Background
NROC courses were not designed to interact with or provide data to your LMS gradebook. With so many different gradebook formats in different LMSes, plus different configurations and customizations needed by individual teachers and schools, it is not possible for us to come up with one model that works for everyone.
Instead, we developed the NROC Course Manager, which houses all the data we collect when students are progressing through NROC English or NROC Math (pre-assessment version). You can download this data as an Excel file and import it into your gradebook if you wish, or manually copy grades on individual items into your gradebook on a per-student basis.
The Course Manager was designed to conveniently display all of the data for each class directly to the instructors, who can log in through the "Course Management and Reporting" link (located in the "Instructor Resources" section of each class). The Course Manager is visual and interactive, so you can drill down and see extensive data, beyond just scores (e.g., time in various sections of the course, how students are doing on individual learning objectives, other progress markers).
LTI Settings
Some LMSes (notably Moodle) have the ability to receive scores from the LTI "tool" or "app" that connects the LMS to our NROC Course Manager. The purpose of the tool is to record student sessions and data in the NROC Course Manager. It is not designed to transmit scores back to the gradebook. So any scores that you see in your LMS coming from the tool are not reliable. We did not intend for this to be a feature and we do not test it. We do not know how your LMS handles those incoming scores, where it puts them, or what model it uses to parse that data into a score or grade. Whenever possible, this option should be turned off by your LMS administrator. (This is what we advise in our installation guide when the course is first installed.)
Importing Data
The NROC Course Manager allows you to download student data in Excel format (see the Reports tab when you are logged in). You can import this data into your LMS gradebook using the options your LMS provides. For assistance, please contact your LMS administrator or support community.
Assessments and Your Gradebook
NROC courses contain assessments that take advantage of your LMS' naive quiz engine. These should populate your LMS gradebook as you would expect, based on your default settings. This is the ONLY part of an NROC course that interacts with your gradebook intentionally.
You will find these assessments in your course. In each unit, they are listed as Assessment Form A, B, C, etc. In English, there is also a placement test at the beginning. Math includes a midterm and final. All assessments and scoring are at the instructor's discretion and can be modified using LMS features.
NROC does not force or recommend any particular scoring model, other than the required points-per-question setting of 1 or 100 (see the next section on Assessment Scoring). We recommend creating a template course with the assessment settings you prefer, testing it thoroughly, then copying that course for as many class sections as needed.
Assessment Scoring
NROC courses offer two scoring models:
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- 1 point per question
- 100 points per question
The 1 point basis is most commonly used for Moodle, Canvas, Sakai, and Brightspace. The 100 point basis is most commonly used for Blackboard. Your LMS administrator can set up either version or test both of them to determine which works best with your LMS.
The IMSCC installation file we provide to your school includes a point basis, as that is a requirement of the common cartridge standard (i.e., the import of our class into your LMS will not work without a points-per-question basis). Beyond that, NROC does not provide ANY additional information to your LMS about how to score the assessment questions. NROC also does not override your LMS defaults with any other settings. For more details, you can read about NROC Course default settings.
If you experience any trouble or have any questions about how your assessments are being scored, please reach out to your LMS administrator or your LMS support community. NROC staff does not have the expertise or access required to support LMS scoring issues.
Moodle Assessment Scoring
Moodle has a scoring issue that affects some members. As noted above, our default scoring model is 1 point per question. There are 20 questions on most assessments, so one would logically expect 20 points per quiz. However, in some cases, Moodle translates this to 4 points per quiz. One of our members shared their solution to resolve the Moodle scoring issue. We hope it helps you, as well.
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