Updates to Discussion Forum Grading
We recently received quite a bit of good feedback about grading discussion forum posts from a course team that spent a lot of time on that task in the last term. They raised a number of excellent points about how things could be better, so here are some of the changes we've made to grading discussion forum posts based on this feedback:
- Scores and comments are now automatically saved when the "Enter" key is pressed while typing in a score or adding a comment. You no longer have to click outside a score box or comment field for that information to be saved.
- A "Save" button has been added to each set of grading controls for those who feel confident in saving data only when a button is pressed.
- Discussion forum posts that still need to be graded are highlighted in orange. Once a discussion forum post is graded, the grading controls appear on a gray background instead.
- If a category is set to have graded posts, all posts in each topic are shown to faculty, editors, and TAs by default, rather than the usual behavior of only showing the three most recent posts in the topic. This saves faculty, editors, and TAs an extra click to see all posts in that topic.
- The error message that is shown when scores and comments fail to save for any reason has been reworded for greater clarity and now includes instructions on a simple fix to the problem: reloading the page.
More changes will be forthcoming, but these are some simple changes that will hopefully make the discussion forum post grading experience better for everyone!