Entering weightings for Moodle grades

Moodle is an education platform, and is an acronym: modular object-oriented dynamic learning environment. The brainchild of PhD student, Martin Dougiamas, who gave Moodle to the world of educators. The 'm' in Moodle was originally for "Martin's" object-etc. Moodle is based on open-source PHP, and distributed under a GNU General Public License. Other educators around the world tinker with code in their off-time to build new functionality. And most of the time Moodle works well.

BUT. Some aspects can be a bit tricky. While there is documentation, how Moodle works at different institutions varies. A lot. The variance arises from what bolt-ons have been bolted on. Often trying to get from point A to point B at our particular institution can be a lot more complicated than we might hope.

At my institution we use Moodle as our student course interface. This year I took over a course from someone else, and went to mark an assignment... to find that whoever had previously set it up had not set up the gradebook in our 'standard' way (assignments marked out of percentages, with assignment weightings loaded somewhere). I had never had to tinker with this element of Moodle before, but knew I had to get this right, or students would not see their results correctly.

However, the fix was MUCH easier than I had expected it to be. A simple Google search ("How to set weightings in Moodle assessments") got me the following superb video (Birch, 2020), which I have embedded below:

After selecting the grade aggregation as "Weighted mean of grades", those of us with access to Moodle settings are able to go into the dropbox of any assessment, select "View Gradebook" from the settings list, then go to the "Setup" tab, and select the "edit" actions from the table header And I was able to set up my course exactly as it should have been set up, right from the start (Birch, 2020).

Surprisingly easy, thanks to the very clear instructions supplied (Birch, 2020). 

Sam

References:

Birch, S. K. (2020, July 14). Weights in the Moodle Gradebook [video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/omrLjwRYxMQ