Smart views in the Grade Center

Smart Views let you see only specific sets of Grade Center columns and rows based on criteria you provide. Using Smart Views, you can see only students who scored poorly on an exam or homework assignment, only columns with a specific category, and so on. The tools available for dynamically selecting the columns and rows that are displayed are pretty powerful. They’re not difficult to set up either.

You may have noticed the headings ASSIGNMENTS and TESTS that appear under the FULL GRADE CENTER link when you open the GRADE CENTER heading on one of your courses.

These are shortcuts to a couple Smart Views available in your course site by default. A Grade Center Smart View is essentially a filtering mechanism: it displays only the Grade Center columns that share a set of attributes. The simplest smart view is based on a column’s category (all columns with the ASSIGNMENTS category are displayed when you click Assignments), but we can also set up a smart views based on other attributes. We could, for example, set up a Smart View showing us all (and only) Assignments that need grading. Best of all, smart views aren’t limited to columns. You can use smart views to view only particular students or groups of students, which can be particularly handy if you’re running a MERGED course site — you can drop the students from  each section into a group, then used group-based smart views to look at only one section’s students at a time.

To create a smart view, load up your course’s Grade Center, point to MANAGE, then click SMART VIEWS.

The Smart Views page lists all the default views for your course (along with any you may have created yourself. You’ll notice you have the option to FAVORITE one or more views. Smart Views that are marked as FAVORITES will appear underneath the FULL GRADE CENTER link in the menu on the left (ASSIGNMENTS and TESTS are both default favorites). To favorite or un-favorite a view, click the star to the right of the view’s name.

To create a new Smart View, click the CREATE SMART VIEW button at the top of the page.

The first section of the CREATE SMART VIEW page is fairly self-explanatory. Enter a name for your Smart View, provide a description if you’d like, check the ADD AS FAVORITE box if you’d like the view to appear as part of the GRADE CENTER menu on the left.

It’s under part two, SELECTION CRITERIA, that things get interesting. Depending on whether you have groups active in your course you’ll see four or five selection criteria. Let’s look at each separately, in order.

Course Group

If you’ve set up groups for your course, then the first criteria will be Course Group. This will narrow your view to just a group or set of groups. If you’d like, you can further filter your view limiting to a particular category, column, or grading period.

First, select the group or groups you want included in (or excluded from) your new Smart View.

You can select more than one group at a time by holding the CTRL key on your keyboard and clicking through the groups that appear in the list.

By default, the criteria is set to ALL COLUMNS. However, you can narrow the display to to just particular columns, categories, grading periods, or columns either shown two or hidden from users. To include columns you’ve hidden from the Full Grade Center view in your new Smart View, check the INCLUDE HIDDEN INFORMATION box to the right of the column filter pull-down list.

If you’d like to filter by group and status (e.g., “Needs grading”), use the CATEGORY AND STATUS criteria.

Performance

Performance-based smart views show you columns for users who have a score in a particular Grade Center column that is at, above, below, or between a score (or pair of scores) you provide. So let’s say we want to create a Smart View that will only show me students who are not doing well in the course.

In the SELECT CRITERA section, I could choose “GRADE ON WEIGHTED TOTAL” for USER CRITERIA, “Less than” for the CONDITION, and set the VALUE to the number which I want to use as my red flag (say, “80″). So when I use this smart view, I’ll see all the columns for students who have less than an 80% in the weighted total column. If I don’t want to see all the columns, I have access to the same filtering options found in the COURSE GROUP criteria.

User

USER is possibly the most straightforward of all the selection criteria. Use this option to select one or more users (use the CTRL+Click trick to select more than one) whose column information will be displayed in your Smart View. If you don’t want to see all the columns, for these users, you have the same filtering options found in the COURSE GROUP and PERFORMANCE criteria.

Category and Status

This is probably the most useful and most powerful of the Smart View criteria. As the name suggests, the CATEGORY AND STATUS criteria lets you view either all columns or columns set to a particular category. You can also limit the rows that appear in this view to particular users or groups, should you so choose.

Next, you have the option to select a column status –

– meaning you can display only columns that have a grade in them (Completed), or all the columns in a particular category that need to be graded.

