Moodle™ Grading: 5 ways to grade in Moodle™ (Do you know them all?)

Kiran

This is a guest post by Moodle™ Expert, Ana Rosiris Castro. If you want to contribute to our blog, Contact Us 🙂 Let’s together make Moodle™ a better platform for e-learning.

If there is one thing that makes Moodle™ stand out, it is the many ways it gives you to create exams and assessments.

It is very important to know why you should use one over the other, and not simply use a grading method just because it is available. The key here is to make a plan and then apply it in Moodle™. This way, the platform works as a tool to achieve your learning goals.

In the same way, Moodle™ has a very important set of tools that will allow you to assess, grade, and evaluate. This means that we are in a scenario in which very few platforms (if any) are able to compete with Moodle™.

So, take note to make sure that you can use the method that best suits your goals.

1. Quizzes

In Moodle™, you can create automated (or semi-automated) evaluations through quizzes that provide immediate feedback.

You probably already know all about quizzes or expected them to be on this list.

What you probably didn’t know is that:

• Moodle™ has Question Banks, which are databases of questions that you can sort by category.
• In Moodle™ 4.0, Question Banks allow you to check question versions, statuses, number of uses, etc.

• Also, in Moodle™ 4.0 you can set up whether to show or hide options in the Question Bank, create custom fields, and sort columns.
• These Question Banks allow you to create quizzes that are generated randomly from these databases.
• You can easily feed Moodle™ Question Banks by importing questions, even if you have typed them out in an external Word file. AIKEN, GIFT, and XML formats are available for this. In our Evaluation Tools Moodle Courses we teach you how to manage these banks and import questions.

• Moodle™ has 16 question types. Additionally, you can add more types by using plugins.
• In Moodle™ 4.0, question management was improved, so you can see them from the status (ready, draft) as well as versions of the questions.

As you will see in other Moodle™ tools, everything is highly customizable. In quizzes, you can:

• Schedule when access to the quiz starts and when it ends
• Time available to complete the quiz
• Number of attempts
• Question behavior
• Among others

2. Scales

In Moodle™, we have Scales, which allow us to evaluate, rate, or grade the student’s performance. These can be numerical or customized. This way, Scales are very useful for quick feedback if we configure them with one or two items.

Grading Guide and Rubrics

The grading guide (or marking guide) and rubrics are ideal for grading assignments because you do not evaluate through “instinct”, but instead, have a set of criteria to which you assign a grade. Therefore, grading guides are considered an advanced grading method.

In both cases, the student will be able to know what he/she is facing, and the criteria that will be considered. As for the teacher, it will be easier because he/she only has to follow each criterion when grading.

3. Grading guide

In the grading guide, we define the criteria with a maximum grade. An example of this is shown below:

4. Rubrics

As for Rubrics, this criteria-based assessment makes it possible to know even more precisely what is being graded.

5. Competencies

According to Educagob (the website of the Spanish education system), competencies are defined as “a combination of knowledge, skills, and attitudes.”

If this sounds familiar to you, or if you already work with Competency-based learning, you have probably found that applying it to the e-learning world can be difficult, mainly because most LMS platforms do not have the possibility to use it.

However, Moodle™ does allow Competency-based learning.

I repeat, Moodle™ does allow Competency-based learning.

In Moodle™, you can set up a competency framework or import one, which will save you a lot of time.

Closing thoughts

Moodle™ is a very flexible learning platform, which allows you to choose or combine different types of grading methods.

• Quizzes allow you to automate your grading process
• With Scales, you can give quick feedback to your students.
• The Grading Guide allows you to offer the student the criteria with which you will grade or evaluate them.
• Rubrics give students the criteria that will be taken into account during the grading as well as their status.
• Lastly, Competencies allow grading through a framework of reference.

In this article, I’ve selected 5 methods, but there are more and many tools with which you can show your creativity and grade your students the way you want.

If you want to learn how to manage your Moodle courses and get the most out of them, come learn with me at eLearning Fácil.

Author: Ana Rosiris Castro.

? Youtube https://efac.li/YouTube

? Instagram  https://efac.li/Instagram

? Linkedin https://efac.li/Linkedin

? Mi Blog  https://efac.li

? Telegram https://efac.li/Telegram