Wednesday, September 9, 2009

SafeAssign Comments Not Showing to Students

We have just discovered that when you grade a SafeAssignment and make comments to your students, they cannot view these comments through My Grades. This has been reported to Blackboard and we have two temporary workarounds.

One workaround is to make the SafeAssignment available after you have finished grading. This way students could view the assignment and see your comments. You would need to make sure to enter zero points for those students who haven't turned in their work on time so it would be clear if they tried to submit it late.

Another workaround is to enter the comments in Grade Details by clicking on Modify Attempt. I understand that this would require several extra steps and may not be very feasible.

This is a priority issue for Blackboard and we hope to get a fix for this soon.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This seems like a big pain - and BB is never very responsive - how long are you going to give them before they fix this bug??

Eileen Phillips said...

My students do lab assignments in Excel and Access
I always attach a breakdown of points or percentages. Of course, I do include this breakdown in the Assignment file in BB; it is simple a Grading Rubric which starts out as an Excel file. This becomes my master file for grading. Since I teach Excel, the breakdown with my comments for improvement just get copied to the original student file to be returned to the student.
In Access files, students have their original file. So I just return a copy of my Grading Rubric with my comments for improvement to them. If I tried to mark up a student Access Database, it would be a horrific. No one would be able to read it, including the Instructor!
I do not like the Comment s section in BB. I feel every student should have a little privacy when viewing their grades. This can be difficult in campus lab situation, when the student sitting next to them is asking, “ What did you get!”. Some students like to share their grades; others don’t.