Custom

If none of the above meet your needs, you have the option of venturing into the land of custom filtering. Use the pull down lists to select a column, user, or group to select on, and filter as necessary as we’ve seen above (members of Assignment Groups 1-3), then click the ADD CRITERIA button to further narrow what will appear in the display (who have less than 70 points on the midterm), and continue adding criteria as necessary (who also have less than 70 points on the final paper) …

By default, your custom smart column will incorporate all these elements (1 AND 2 AND 3), but you can use the formula editor to insert parentheses and change the relationship between lines from AND to OR …

Applying a Smart View to the Grade Center

So now you’ve created a smart view or two. Outside of the Favorites list, how do we apply a smart view? First, we need to turn on the FILTER menu. So from the Grade Center, click the FILTER button in the upper right …

This will add a filtering menu right beneath this line of buttons. Point to the button to labelled CURRENT VIEW (likely, this will say FULL GRADE CENTER) to access a broad menu of filtering options. Select the Smart View you want to use, and your view will instantly be filtered.

Used judiciously, Smart Views can be an extremely effective way of managing your Grade Center, particularly if you have a large number of students and / or columns. If you have any questions about creating and applying Smart Views, please contact the Instructional Design Studio.

Grade Center , , , , Updated: March 14, 2016

Java issues using Firefox

Java is a critical part of your online classroom experience. However, recent security concerns surrounding Java mean you may run into problems with the Java plug-in. We have found this is particularly an issue in Firefox.

To get Java working correctly, first open up Internet Explorer.

Go to: http://java.com, then click on the “free Java Download” button.

If you do not have the newest version of Java installed, you will be prompted to download and install the latest version. More info available here: http://ids.commons.udmercy.edu/2013/01/10/is-your-java-up-to-date/

If you have the latest version installed, you should get the “Congratulations!” message on your computer.

You should be all set to go into http://knowledge.udmercy.edu using Internet Explorer to access your Collaborate or Wimba sessions.

If you’d prefer to continue using Firefox as your primary browser, open Firefox then go to: http://java.com. Click on the “free java download” button again. Look for the little block that looks like a lego in the URL bar:

You should get a message to prompt you to activate Java (more info available at: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-to-use-java-if-its-been-blocked#w_always-activate-java-for-a-site)
Under the “Activate All Plugins” dropdown menu, select “Always activate plugins for this site”. This will activate Java for the site you are currently on. You will need to do this when you launch a Wimba or Collaborate session in Blackboard.

When you are signed into the http://knowledge.udmercy.edu site, you may see a little red block that looks like a lego in your url bar when you launch a Wimba or Collaborate session. Remember to click the “Activate All Plugins” dropdown menu, select “Always activate plugins for this site” to activate the java plugin for the website.

Bb Collaborate, Bb Collaborate, FAQ , , , , Updated: February 4, 2014

Set up after-hours phone support through Google Voice

IDS has heard that many faculty are interested in providing students with a phone number that can be used to reach them after regular office hours. Making yourself accessible to students in the evening can be particularly helpful if you have non-traditional students in your courses who aren’t in a position to call or stop by your office during the day. At the same time, you may not want to share your home or cell phone number with students, lest it be abused. One possible solution to this dilemma is to set up call forwarding using Google Voice.

Google Voice will give you a phone number you can give to your students. Then you can set up your voice account to forward calls to that number to your cell (or home) phone or your office phone, depending on the time of day and day of week. This way, you can have your student calls sent to your cell phone between 6PM and 9PM on weekdays, but bounce back to your office phone (and your office phone’s voice mail) between 9PM and 9AM, meaning a student’s 3AM call will go to your office voice mail and not ring your personal cell phone.

Setting up a Google Voice account is pretty easy. First you’ll need a Google account. If you don’t already have a Google account, go to http://www.google.com, click the SIGN IN button in the upper right, then click the red SIGN UP button in the upper right of the sign in page.

Creating an account

If you’re creating a Google account, you’ll need to provide some basic information. You do NOT need to provide a cell phone number as part of the account creation (but if you plan to use a cell for forwarding, you may as well). Click NEXT when you have provided all the necessary account information. The next page asks you to set up a profile. You can click NEXT through this page as well. That’s all there is to setting up your Google account.

Set up Google Voice

Across the top of the Google screen you should see a black bar with a series of menu items. Click MORE.

Then click EVEN MORE from the bottom of that list.

Then scroll down to the HOME & OFFICE block and click VOICE.

When you open Voice for the first time, you’ll be prompted to accept the Terms and Privacy Policy. Read the linked documents, then check the box and click PROCEED to continue setting up your account.

Next you’ll be asked to set up your Google Voice number. Because you want to provide students with a separate number that forwards to your cell, home, and/or office phone, you’ll want to select I WANT A NEW NUMBER.

Before you get your Google Voice number, you’ll be asked to provide a forwarding phone. Enter your office, home, or cell phone number, choose an appropriate type for the number, then click CONTINUE.

