A collaboration between Dr Paul Docherty (School of Mechanical Engineering), Dr Wendy Fox-Turnbull (School of Teacher Education) and Pinelopi Zaka (e-Learning Support) provided research driven validation of flipped teaching strategy in foundational engineering. The flipped approach proved to be a successful pedagogical mechanism for this unique cohort of students and was well-received. The research was also successful and has yielded three conference submissions and three journal papers have been submitted. Details of the research outcomes can be seen on the Ako Aotearoa website https://akoaotearoa.ac.nz/projects/flipped-classroom-foundation-engineering.
Dr Rhonda Powell from the School of Law shares how technology was used in her course to encourage student engagement and authentic learning.
Dr Valerie Sotardi from the College of Education, Health and Human Development describes some of the strategies she used to support student learning in a first year education summer course.
The e-Learning Support team invites UC staff to our e-Learning workshop series that are taking place from the 19th January to the 25th of February (We will be offering the same workshops every week for six weeks so people can choose the day and time that best suits them). These hands-on workshops focus on important new Learn features and cover the following topics:
Form more information about the workshops including times and venues click here.
Feel free to contact e-Learning Support for any questions 🙂
If you are a UC staff member or student, you are almost certainly using Learn, since nearly 100% of UC’s undergraduate courses have an online learning environment in Learn. Learn is the University of Canterbury’s Learning Management system which is based on Moodle, an open source software platform used worldwide. Learn is being used in a variety of ways across UC, from sharing of resources and communicating with students, to engaging students in online self-paced learning with blended and distance courses.
One of the most useful features in Learn (and commonly used) is the Gradebook. It is a powerful feature which – if set up properly – can provide teachers and students with a clear overview of all assessed items and grades in the course. It can calculate course totals based on different aggregation methods and provides teachers with the opportunity to export grades. But how can you set it up properly? Below is a list of steps you can take to get you started.
Write down an overview of your Course assessment plan:
Access your course’s Gradebook from the course main menu link or via Course Administration, Grades. See how many items it includes. Some of them will be linked to an online activity (e.g. an assignment submission box or online quiz). Others may be manual items representing offline activities (e.g. in-class presentation, participation). See an example here.
Select Full view of Categories and items to see how each of these items is set up. Are there any items you will not need? Are there any items missing? See an example here.
Once you have all the items you want in the Gradebook, set up the aggregation method. The easiest aggregation method you can use is Weighted mean of Grades. This allows you to use different maximum marks and different weights. For example, a quiz may be marked out of 50 and have 30 as weight in the Gradebook. Make sure you Save changes when finished. Other aggregation methods you may use include Sum of Grades (marks for each item are added) or Simple weighted mean of grades (an item’s maximum grade is used as its weight).
There are other settings that you can configure in the Gradebook, such as grade visibility, type of grade shown to students (e.g. real, letter, percentage etc). Your Flexible Learning Advisor is able to provide you with additional support in setting up your Gradebook and looking at these aspects. Having your piece of paper with the notes described in 1 when you meet your FLA will help you both in setting it up easier and faster!
See also: Moodle Gradebook help