Moodle Gradebook:

All courses in Moodle have a grades area, which is also known as the Gradebook. A number of activities within Moodle can be graded, and these grades will be automatically captured and shown in the Gradebook.

To get to the Gradebook, view the Administration block on the course and then click on Grades under the Course administration heading.

The following screenshot shows you an example of the teacher's view of a simple Gradebook with a number of different graded activities within it:

Let's take a quick tour of what we can see:

The Gradebook captures all the assessment information on one screen.

Users who have the roles of teacher, non-editing teacher, or manager will be able to see the grades for all students who are enrolled for the course. Students will only be able to see their own grades and feedback.

The advantage of storing the grades within Moodle is that information can be easily shared between all teachers in the online course. Traditionally, if a course manager wanted to know how students were progressing, they would need to contact the course teacher(s) to gather this information. Now, they can log in to Moodle and view the live data (as long as they have teacher or manager rights to the course).

There are benefits for students as well as they will see all their progress in one place and can start to manage their own learning by reviewing their progress to date, as shown in the following example of a student's view:

The grade report shown is of that of Bayley W. Bayley can see each assessment on the left-hand side with his grade next to it. By default, the student's grade report also shows the range of grades possible for the assessment (for example, the highest and lowest scores possible), but this can be switched off by the teacher in the Gradebook settings. This also shows you the equivalent percentage as well as any written feedback given by the teacher. The options for customizing reports will be explained further in Chapter 7, Reporting with the Gradebook.

There are a number of Moodle activities that can be graded and, therefore, work with the Gradebook. The activities that will automatically appear in the Gradebook are:

A number of other Moodle activities can also have grades and ratings assigned to them so that they also appear in the Gradebook. These include:

It is also possible to manually set up a graded item within the Gradebook, which is not linked with an activity but allows a grade to be recorded.

This book will not explain how to add all of these activities. However, Chapter 3, Adding Graded Activities, will provide an overview of the options within an assignment that is the most feature-rich of all of the graded Moodle items.

The Gradebook primarily shows you the grade or score for each graded activity within the online course. This grade can be shown in a number of ways:

Within some activities (such as assignments), written feedback can be provided in addition to the grade and can be viewed in the user reports and by students.

This chapter has given you a brief overview of the Gradebook, what it will show, how it can be used, and which activities feed into the grades area. It has only provided an introduction to the key features, but you can now work through each chapter and learn how to set them up in a way that works best for you.

As each element is explained in the following chapters, activities will be provided that will help you apply the ideas as well as provide a range of example uses. The default settings will be used for examples initially; however, where further customization is required, it will be explained within the chapters. These settings will mainly be changed at course level by a course teacher, and we will also highlight where these settings need to be switched on or amended by a site administrator.

In the next chapter, you will find out more about the different grading options and have a go at customizing scales and letter grades.