To verify you’ve provided a real phone number, Google Voice will give you a two digit code, then call you. Pick up the call and enter the two digit code to verify your number. You’ll also be given the opportunity to set up your voice mail on Google Voice at the same time. Listen to the prompts and walk through the voice mail creation process.

Finally, you’ll be prompted to choose a number. Enter an area code, zip code, or city in the first box and/or a word, phrase, or number in the second box, then click SEARCH. Select a number from the list of options provided, then click CONTINUE.

Congratulations! Your new number is set up.

Any calls placed to your new Google Voice number will ring the initial number you set up the account with.

Schedule your rings

Now it’s time to add some new lines and set some parameters so the right phones ring at the right times.

Click the GEAR icon in the upper right corner of the screen, then choose SETTINGS.

You’ll find your new Google Voice number, then the number it forwards to. Click the EDIT button under the number it forwards to.

You can change the name, number, and type associated with this entry. To set the timing, click SHOW ADVANCED SETTINGS.

Now you can set up a RING SCHEDULE for the phone. I’ve started out with my office phone. I want to provide access via cell phone from 5PM to 9PM on weekdays and from 1PM to 5PM on weekends. So I want to set this up so my office phone will not ring at those times (we’ll set up the second line in a minute). So I select USE CUSTOM SCHEDULE, then put in the times I’ll want my cell phone to ring (because I don’t want my office phone to ring at those times). Under the Weekends heading, I’ll set it up to NOT ring between 1PM and 5PM.

Click SAVE at the bottom of the screen to save these changes. Now let’s add that second phone (in this case, a mobile phone). Click ADD ANOTHER PHONE.

Enter a name for the new number (e.g., “Cell phone”), the number, and a type, then click SHOW ADVANCED SETTINGS again. Again, we’ll want to select USE CUSTOM SCHEDULE, and again we’ll want to select the times we do not want this phone to ring. So we’ll set it to NOT ring from Midnight (selected from the top of the list) until 5pm (when we want this phone to start ringing), then click ADD TIME RANGE, and set the phone to not ring from 9PM until Midnight (selected from the bottom of the list). Similarly, enter Midnight to 1PM and 5PM to Midnight for weekends.

Click SAVE at the bottom of the screen, and you’re ready to go. Give your students your new Google Voice number, and they’ll be able to call you and reach you at your office or on your cell phone (or home phone), depending on the day and time.

This is a pretty simple set up. If you’re inclined, you can have multiple windows each day

Unfortunately, there isn’t an automated way to have hours set for Saturday but not Sunday (or vice versa). This can be managed manually by editing the settings on this page, going in some time before your weekend hours start on Sunday and switching your work phone to “Always ring on weekends” and your mobile phone to “Never ring on weekends” — you’ll just need to remember to flip this back on before the next Saturday.

Communicate , , , , , , Updated: January 16, 2013

Quickly identify and contact students who need help

Combining color-coded cells in the Grade Center table with the Email from Grade Center tool makes it easy to identify and get in touch with students who are having difficulty mastering your course material. Fortunately, it’s also easy to set up these features.

First, let’s look at how we can color code a grade center column to make it easier to quickly identify a student who is slipping.

Open the Grade Center in your course. Point to MANAGE at the top, then choose “Grading Color Codes”.

First, make sure “Enable Grading Color Codes” is selected.

You’ll notice you can change the background color of a cell depending on it’s state (you could set all NEEDS GRADING cells to green, for example). We’re going to set some criteria for coloring cells based on a grade range. Under the GRADE RANGE heading, click the ADD CRITERIA button.

Now we can set up a coloring scheme.

On the Criteria pull down, choose whether you want to color a cell that is between a set of percentages, more than or equal to a percentage, or less than a percentage. For this example we’ll use “LESS THAN”, because we want an alert when students are under-performing.

In the next box, enter the percentage you want to use. In this case, we want a cell to change color when a student scores less than 80%, so we’ll enter 80 in the percentage box. This means if a student scores 79.9% or less, the cell’s color will be changed. If we had chosen “BETWEEN,” we’d have two percentages — in that case, enter the upper and lower limits.

Next, pick the background and foreground colors. The INDICATOR PREVIEW column will show you a sample of what the Grade Center cell is going to look like, so you can make sure you can easily read your color combination.

If you’d like, click ADD CRITERIA again to add a new rule.

NOTE: You can stack “LESS THANS” or “MORE THANS” if you’d rather not use the between option. If you set a coloring rule that has the background color turning to orange at less than 80 percent, and a rule that sets the background to red at 70 percent, then anyone in the 70%-80% range will show up orange and anyone below 70% will be red.

When you’re done, click SUBMIT at the bottom of the page.

