Program for Online Teaching Site Archive

The Navigation menu

It doesn’t appear on every page, but it has things you need (reports for activity completion and controls for manual grading, expecially). Turn editing onfor the main page first to add the Navigation page where you need it.

I add it to every essay exam page so I can use Manual Grading, which brings up all the answers on one screen (Navigation – Course – Week – Assignment – Results – Manual Grading).

Navigation vs Settings

You now have two administrative menus instead of one. Navigation provides access to all your courses, their activities and reports, in one huge menu. Settings provides contextual settings for whatever page you’re on – an activity, forum, or course for the main page.

Both can be docked in the upper left corner, or shown as a block. In some browsers, docking both makes it hard to select and scroll. I usually leave Settings up there and put Navigation blocks on pages where I need it (again, you need to have editing on for the main page to do that).

Changing an already deployed activity

If you have Activity Completion set, the activity locks as soon as a student does the activity, so you can’t make changes. You need to Unlock. Although it threatens you that unlocking will mess up students who’ve take the activity, it won’t.

Automatic embedding and linking

In many cases, creating a live link will embed the video, and typing in a URL will automatically create a live link. This varies across browsers and systems, but not too much.

If it isn’t happening, go into main course Settings – Filters and enable Convert URLs into links and images.

Turn off the scale ranges in the gradebook

If you use qualitative scales for grading, students get confused by seeing the range of marks in the gradebook. You can now turn this off in Grades Settings (you can also turn off the percentages if you don’t want them to see them).

If the print is small and ugly, try the Arialist theme.

It is cleaner and larger.

To get it to accept your code, use your Profile.

It’s totally bizarre, but if you are trying to enter some embed code and it gets stripped, go to your own Profile (Settings – My Profile Settings) and turn off the editor.

Show more students in the gradebook.

Most of us have classes of 35-40 students. To show them all (instead of the default 25) in the gradebook, change the number of students in Grades – My Preferences.

Override the override on graded items.

If you’ve given a student a grade directly in the gradebook (for example, for a late quiz), and need it to revert to regular grading, check the Edit symbol next to that grade and uncheck the Overridden box.

Change the letter grades.

MiraCosta doesn’t have plus and minus grades, so near the end of the class many of us change the letter grade scale. In 1.9 this was easy, but 2′s programming makes it difficult. If you just change things and save, you’ll get an error. First delete all but the top grade by deleting the letters. Then save and go back to add the B, C, D, F with percentages.

Hope this helps or at least prevents some headaches!

Session from May 2013.

From Mark Drechsler

New: navigation warnings, drag and drop docs, marking guide, conditional topics, course layout condensing, editing titles.