Online Assessments

Bryan Lorenzo

Has anyone been able to implement online assessments without any bugs successfully? They often freeze for our students, and they get stuck in "paused" or 'in progress." Our teachers would love to use them more, but they continue to have issues and get frustrated.

Any recommendations or best practices you've found that worked for your teachers? We also use GradeCam for online assessments (https://gradecam.com) and don't have these issues. The user experience is much better for our teachers and students in GradeCam.

Ben Leddy

@Bryan Lorenzo We are actually embarking on a redesign of our assessments experience to address these challenges! If you are interested in learning more, feel free to email me at ben.leddy@blackbaud.com.

Kathy Hannon

@Bryan Lorenzo we moved to Gradecam also because of the bugs in the assessments. Gradecam has minimal issues and it interfaces with gradebooks flawlessly.

Chris Felinski

Are you saying it integrates with Blackbaud's Learning Management System gradebook?

Bryan Lorenzo

Chris Felinski:

Are you saying it integrates with Blackbaud's Learning Management System gradebook?

@Chris Felinski - it doesn't integrate directly. They have a grade transfer that works with the BB gradebook.

Kathy Hannon

With 2 keystrokes while in the gradebook, Gradecam will enter them in BB LMS Gradebook

Oona McKnight

I have only one teacher who uses the online assessments regularly (every day), and each day there is at least one student where the quiz says that they have skipped a question or two, but they didn't. The teacher has to go in manually and give them the additional points.

Paul Tidmore

It would be nice to get feedback from schools about the assessment experience. Last year Blackbaud added the ability to differentiate assignments by allowing teachers to select what students would actually have to complete the assignment. That was a great feature for us and individualized instruction overall. The next step would be the ability to assign different due dates to students for assignments/assessments. I hope that is something Blackbaud will take into consideration--would be really helpful for our summer program as well as many classes.

Sarah Bienvenue

Hi Paul, we always strive to get feedback as part of our discovery process before embarking on major changes to the system, our work on assessments included! We're done with our initial round, but will likely have an Early Adopter Program for users to give us feedback before we go live for everyone. Are you interested in participating?

As for assignments, different due dates is a new one for us and one we didn't hear in discovery. You could accomplish something similar by have copies of the assignments (with different due dates) given to different groups. I would encourage you to add this as an idea in the forum so we can see if others are looking for the same thing.

Thank you,

Sarah Bienvenue

Paul Tidmore

>>different due dates is a new one for us and one we didn't hear in discovery.

I told Ben Leddy about our need for that some time ago--at least as early as last summer when he told me about differentiated assignments. Your idea of copies of assignments is one we have considered. For our summer program, we work with students with jobs, differing schedules, etc--that could be several copies of assignments to accommodate all groups/students.

Appreciate your response.