Congratulations. Now any one who falls into your color scheme range should have Grade Center cells that show up in your selected colors. In the example below, we see two 10 point columns colored according to the coloring scheme above:

As you can see, it’s easy to tell that these two students are had problems with their blog and reflection assignments. We should send them an email and ask them to schedule a meeting during office hours. Fortunately, we can email directly from the Grade Center.

Just check the names of the students you’d like to email …

Then point to the EMAIL button at the top or bottom of your Grade Center spreadsheet and choose EMAIL SELECTED USERS.

The email users page should be pretty familiar to anyone who has sent email through Blackboard. This particular page includes the option to send a blind copy of your message to an email address that is not one of the students in your course.

This may be helpful for notifying an advisor or University Academic Services at the same time that you contact a student who is having a problem (NOTE: due to the way Blackboard sends email, folks who are blind copied will not know who the message we sent to either, so you may want to identify the student you are emailing in the body of your email).

Type your subject in the subject space and your message in the message space. Because students won’t know whether anyone else in the class is included in your email, a single carefully crafted message can give several students the impression that they are being contacted individually and personally.

Beneath the message space is a checkbox for “Include list of recipients”. If you check this box, the copy of the message which is sent to you will include the names (or, in the case of a BCC address, the email address) of everyone you sent this message. This may be helpful for your records.

When you’re done, click SUBMIT to send your email.

Communicate, Grade Center , , , , , , Updated: January 16, 2013

Setting up a microphone + speakers in Collaborate

Voice chat is one of the most useful features of Blackboard Collaborate. It can also be the most frustrating if your microphone and speakers aren’t set up right. Fortunately, getting your audio set up is easily done. But before we look at audio setup wizard, let’s look at the AUDIO & VIDEO module. The AUDIO & VIDEO module appears in the upper left corner of the Collaborate window.

At the bottom of the AUDIO & VIDEO module you’ll see a Talk button and a Video button. If you’d like to talk, click the Talk button. When you’ve said your piece, click the Talk button again to mute your microphone.

Above the Talk and Video buttons, you’ll notice there’s a pair of slider bars. The leftmost slider (with a microphone) is for microphone volume, the other (with sound waves) is for speakers.

When you see a dark line filling the background of either slider, that indicates sound is going through that feed. So in the image above, the microphone is picking up sound and sending it to the Collaborate room (but audio is not coming from the Collaborate room through my headset or speakers). You can adjust microphone and speaker volume by moving the bar crossing the appropriate slider left or right.

If you are supposed to be hearing audio, or if you have TALK clicked but the microphone bar isn’t picking up anything, you should run the Audio Setup Wizard. You launch the Audio Setup Wizard by clicking the microphone with a red gear icon over it that appears in the upper right corner of the AUDIO & VIDEO module.

In the first window, you’ll be selecting an output device (speakers or a headphones). If you’re using a headset, select the headset from list. Note that if you’re using headphones that use a mini-plug (like you’d find on an MP3 player or phone), they will likely appear as Speakers (High Definition Audio Device), not as “headphones”. In the example below, I have a set of earbuds plugged in as well as a USB headset, so I see Speakers (High Definition Audio Device) listed twice — once for my earbuds, once for my computer’s built-in speakers. Unfortunately, the only way to distinguish between the two is experimentation.

If you don’t see the appropriate output on the list, make sure it’s properly plugged in then hit REFRESH. Once you have the appropriate output selected, click OK.

The next window will let you adjust the volume of your speakers. Hit the PLAY button, then adjust the slider to adjust the volume. Once you have the volume set to a comfortable level (or if you find you selected the wrong set of speakers), press the STOP button.  You’ll be asked if you were able to set the volume to a comfortable level. If you’d like to begin the speaker selection process over, click NO. Otherwise, click YES to set up your microphone.

The process for selecting the microphone is the same as the process for selecting speakers. Again, you’ll be asked to select the appropriate device (and again, if you have a microphone that’s plugged in using a mini-plug and your computer has a built in microphone you’ll likely see both listed as Microphone (High Definition Audio Device). Click RECORD, speak as you would if you were on the phone, and adjust the slider so you see mostly green with may be a little bit of yellow, then click STOP. Next you’ll be prompted to play back the audio you just recorded. Hit Play and listen. If your recording is loud enough, then click YES on the confirmation page (which will open automatically when your recording finishes). To re-do the microphone setup, click NO.

Depending on your computer, you may need to re-run this wizard before every Collaborate session. You should always make sure you log into your Collaborate session with yourself enough time to run the wizard before your session is scheduled to start.

Bb Collaborate, Bb Collaborate, FAQ , , , , Updated: February 4, 2014
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