An increasing number of Swarthmore faculty are using online grading for assignments and exams.\u00a0 Since students create most of their work digitally, it makes sense to submit an assignment electronically and avoid the need to print a hard copy.\u00a0 ITS provides many different ways to collect and grade assignments.<\/p>\n
Moodle has several tools for electronic assignments and exams.<\/p>\n
The Moodle assignment activity is an easy way to collect assignments from students and simplify the process of setting up due dates, granting individual extensions, and keeping track of any students that did turn in their assignment.\u00a0 Moodle also provides a basic interface for viewing and grading the assignment.\u00a0 It is possible to set up more complex grading forms, including rubrics.\u00a0 The Moodle assignment also works well for courses with student graders because it eliminates the need to deal with stacks of paper assignments and makes it easy for the instructors to see the grading status of each assignment.<\/p>\n
In addition to the built-in Moodle Assignment, there is a Moodle Turnitin Assignment.\u00a0 Turnitin is best know for plagiarism detection, but also includes a grading tool that make it easy to mark up papers with frequently used comments, enter text feedback, and even record audio notes to a student.<\/p>\n
The Moodle Quiz activity can be used for an online exam.\u00a0 Quizzes are set up to be taken within a certain time period.\u00a0 Students can be prompted to either enter text directly in the quiz, upload a document with their responses, or answer multiple-choice type questions.\u00a0 This tool is handy for keeping track of a timed exam while allowing for extended time or alternate test days for certain students.\u00a0 If you dread reading student handwriting in a blue book, this is worth a look.<\/p>\n
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In addition to Moodle, ITS provides a number of other ways to grade assignments electronically.<\/p>\n
Academic Technology has been running the Teaching with Tablets<\/a>\u00a0program for several years and has provided many faculty with iPad Pros and Microsoft Surface tablets to facilitate teaching and electronic grading.\u00a0 The tablets come with a stylus that is perfect for marking up student papers.<\/p>\n If a higher level of security is needed, ITS can set up the same software as used for the Honors Exams for a midterm or final.\u00a0 This software blocks the use of other applications and connections to the Internet.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The following tools are aimed at assignments and exams that involve programming.<\/p>\n If you are asking students to submit computer code, Swarthmore has its own installation of GitHub for use by community members available at github.swarthmore.edu<\/a>.\u00a0 It is possible to set up and share repositories with students, collect the code, then grader and enter feedback to the repository.\u00a0 The Computer Science department has done a great job at scripting this workflow to make it easy for faculty and students.<\/p>\n If your students code in MATLAB, the MathWorks has just released\u00a0MATLAB Grader<\/a> to make it possible to assign and collect student work.\u00a0 This is a new program and if you are interested in trying it out, please email help@swarthmore.edu and we’ll be in touch.<\/p>\n If you are asking students to code in Python, Swarthmore’s JupyterHub installation could be useful to provide a web-based Python coding environment for students.\u00a0 ITS is working to set up the nbgrader<\/a> plugin to facilitate distributing, collecting, and grading assignments.\u00a0 If you’d like to check it out, contact Andrew Ruether in ITS (aruethe2, x8254).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Featured image: Assignment by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Honors Exam Software<\/h2>\n
Grading Code<\/h1>\n
GitHub Enterprise<\/h2>\n
MATLAB Grader<\/h2>\n
JupyterHub<\/h2>\n
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