Moodle Gradebook: If you're already using Moodle for your courses, adding the power of the in-built gradebook can make teaching life a lot easier. This book tells you all about it – from basic concepts to clever customization.

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

To get to the gradebook, view the Settings block on the course and then click on Grades.

The following screenshot shows an example of the teachers' 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!

Using the gradebook, we can see all the assessments and grades linked to each student from one screen.

Users with teacher, non-editing teacher, or manager roles will be able to see the grades for all students on 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 on 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 also benefits to students 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 student view:

This is Bayley W's grade report. Bayley can see each assessment on the left-hand side with his grade next to it. By default, the student grades 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 Grades course settings. It also shows the equivalent percentage as well as the 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 main ones are the following:

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

This book will not explain how to add these activities. However, Chapter 3, Adding Graded Activities, will provide an overview of how to choose customized options within an assignment. The core elements of adding activities within Moodle are very similar, so these instructions can be used to add the same options within the other activity types.

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

Within some activities (such as the 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 will now work through each chapter to learn how to set them up.

As each element is explained in the following chapters, activities will be provided to enable us to apply the ideas as well as providing a range of example uses. The default settings will be used initially for examples, but where further customization is required, this will be explained within the chapters. These settings will mainly be changed at course level by a course teacher, but where these settings need to be turned on by an administrator this will also be highlighted.

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