What is the recommended workflow for teachers to be alerted of new student work and stay up to date

John.Wasinski25

In the pre-Daylight version, there was more granular information in the teachers' course widget. There was information about how many ungraded quizzes and/or dropboxes were present in each course. In Daylight, this has been replaced by a single number that does not indicate what needs to be graded.  We are aware that teachers can use Intelligent Agents, or, can use the "notification" box in the quiz/dropbox settings to receive an email for each submitted quiz or assignment. However, of our 60 faculty, only a small percentage prefer to receive emails. The remainder prefer to log in to Brightspace and see a visual alert for ungraded items.  We are interested in knowing:Is there a way to create a more informative notification on teachers' screens that would indicate what needs to be graded?Can clicking this notification take teachers directly to the item that needs to be graded?If the above is NOT possible, what workflow are you recommending? Our teachers are finding it is not efficient to open the "Manage Quizzes" screen and browse the right column to find "unpublished quiz submissions." This seems really cumbersome, and it is easy to overlook a new submission. Thanks for any ideas!

Kristina.McLaughlin67

To follow-up on this, it is extremely cumbersome to get to ungraded items in Daylight now. Prior to moving to Daylight, I could see that I had ungraded quizzes or drop boxes on my home page. From there, I could click on the link to ungraded quizzes and it would take me directly to the ungraded quizzes at the quiz management screen. Now in Daylight, my ungraded alert item is just a number so I don't know what was submitted. When I click on the number, it just takes me to the course home page. Now I have to search through all the manage screens (quiz, drop box, discussion board) to find the ungraded item. This is not feasible for classes. It has tripled the number of clicks it will take me to find ungraded items. I have around 30 quizzes and 10 drop boxes (and 5 discussion boards) set up over a year in two different classes and I will have around 250 students. Every time that number changes, I have to repetitively search to find what was submitted.

John.Wasinski25

I should clarify that our students work asynchronously. Students work sequentially, but at their own pace. There is no "due date" for assignments - the turn-in window for assignments never closes.

Stephanie.Boychuk71

I also miss the more informative notifications on the My Home page. My institution also has the "Updates" widget on the Course Home pages with similar information, however. These updates are clickable and take you to the tool where the grading needs to be done (screenshot attached). "Updates" is a system widget, so all that needs to happen is to add it to the the homepage for the Course Home to automatically get that information. It doesn't solve the problem of needing to click into the course to get the notifications, but it is certainly an improvement to getting a bunch of Intelligent Agent emails (at least, for my workflow).

 

To answer your question about being directed to exactly the item that needs to be graded, I am not sure that has ever been possible (although I would love that feature). For Assignments I manage graded/ungraded with the read/unread feature (since you can choose to mark items as read or not) so that allows me to see in which folder and which students still need grading, as the screen will show Total, Unread, and Flagged submissions. Most of my quizzes are self-grading, so I don't have a good suggestion for that.

 

Hopefully this information helps a bit, I'm really interested to hear what other solutions may be out there.

Jacqueline.Kirkham86

Hi @Kristina McLaughlin​ ,

If you are able to edit your course homepages to add the Course Updates widget, this will reduce the steps to get to the ungraded items. The Course Updates widget will display the number of unmarked quizzes, unread discussion posts, and ungraded assignments as links you can follow to get to those tools. You will still have two clicks where you previously had one, but it should save any time that is currently being spent searching to find out which tool the unread/ungraded item is associated with.

 

It may also be possible to configure My Courses to make the course update number more meaningful for your instructors. For example, if Assignments need to be kept up with on a daily bases, but quizzes are generally set to self mark, and discussion grades are more holistic, you could set the Widget to only display a number if there are unread assignment submissions.

Kristina.McLaughlin67

Thank you everyone! I did not know about the Updates widget. We have it added at the district level and this is what I needed! Thanks for the quick help!

Kristina.McLaughlin67

Thank you everyone! I did not know about the Updates widget. We have it added at the district level and this is what I needed! Thanks for the quick help!