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Brightspace Update for Staff: March 2020 - Mark Assignments More Quickly Than Before

Good news! Brightspace has a nifty little feature that enables you to see all of the assignments that need your feedback, and we're releasing it for you this month. In fact, if you login to Brightspace now, it's waiting for you. See below for the details.

Quick Eval - What is it?

QuickEval is a tool that enables you to see all of the ungraded items that your students have submitted across all of your modules. It provides a link to each submission so that you can quickly grade them.

Where do I find it?

On your Brightspace homepage - the first page you see when you login to Brightspace - or within a module. You’ll find it on the right-hand side of the navbar. If you load it up within a module, it will show you only submissions for that module, but it does allow you to switch to your QuickEval for all modules.

How do I use it?
 

When you open up QuickEval, you’ll see the ‘Submissions’ tab.

If you look to the top right, you can filter by activity name, module or date. You can also search for the student’s name if you’re looking for a particular submission.

Clicking the name of the column will order the submissions by that criterion. In this screenshot, we’ve ordered it based on the name of the module.

To grade any of the submissions, simply click on the student’s name.

On the ‘Activities’ tab, you have a summary of all of the assignments that you can currently grade for.

Clicking on the number of new submissions will take you to those submissions.

Hovering over the number of completed, evaluated and published submissions will bring up further options.

Selecting ‘Evaluate all’ will take you to the first submission for that assignment, which you can grade before moving onto the next.

Selecting submissions list will take you to all of the submissions for that assignment, showing both the ones you’ve evaluated and the ones that you haven’t.

Selecting ‘More Actions’ will allow you to do two things. Firstly, If you have draft feedback waiting to go, you can publish it all. Secondly, if you don’t want this activity to display in QuickEval – perhaps you’re on the module but not responsible for grading the submissions – you can dismiss it indefinitely or just until a particular date.

If you’ve got plenty of submissions to grade across several modules, QuickEval should make it easier for you to get through the marking. 

Once you’ve loaded up an assignment to grade, you might want to use Brightspace’s annotations tool instead of Turnitin’s. We have a video tutorial for this here: https://libguides.uos.ac.uk/celt/brightspace/t-annotations

As usual, Brightspace support is available on Libguides. If you’re yet to attempt our Brightspace Introduction CPD, have a look at it within Brightspace. Our face-to-face CPD will change theme every month, with half an hour on a particular feature and a half-hour dropin afterwards. March's focus is on the student engagement data that you can access within Brightspace. If you can’t make the drop-in, send us any questions at learningservices@uos.ac.uk.