Instructional Design Studio

Whether you’re using a weighted column to calculate your students’ final grade or putting together a smart view to make it easier to look at groups of columns, using categories can make your Grade Center experience significantly more efficient. The default course shell comes with a handful of categories pre-created for you, but you may find these labels are insufficient. Fortunately, it’s very easy to create a new categories and apply even apply them quickly to multiple columns at once.

To create a new category, open up your Grade Center, point to the MANAGE button at the top of the screen, then choose CATEGORIES.

To create a new category, click the CREATE CATEGORY button in the upper left corner of the page.

Then enter a name for your category. If you’d like, you can enter a description for your new category, but the description will only appear on the CATEGORIES page. Click SUBMIT at the top or bottom of the page to save your new category.

Now that we’ve created a new category (Case Study, in this example), we may want to apply it to several columns in the Grade Center. We could go edit each column’s information and apply the new category, but that is pretty time consuming. Fortunately, there’s a faster way. Return to the Grade Center, point to MANAGE again, and this time choose COLUMN ORGANIZATION.The column organization page lists all the columns in your Grade Center. You can use this page to quickly rearrange your view of columns (by clicking the cross arrow on the left side of each Grade Center item then dragging it up or down on the list). You can also hide or un-hide items from the instructor grade center view, apply grading periods, or apply categories in bulk on this page. Just check the box for the items you want to effect. In this case, we want to apply our new Case Study category to all the Case Study (CS#) columns, so we’re going to check all those boxes.

At the top or bottom of the page we point to the button for the attribute we want to change and make our selection. So, to change the category, we point to CHANGE CATEGORY TO then choose CASE STUDY ….

To save your changes click SUBMIT at the top or bottom of the page.

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