Context

Assessment, grading, and feedback is a fundamental task of the educator and a core function of the LMS. Maria is a lecturer in the Faculty of Health and has over 500 undergraduate students enrolled in her Anatomy unit. She is comfortable working in the LMS but has been looking for ways to improve the time it takes to manage assessment, grading and feedback tasks of her students.

For one assessment students need to complete a Lab Report that they submit for Maria and her small team of three support staff (Markers/Graders) to review, grade and provide feedback. However, they have found this to be very time consuming as they need allocate the students to each support staff member, comment on each Report, provide a grade for students, come together to finalise the grades and then release the grade to the students. She and the team can often spend hours attending to this task.

To help save some time Maria and the team use a bank of comments they have in a shared document that they copy and paste for student feedback, but this does not scale well and means they need to work across multiple technology. They have tried many options to grade, provide feedback to students, finalise, and then release grades but it just seems to take them so long.

Add to this that Maria and her team often need to deal with extension requests from their students. They have tried a few ways to deal with this, but as they spend most of their time in the LMS are eager to explore what options may be available to them in the LMS to help with this.