What's New for Faculty

March 2025

Navigate between students when grading assignment through gradebook

After opening an assignment from within the gradebook, teachers can now navigate between students in the evaluation page using Previous student and Next student.

 

Assessment media files and question banks

Any media files attached to an assessment question are now included when adding the question to a question bank. Additionally, files attached to a banked question are now included when adding that banked question to an assessment.

 

Calculate standard grades from narrative view

In the narrative view of the new faculty report card grade entry experience, teachers can now calculate standard grades. Previously, Calculate was only available from the grid view.

 

February 2025

Class meeting times display when setting Assigned and Due dates on assignments

When setting the Assigned and Due dates for assignments, teachers can select the calendar icon and hover over a date the class meets to display the class meeting times. This assists teachers in selecting dates and times that coincide with class meetings.

 

Question Generator for online assessments

Platform Managers can now enable the question generator for teachers to utilize when building questions for their online assessments. Teachers enter a topic, number of questions to generate, question type, and details to determine question difficulty. The question generator then uses generative artificial intelligence (Generative AI) to create questions that teachers can add to their question banks and assessments.

Note: This AI does not index or crawl any existing question information and information entered in the generator is not used for training the AI.

Teachers have full control over which generated questions are added to their question banks and assessments and they can edit those questions as needed.

The question generator does not replace the question building process and is intended to be used as a starting point in building assessment questions. The tool may provide incorrect information and teachers need to review generated questions for accuracy and appropriateness.

Tips for generating questions:

  • Topics may be broad, but more specific topics tend to generate more usable questions.

  • Learning levels are based on Bloom's Taxonomy and increase in complexity and difficulty as you go down the list of available options. In theory:

    • Remembering, Understanding, and Applying are better suited to Multiple Choice, Fill in the Blank, and True/False questions.

    • Analyzing, Evaluating, and Creating tend to be a better fit for Essay questions.

  • The difficulty of the generated questions is determined by a combination of the Grade level, Learning level, and Question difficulty selected.

 

Bulk comment entry in new faculty report card grade entry experience

In the new faculty report card grade entry experience, faculty can now enter bulk comments for their students across multiple class sections.

  1. In Faculty:

    Select Classes, choose your class, then select New Grading.

    OR

    Select My Day, then Schedule & Performance and choose a Standard grade plan under Grading on the right side of the page.

  2. Ensure grid view is selected in the upper right.

  3. Under the appropriate Grade plan grade, select Add bulk comment.

  4. Select the students the comment applies to, expanding additional class sections and selecting additional students as needed.

  5. Enter the comment and select Save.

    Note: Note: When adding bulk comments, a comment icon displays next to a student's name if they have an existing comment for the grade plan. If you apply a bulk comment to a student with an existing comment, the bulk comment will overwrite the existing comment.

 

Preferences in Gradebook

Teachers can now access their assignment creation default settings from gradebooks. Previously, these settings were only available through the Assignment Center or class Assignments pages.

To access the assignment creation defaults from a gradebook, select More, then Preferences.

Assignment Creation default settings

From here, you can access the full Preferences menu, which includes assignment import settings and assignment list view defaults, by selecting Tab list.