Speaker 1: This is Theresa from eLearning with some tips and best practices for grading student submissions in Blackboard. The Blackboard Grade Center allows you to view student submission attempts and grade history, as well as assign and edit grades for all graded activities in your course. When you create a new graded learning activity in the course, and you enable the grading feature, if presented with this choice, a column is automatically created in the Grade Center. This makes it easy to keep track of student work, as well as calculate and weigh scores for the final grade. After students submit their work to Blackboard, you can access and grade their work using the Needs Grading and Full Grade Center options. Needs Grading is a useful feature that lists student submissions to all graded learning activities as they are submitted. To access Needs Grading, click Grade Center from the Control Panel. This area is just under the Course Menu. Click Needs Grading. The Needs Grading page lists the most recent submissions. You can use the drop-down menus at the top to selectively grade,

Speaker 2: and click the Go button, or click Grade All to grade all submissions indiscriminately.

Speaker 1: To grade an attempt, click on the student name under User Attempt. Alternatively, click the menu link beside the item name and select Grade All Users. Both of these options take you to the grading page. We'll take a closer look at this page later. The Full Grade Center provides a comprehensive view of student submissions throughout the Grade Center columns, which are associated with graded activities in the course. When a student submits new work, their ungraded submission is indicated with an exclamation point icon. To grade through the Full Grade Center, go to the Grade Center from the Control Panel. Click Full Grade Center. On the Full Grade Center page, locate a column with an exclamation point icon, hover over the cell, and click the drop-down arrow that appears. Click Attempt Date or Grade User Activity, depending on the options presented. Discussion forums can be graded within the Discussions tool. Click on Discussions from the navigation menu to access Discussions. Navigate to the Discussion Forum to Grade and click on the link to the Discussion Forum. Click Grade Discussion Forum. Click on the Grade button next to the student to grade. This takes you to the Grading Discussion Forum page. The Discussion post appears in the center, and over to the right is the Grading panel. Click on the Grade box to enter the points earned for the Discussion post, and add feedback to the learner in the text box. Click the link to add notes if desired. Use the Save Draft button to save notes and feedback, or click Submit to finalize the grade. Click OK to get back to the Grade Discussion Forum Users page. You'll notice the grade is populated here. The grade is also populated in the Full Grade Center. Accessing an assignment submission takes you to the Assignment Grading page. To allow more space on the Grading page, hover over the left side area and click on the gray arrow that appears to minimize the course menu. You can also click the arrow over to the right to collapse the Grading panel. You can use the Zoom and Pan tools to navigate through the document. Use the Drawing tool to underline text if desired, and use the Comment tool to add a comment. Also notice that you can use the trash can icon to delete a comment. Click the arrow on the far right to expand the Grading panel. Click on the Attempt box and enter a score. Add feedback in the Feedback to Learner box. Note that you can also add personal grading notes. When you're ready to finalize the grade, click Submit.

Speaker 2: This posts the grade to the Grade Center column.

Speaker 1: For assignments that have been set up with rubrics, you can access the rubric within the Grading panel. Click on the Rubric link to use the rubric for grading. Click the View Rubric icon to view the entire rubric in a new window. A rubric is a scoring guide. It contains the criteria for the assignment and the rating scale, which indicates the level of performance for each criteria. Each level of performance has a point value or point scale associated with it. Click Exit to return to the Grading panel. Click Show Description to display the details for each level of achievement under each criteria. Click the appropriate radio buttons to select the desired level of achievement for each criteria. The raw total represents all of the points earned for each level of achievement. You can override the raw score by entering a new score in the box below. You can enter additional feedback in the text box and click Save Rubric. Add additional feedback if desired. Click Submit to post the grade to the Grade Center. Students view their grades and instructor feedback under My Grades. A comment bubble appears beside the grade for students to access instructor comments. Students can also view a rubric if one was used for grading and if it's set to be viewable to students in the assignment options. Students can also view the grading page along with any instructor comments or annotations by clicking on the Assignment link.