A "How To" - Grading Discussion Forums

Not sure if you are all on the ANGEL listserv, but this was something that showed up yesterday:

Grading discussions is a two-step process. By rating a discussion, that is a quality rating of that post only. Probably you have some sort of rubric for grading quality (ex. on a 0-4 point scale). This rating provides students feedback based on that rubric. Those per-post ratings do not go into the gradebook.

In order to send grades to the gradebook on a forum, you would go to UTILITIES -- GRADE FORUM. There you will see the student’s name (if you click on their name it will bring up all posts that student has supplied to the forum, though the context in which they may have written it is lost). You will then see the number of posts each student has posted to the forum (in case your forum grade includes a quantity measure). This is followed by number of points earned and points possible (based on your rating, i.e. quality measure). Then you will find a grade column and a comments column. These are what go into the gradebook. You have to use the quantity and quality columns to assign a grade based on the number of points you have assigned to the discussion forum.