Vendor Documentation
Discussion assessments are not compatible with individual group topics
Because discussion assessments are performed per topic and a grade item can only be linked to a single activity this feature is not compatible for group topics where there are multiple individual topics.
The vendor expects faculty to us the consolidated Group Topic where a single topic is marked as a group topic when created. There are some use cases where an instructor may want to keep individual group topics.
Review the different Group Discussion options with pros and cons and links to documentation in: Group Discussion Comparison.
To take advantage of discussion assessments with individual group topics you will need to use a special set up of grade items and categories in the Grades tool. Using this method may impact your grading style overall for the course so please read through the solution entirely before implementing it.
With this method you will use a grade category to represent the discussion assignment, with a grade item for each group. We will then use the drop lowest grades feature in the settings of the category to ignore the grade items representing the groups the student is not a part of.
Once completed, your grade category and items will look similar to this example.
When you grade, the view in Enter Grades will look similar to this example. Here we show one student in each group, they have a grade in the item associated to their group. In the other grade items for the groups they are not a part of, a grade of zero is given automatically and they are being dropped as indicated by the exclamation point icon.
In the Grades tool you will need to create a category to represent the discussion topic. In addition to the normal settings you would make when setting up a category, two additional settings need to be made for this approach.
...
| Remarque | ||
|---|---|---|
| ||
If you do not enable the option to Treat ungraded items as 0, ungraded items are ignored. The single grade the student does receive for the discussion will be dropped as being one of the "lowest" items since the ungraded items are ignored. This will result in the student not receiving any grade for the category in the Subtotal, as all items are ignored or dropped. If the student does get a zero for the assignment, it will still count against them. In our example of 4 groups, we are only dropping 3 of the lowest scores. The fourth grade of zero will still count against the student.
|
Students will see all of the grade items in these categories even though they are only going to be graded in a single item for their group. If you feel this could be confusing for your students you can do some additional work when setting up the items to hide the groups the student is not a member of.
This can be a significant amount of additional work to set up! In our experience we find most students understand that the items for groups they are not a part of are being dropped.
When creating or editing each grade item make the following settings:
...
The discussion assessment setup does not require any special setup beyond making sure you choose the appropriate grade item for the group on that topic, so make sure to chose the appropriate Group 1 grade item for the Group 1 topic for example.
Once you have assessed the discussion topic, making sure the Graded box is checked so the grade are sent to the Grades tool, your grading for the category will look similar to this example:
In this example I was grading out of ten points. The greyed out items and the exclamation point icon reflect the items that were dropped. In the first row the student is a part of Group 3, so their grade of 9/10 is displayed in the Group 3 column, and the other items representing groups they are not in have a grade of 0/10 and are marked as dropped.
...
Operating System
...
ALL
...
Browser
...
ALL
...
Role
...
ALL
...
Report Date
...
Apr 8, 2008
...
D2L Incident #
...
49501
This page has been moved to the new CTL Knowledge Base.
myCourses Discussion assessments are not compatible with individual group Discussions
