Gradebook Redesign

Redesigning the Gradebook

The organizing principle of the new Gradebook is to provide the users with a familiar, spreadsheet-style interface to their roster and grades. This principle is reflected most clearly on the main screen, which we've designated the "multigrade" screen, and which has some of the features of a spreadsheet, albeit a somewhat limited one. It is not our intention to provide user-editable ad hoc calculations, but to facilitate the rapid entry of grades over multiple items for multiple students.

Currently, we are working with a grid control (from the Ext-GWT project) that provides paging and scrolling. It does not allow us to "freeze" columns, so the current thinking is that users will select some subset of their grade items to edit simultaneously. To make the task of selecting items to grade as simple as possible, we've modified the grid control's built-in column context menu (accessible by clicking on the down arrow that appears at the right of each column header on mouse-over) to group the available columns by category. In addition to any user categories created for the given gradebook, there are two static categories for the context menu: "Student Information", and "Grades". These static categories allow the user to modify the visibility of certain 'static' columns, such as 'student id', 'student name', or 'section', and in the case of "Grades", the calculated 'Course Grade' and 'Grade Override' columns.

The default behavior on a new gradebook will be to only show the user the student name column. Column visibility selections and column widths will be stored locally (as Cookies) on the user's browser. This has the advantage of limiting the amount of data that must be passed back to the server and persisted, with the disadvantage that it requires the user to consistently use the same browser in order to maintain these selections across sessions.

Double clicking on a student name from the multigrade screen will bring up an "Individual Grade Summary" for that student. This screen can also be used to enter grades. This screen will also allow the user to browse between students by clicking the buttons marked "Next" and "Previous", and to take a look at the screen each student will be presented with when he or she accesses the tool, by clicking on the button marked "View as Student".

As of Milestone 1, the "Individual Grade Summary" screen is the only means of (a) viewing the log of previous grades entered, (b) entering comments for the assignment, and (c) excusing a student from an assignment. Milestone 2 will add this functionality to the multigrade screen, by means of a context menu on right-click.

To provide users with a means of controlling their list of items and categories, there is a "Setup" button at the top of the tool. Clicking on this button will bring up another screen, with three tabs, currently labeled "Gradebook", "Categories" and "Grade Items". The first is for general Gradebook configuration, including whether the grading is done with points or percentages and whether the final course grade should be released to students in their view of the data. The other two tabs offer views of the category and grade item data, respectively, and allow properly authorized users to edit each field.