Staff Graded Points ready for Fall

TL;DR: Dahlia and the Master’s Squad are proud to announce Staff Graded Points, which allows instructors to assign scores for off-platform work and participation.

Release: Aug 7, 2019 - soft launch in July

Product owner: Olga Stroilova

What is it?

Staff Graded Points (SGP) is a new problem type that allows course teams to assign scores to learners for off-platform activities or participation.

We released SGP in soft launch earlier this summer, and are now socializing widely for Fall courses. Our target audience is small, higher-touch courses like Master’s.

Learner View

SGP provides learners with text Instructions on what they’ll need to do to complete that problem, and a readout of their assigned Point score.

Instructor Workflow

SGP allows instructors to assign grades by downloading a template problem score file, filling out scores, and re-uploading.

Currently SGP supports file sizes up to 4MB (around 10k learners). In larger courses, instructors will have to upload files in chunks.

Key talking points

  1. Why did we build SGP now?
    We knew Master’s courses need a way to assign grades for off-platform activities like labs and participation. These higher touch courses also have the resources to individually grade learners. So we prioritized a soft release for the beginning of the summer, to prepare for Fall Master’s courses.

  2. What courses is SGP available for?
    Any course can add an SGP problem block, but file uploads are currently limited to 4MB (around 10k enrollments). If larger courses do want to use this higher-touch feature, the course team will have to upload scores files in chunks.

  3. How can my course team add an SGP problem?
    SGP is available as an Advanced Component Type in Studio - see instructions here.

  4. What best practices should my course team keep in mind?
    Course authors should fill out the text field Instructions to let learners clearly know what’s expected of them and what the grading rubric will be. Instructors should also let learners know when grades have been assigned - either by an update or a post to the forum


Results: We have several course teams trying out SGP now. We’ll monitor how this problem type is used in the Fall, as we prepare to build out further high-touch features for Programs.


Documentation: SGP docs on RTD

Credits: Thanks to Dahlia Team, with special thanks to @David St. Germain (Deactivated) leading the tech effort, and to @Ben Piscopo (Deactivated) and @Christine Michael (Deactivated) for reviewing the experience.