Best Practices: Advanced Grading with Checklists

Best Practices: Advanced Grading with Checklists
By: Rebecca DeSantis, MSIT, Moodlerooms Instructional Designer

Our recent Summer 2012 release of joule included two advanced grading methods: Moode core’s Rubric and our joule Checklist. If you were already using joule marking tables, they were automatically upgraded to Moodle core rubrics. If you were using the joule checklist, they were upgraded to the joule checklist. Both of these advanced grading methods allow you to evaluate performance in any classroom. Currently, instructors can only add advanced grading methods to assignments with Moodle core. However, joule users can use advanced grading methods for assignments and advanced forums!

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Moodle rubrics and included videos for creating one from scratch, creating one from a template, and how to grade with them. You can view that post to learn about more about rubrics: “How To” Videos for Creating Moodle Rubrics. In today’s post, I’m going to focus on checklists.

Creating Checklists
Like rubrics, you can create checklists from scratch or by using a predefined template, and you can grade within the checklist itself. Also, the process for creating one and grading is very similar. The checklist method allows instructors to identify items (i.e., criteria) and correlate point values to each. The maximum value of the checklist is equal to the sum of all items. Watch this video to learn how to create a checklist in joule.




When an instructor grades activities using a checklist, they award students with either all or no points for each item. Students will be able to view the checklist after an activity is graded, but they may also view it before completing activities if instructors allow for it. To do this, instructors must check the “Allow users to preview checklist used in the module” settings within the checklist options area when creating it. We recommend that you enable this setting so that students are aware of how they will be evaluated before completing activities. We also recommend that instructors grade using the new joule Grader to save time in grading. To learn about the joule Grader, visit the blog post “Spend Less Time Grading with joule Grader”.

I hope you are enjoying the new features in our latest release. They sure are exciting and can save you time! Don’t forget to check out our Moodlerooms’ training offerings, which have been updated to include all of these great new features.

~Rebecca