Changes to the Gradebook, Surveys, and Video in Online Courses
As part of a fairly substantial update that was rolled out to the online course system at the end of May, a couple of new features have been added to various online course tools. These include:
- Gradebook:
- The "Prepare Final Grade" page now has a "Save Only" option that saves any manual adjustments that faculty have made to an individual final grade.
- If an item is excluded from calculation in the final grade, and the "Show grade in student view" option is deselected, then the row for that item and the grade for that item will not appear in the student view of the Gradebook. This allows for completely hiding certain items from the student view in the Gradebook while using the Gradebook to track those items.
- A spinning circle indicator now appears when you add or edit an activity in the Gradebook to provide visual feedback that your request to add or edit an activity is being processed.
- Surveys:
- There is now an option available for faculty or TAs to be notified via email when someone submits responses to a survey.
- The 1400 character limit on essay question responses in surveys has been removed.
- Video:
- If you are accessing an online course website from an iPad, iPhone, or other iOS device, you can now watch videos (not lectures) in course websites. Please note that not all class websites have been updated for this new feature yet. As the academic year progresses, we will be updating course videos. Fully synchronized course lecture presentations still do not play on iOS devices due to the lack of support for the Flash Player on iOS devices.
- Video playback will now adjust to a higher quality version of the file, if one is available, when the connection improves significantly while playing back the video. If you already are playing the highest quality version of the file, you will see no change.