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[personal profile] rebeccmeister
These days we use an LMS that supplanted an older-generation LMS because it had the honorable distinction of being more 'mobile-friendly.'

As happens for many newer pieces of software, as its creators have added 'features,' they have failed to budget sufficient time and money towards fundamentals.

One of my least favorite elements: in theory, it's possible to grade quizzes implemented in the LMS question-by-question. This is very useful, because it helps ensure I'm applying fair and consistent standards across students.

However. For whatever reason, I have to push an "update grades" button every single time I finish grading one question in one student's quiz. Otherwise the grade I just applied isn't saved.

In theory, this is fine, but in practice, unless I ALSO repeatedly click a "hide grades" button (which seems to be magically unchecking itself sporadically), the newly updated grade gets posted to the student's gradebook, and they get an email notification telling them their grade has been updated.

This then results in 4000 frantic student emails just checking to see if this is maybe their final grade, but they worked so hard, and this is so discouraging, because I still have 8 more questions to grade, and it's going to be several more hours before anything can be finalized.

Seriously, FFS, of all the things an LMS should do well, high-quality control over the gradebook needs to be near the top of the list.

It can be both a blessing and a curse for students to have such ready access to their grades. Unfortunately, from everything I've seen, the students who really need to care about their grades don't seem to pay much attention to them.

.

And now that I've gotten that off my chest, back to it.

Date: 2022-12-19 06:46 pm (UTC)
From: [personal profile] annikusrex
LMS is a generic term, yes? i accidentally pushed some prelim written assignment grades to students last time i taught (using canvas). and teaching only once a year means i have trouble learning from my mistakes.

Date: 2022-12-20 05:23 pm (UTC)
From: [personal profile] slydevil
College-level instructors are one of my favorite types of people to design for. They mostly figure out what's wrong before I even talk to them and then tell me about it in great detail. None of this "okay, let's walk through grading a test one step at a time," with constant reminders to think aloud.

I would be surprised that this particular issue exists, if I didn't know that some designer somewhere was likely overruled by a PM wanting to get a feature out the door and pat themself on the back, promising a "fast follow" release to address this. Which will come sometime in Q3 next year, if there's not a reorg. Meaning YOU should see it as soon as the IT dept decides it's secure enough to update to the next version...

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