Best Practices: Displaying Moodle™ Grades in Real-Time

When you’re preparing eLearning courses, setting up your gradebook to display real-time grades isn’t as straightforward as one might think. The Moodle™ gradebook at its core displays an overall course grade for students moving from 0% up or 100% down.

One option is to use the “Aggregate Only Non-Empty Grades” setting so that all activities that have yet to be graded are ignored. If you do not enable this feature then the gradebook will count all activities that do not have a grade as a 0. This is problematic because the gradebook won’t show an accurate real-time grade for students as all course activities are included in the overall grade—even if the activity has not become due yet. The following steps will allow you to show the activities that have been graded along with the students’ current grades.

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Set Your Gradebook for Real-Time Grades

First create a gradebook category called “Not Graded,” as well as any other categories to be included within the course gradebook. Place all activities within the “Not Graded” category for the start of the course.

Next set the overall course aggregation to “Weighted Mean of Grades.” Set the other categories, including the “Not Graded” category, to any aggregation type desired. Then set the “Not Graded” category to a weight of 00.0 and each additional category to the weight you would like them to have. If you want all categories to have equal weight, divide the number of categories by 100 and give each category that weight.

Finally set the “Aggregate Only Non-Empty Grades” to not set (unchecked). This will calculate any items that have not been given a grade as 0. As the course progresses and as activities become due, move the graded activities out of the “Not Graded” category.

KEEP READING | ‘Best practices: Advanced Grading With Checklists’