Overview
It should be possible to grade participation in discussions and factor this grading into a learner’s score for a course.
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Function | Admin | Discussion Admin* | Discussion Moderator* | TA |
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Manage graded discussion posts as per the existing discussion roles | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Create and manage graded discussion rubrics | ✔ | ✔ | ✘ | ✘ |
Add / edit grades | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✘ |
Grant graded discussion permissions to existing team members | ✔ Can grant permissions to: Staff, Discussion Admins, Discussion Moderators, Group Community TAs & Community TAs | ✔ Can grant permissions to: Discussion Moderators, Group Community TAs & Community TAs | ✘ | ✘ |
Note:
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Students can:
✔ View the discussion’s possible points | ||||
✔ View the grading rubric (how will points be awarded) | ||||
✔ View discussion description (how many posts, responses, word count etc) | ||||
✔ View the due date | ||||
✔ Add a post to a graded discussion |
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If Enabled, the user has the option to add the following grading criteria:
(Note: for MVP, we’d like to leverage as much of the Open Response Assessment’s (ORA) UX and UI as possible)
Grading Description (ie. Prompt)
Schedule, eg:
Discussion start date and time
Discussion end date and time
Rubric
This will follow the current ORA rubric setup:
Criterion name (eg: Grammar and spelling)
Criterion prompt (ie. Description of how to evaluate a discussion post based on this criterion)
Options (eg. “Fair”, “Good”, or “Excellent”)
Each option has a Name, Explanation and Point value
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The discussion block is deprecated in favor of topics being auto-created. We would have to bring back a discussion block to track graded discussions, which is counter to the authoring experience we’re trying to build.
We COULD create some kind of hidden XBlock that is abstracted away. But then we’d need to carve out some special casing for XBlocks to allow them to be hidden from course authors. This seems like a distasteful approach, especially since no other block is provided such a privilege and it is an open question when else such a feature would (or should) be used.
Opening up the grading code has a lot of potential for extending the platform’s grading capabilities. Discussions are only the start-- other outside plugins could allow for grading without tying grades back to a particular XBlock. This solution offers a lot of potential in the future while avoiding the special casing in item 2.
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Competitive Research
Yellowdig
From their documentation: Different actions and responses to your posted content in Yellowdig can earn you Yellowdig points if they are activated for your community. The Community Owner or Facilitators can configure rules for earning points. The rules can be seen at any time by clicking on the "Show details" section below the main points display (shown below).
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Populi
Populi “attaches” Graded Discussions to an assignment. From their documentation:
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