So Much to Grade, So Little Time – Fall 2021 Resilience Newsletter 6
The goal of the Smeal Academy is to equip everyone with best practices and strategies for teaching, learning, and technology to ensure the Smeal community is prepared to respond to the unique challenges of teaching and learning during the Fall 2021 semester. Between now and the end of the Fall 2021 semester, we will be sending periodic emails with practical tips and information, providing live sessions, and holding virtual consultations.
A nod to Art Jones for this image:
The eLDIG team knows you are busy right now and possibly just a little stressed, so we will keep things short, providing a couple of key resources and reminders intended to make your life easier.
Preparing Final Grades in Canvas
These helpful resources will help you wrap up the Fall 2021 semester courses and ship the grades away to LionPATH:
- Create a Penn State compatible grading scheme: Refer to this step-by-step video about how to create your grading scheme.
- Prepare final grades for LionPATH: Refer to this step-by-step video about how to finalize your Canvas gradebook.
- Use LionPATH to Pull Final Grade from Canvas
- Manually enter your grades into LionPATH
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the eLDIG team.
Current News
Canvas Archiving – Opt Out Before January 25, 2022
On January 25, 2022, Penn State IT will perform its regular archiving of older Canvas courses. Beginning December 7, 2021, you may choose to delay particular courses from being archived by using the in-Canvas Course Archive Manager tool. Please be sure to opt-out of any courses you do not want archived before January 25th.
Archiving on January 25 will include:
- All LionPATH courses taught prior to, and including, Fall 2020 (LionPATH term 2208) will be archived.
- All LionPATH courses that you may have previously opted out of archiving will be archived.
- All non-LionPATH courses, regardless of creation date, including Master, Manually Created, Sandbox courses, and Prides will be archived.
Full details on the long-term archival storage and instructions on how to opt a course out of archiving are available on the Penn State Canvas website.
Upcoming Live Sessions
- ITLD Winterfest Training: During December and January, Penn State IT Learning and Development is offering Winterfest training sessions via Zoom on a variety of topics. Winterfest is a collection of courses traditionally focused on faculty. The goal is to help participants learn something new that might help them or improve the experience for their students in the semester to come. Everything from the basics to advanced topics will be covered in Canvas, Kaltura, Office 365, Zoom, and more.
NOTE: Recordings and resources from previous sessions can be found on our eLDIG Website.
Tips of the Week
- Tip #1: Export Canvas Grades to Verify Final Grades
The final grade column is the grade that will import into LionPath. Be sure to export Canvas grades and check the Excel file to make sure that students’ “Current Grade” column is the same as their “Final Grade” column. If these numbers are not the same, then there is an issue somewhere in the Canvas Gradebook that will need to be resolved before importing grades into LionPath. - Tip #2: Consider Adding a Student Feedback Survey
If you want to know things beyond what is asked on the SRTE, you can create your own end-of-semester survey to gather feedback to improve future offerings of your course. Here is one example survey for your reference. NOTE: Smeal has an instance of Qualtrics. If anyone would like to have an account set up, please email the eLDIG team and we’ll get you set up.
Resources
Helpful Websites
- University Keep Teaching Website
- University Keep Learning Website
- University Announcements
- Smeal Announcements
Website
Check out the eLDIG Website for more resources and support.
Contact Us
Email us at: smealtlthelp@psu.edu or fill out our Remote Teaching Support form.