sections of the course can then become available because they scored that grade. Does that make sense? So then if they got between 20 and 40, then it would open up a different section of the course that relates to the topic that they've decided to take. So it allows for the participants and students to actually create what they want to do and flow through that way. We've used that quite a bit in holding back and releasing different learning. If someone's not yet competent by a long way, then we can open up different activities to support them, foundational style courses or information. And then we've also had it so that at a competent level, we then provide supporting resources and information so that the learning doesn't stop once they've completed the assessment. Once they're competent, we can actually provide them with more information in that particular topic that they're working on. The grader view, I know it's very tight on the screen, but these are all the options that are available to you within the grader view. Things like a display type, whether you do your letters, your grades, or your categories, you've got the ability to have a ranking. So within your environment, you may have rank of abilities and skills that you can show where they sit. You've got percentages, you've got grades, and so we can use and apply different elements to achieve different things right across the board. An example of this is with the grader view, something that has been in mood all right from almost the start. But not very many people know about is when viewing the grader view, you can actually turn off and hide sections. Okay, so there's a little checkbox right at the top. And it has three different settings. And so for this one, it will show each of the activities, the score, but not show a category total. This one shows everything and the category total. And then if you select it again, it will only show the category total. We had students that were getting confused because they didn't understand what they were seeing. And so we actually managed to adjust it so that if they only needed to know what the overall result was, then we just showed the category total. Okay, and then obviously for other lessons, individual assessments that were required, we were able to show each one. But it doesn't matter what the end was. So there was no requirement to see the category total. And in speaking with RTOs around the place over the last couple of years, this is one of the most underutilized functions that are available. We also have the layout that we can adjust ourselves. Now, in our courses, we can introduce categories or topics or weeks, okay? So as the course presents itself, it is broken up into sections. Now, when you do that, it doesn't apply anything to the grade book. But that doesn't mean you can't do it. Because what you can do is you can come into the greater view and select to create topic categories or weeks. And so you can replicate what the learning is at the assessment and grade end, okay? So for example, we deliver courses in a clustered style and we have courses where there are four categories. We have core infrastructure, continuity and security, continuous improvement. When you set those up in the learning, the grade book just sits and does what it normally does. But we've come through and configured so that those categories also exist in the grade book. And you can then slide and adjust those elements into those categories. So when a student then goes to have a look at their grade book, it reflects exactly what's at the front end, at the learning. And we got a lot of great feedback on that because going from the straight, here's the list of activities. And they had to work out where they were and where it fit within the course itself by introducing the categories and the topics into the grade book. It reflected exactly what they were saying on the learning end. You can also, you see on the right hand side, you've got these icons here that allow you to edit the individual activities. And I'll show you some of the functions there. But you can also hide assessments. Now, we have assessments that are SCORM based. And with a SCORM, the assessments, the activities are naturally handed back as an assessment. And we can't adjust that with the Moodle itself. But what we can do is hide it. And so we put it in its own category as a non-assessed activity, and then hide it from the grade book. So we had this long list, and now all of a sudden, all of these SCORM modules just disappeared, and the participants didn't need to know about it at all. Another thing you can do is calculate totals. So you've noticed that we use not yet competent and competent. You can actually, in the total, work out and ensure that all three are competent before it shows competent in the total. Or it may show that it's not yet scored because there's activities missing. With the ability to do the calculating totals, you can use maximums, minimums, averages. Pretty much anything you can type into an Excel cell is available to be able to calculate within the Moodle grade book. And that has a lot of features as well when it comes to, as I said about, the categorizing of your activities, being able to put weighting on certain assessments. Everything has a standard weighting, but with your calculations, you can actually apply a weighting to a particular assessment and say, look, if this is MYC, then it doesn't matter what's happened beforehand. This needs to be really strong pass to be able to gain competence for that section. So there's lots of little tweaks, and certainly this isn't a deep dive in, it's just to show that there are opportunities to adjust the way the grade book works. And with that, I'll finish there. If you'd liked more information or to chat with me about things that we've been doing, please feel free to email me and I'll take any questions. If you have a question, please raise your hand and the wonderful Elizabeth will sprint across the room. Any questions? Oh, yeah. We found that once we introduced groups, it did bring in some interesting aspects to the grade book itself. So the question was about having groups within a course and having teachers and participants within groups. The grade book works with groups, but you're not able to adjust it as finely as what you can without the groups. So we've actually decided to go not with groups. Now, obviously in some cases, that's just not an option. So I haven't had a chance to have a look precisely at what's available with groups and not. Just the comment that you made about organizing your categories, so for the user, they get the information at the learning end. I just wondered if you could elaborate on that a little bit. Yep, so what we've got is when a user goes into the course, it's broken down into we use those four clustered sections. When they go then into have a look at particular activities, the grade book reflects those four sections precisely and you can move the assessments around so that they line up exactly where they would. So we use the progress bar and so by selecting and clicking on the progress bar and then going to that activity, it actually ties in with the grade book seeing where that fits in the whole scheme of things. And so the story then becomes not just about the learning and what they need to do to get the information but as in the journey with the grade book and where they've been so far and what's coming up. Any more questions? Excellent, well thank you very much and I'm gonna hand back to Elizabeth for our next speaker.