Dr Steven Roper
What were your initial thoughts and concerns about adopting MyGrades?
When I first heard about the MyGrades project I was concerned for two reasons. The first was that, having worked as exams officer and in various roles in our School, I know how difficult it can be to apply the code of assessment correctly to calculate course grades. I was initially worried that some of the complexities wouldn’t be able to be captured and that the tool would not be suitable for use in our School. I was also concerned about how we’d integrate the tool into our work to calculate degree classifications and other awards, this is always a really hectic task at the end of the session.
I did however think that should it work it would really help with some of the concerns we had in our School about our current approaches to calculating grades. Our current procedures really on capturing data from Moodle into our local database, which required a lot of manual intervention. If we could switch to everything being in Moodle this seemed to me to be an advantage.
How has your experience with MyGrades been so far?
I’ve used Staff MyGrades to calculate grades for six of our courses, a mixture of non-honours, honours and PGT. I’ve been pleased to see that, when comparing to our local calculations we have agreement in all cases, including using administrative grades. That’s been very reassuring. We’ve also learned a lot about how to set-up Moodle gradebook and how we can achieve what we need using student groups and restrictions. So overall it’s been a positive experience using MyGrades to check course grade calculations, which was our aim this session.
What are the biggest benefits you’ve seen from using MyGrades?
Since we’ve been trialling MyGrades this session and learning a lot about how to set up Moodle so that it works we’ve not yet had benefits of using it. I do think it will be very beneficial for reporting mapped component grades to students, something we’ve done inconsistently in our School (some programmes have done this very well and others not at all). It will also be beneficial initially as a check on our local calculations, eventually if we are to replace our local calculations with MyGrades we’ll need to be absolutely sure what we’re doing since degree outcomes rely on course grade calculations being correct.
What are your hopes for the future of MyGrades?
I hope that eventually it will be able to provide exactly what’s needed in terms of programme aggregration as well as producing course grades (both PGT and UG). I’ve not experimented in full with resit grades, which are sometimes quite hard to get exactly right, so I’m hoping when that time comes that we are able to make MyGrades work for those calculations. I hope also that students start to use it and are better able to understand how their grades were calculated.
UAT Tester
How responsive was the IT team to your feedback and suggestions?
Extremely, it was really excellent to be able to attend the UAT sessions and talk to the team and explain our concerns. The IT team was very responsive and engaged with everything that we raised. We really appreciated the attention and seriousness with which our comments were taken.
How did your involvement in UAT influence the development of MyGrades?
I think positively, we were fortunate to be invited to discuss our School’s approach to various administrative grades and I think this helped with the development of how good cause and missed assessments is treated. I hope this is useful across the University.
How valuable was the UAT process for both you/your school and the project?
It was essential for us to be involved, as a way to be trained in how to use the tool, but also to evaluate whether we could eventually adopt it for our courses. I think there was a lot of useful feedback and sharing of information betweeen testers and I was really happy to be involved.
How has being involved ensured your school is ready for the change?
Without being involved I think we’d be many weeks/months behind in understanding what the tools do and what tasks we need to complete in order to adopt. Since in our School we had multiple testers who were all engaged I think that’s given us something very valuable in that we have expertise in the School so that colleagues can get help locally. We still have to think through some aspects of how we will adopt and manage the things that come after course grades but we’re in a good position having being involved in UAT.