Hot off the presses – meaning, I am posting this as a response to a question from a faculty member who just this morning came in to ask about this issue!
In our last D2L upgrade (upgrades happen monthly), you might have noticed a change in the Assignments tool table vide. Up until the upgrade, you would have had a choice to retain the old table, using an Opt-in feature, but now everyone will have to use the “New Assignments Page” view. So, let’s have a quick look and walk through the features and some of the issues that have been coming up with it.
The column headings in the new Assignment page view (image below the descriptions) are:
- Folder: the title of your Assignment)
- New: a hyperlink that directs you to all New submissions, both completely new submissions, and subsequent, additional submissions. If you hover over this link, you will see how many new submissions are “New” (FIRST submissions) or “Resubmissions” (any additional submissions to the same assignment AFTER the first one).
- Completed: Number of students who have submitted (completed) their assignments over the total number of students in the course (here, 4 submitted assignments out of 9 students)
- Evaluated: The number of student submissions you have already evaluated (here, 0 out of 9).
- Feedback Published: The number of student submissions you have published feedback for (here 0 out of 9). This differs from Evaluated because you can evaluate a submission, but wait to publish feedback.
- Due Date
One of the confusions for faculty has been for those faculty who are in a multi-instructor site where each instructor has small groups of students (in other words, the D2L course is not a one instructor grading all the students in the course kind of situation). In courses like this, the denominator for the Completed, Evaluated, and Feedback Published columns will not feel accurate. The denominators represent the TOTAL number of students in the course, not the number of students on instructor may have in her group.
In addition, the numbers you see when you hover over the hyperlinked number in the New column can be confusing as they refer to submissions that have NOT been evaluated. If you are having students submit regular reflections, for example, and not giving them evaluation/feedback until the end of the term, you will see the hyperlinked number rise as students submit – and their first submission will be the “New” one, and all subsequent submissions will be “Resubmissions”.
While we can’t change this table, we can let D2L how the new terminology is working for our faculty. If you have comments or suggestions based on your own experience with the new Assignment page, email me (Emily Schudel) or any instructional designer in eLearning, and we will submit your comments.