Remote Assessment with Crowdmark Q & A
Questions and answers from the CTE EdTech
Remote Assessment with Crowdmark
session on Monday March 1, 2021.
- With the LEARN integration, are there extra steps to ensure that group work is correctly imported into the gradebook?
- Can we use our Learn Sandbox to play with this?
- Yes. Crowdmark can import your LEARN sandbox course.
You can also create a non-LEARN Crowdmark course to play with.
- What does crowdmark do with the 'This course has sections' checkbox?
- Crowdmark sections are numbers (1, 2, 3, ...) assigned to each student
that partition the students in your Crowdmark course into section1,
section2, etc. When a new assessment is created, you can make it
available for just a section of students, not every student.
For example, you might want different lab sections to have
the same lab assignment, but different due dates. This is achieved
by duplicating the assessment and setting it up for each crowdmark
student section.
See https://crowdmark.com/help/managing-sections-or-multiple-versions-of-an-assigned-assessment/
- So in the LEARN Quiz tool, I can enable a written response ('text') and the option to attach a PDF file/image. Does Crowdmark have that versatility? Or is it just one or the other?
- A LEARN quiz question can allow a student to answer with text
and file attachement answers in the same question. Crowdmark can too
in their 'Text' question type. See section 'Answering text questions":
https://crowdmark.com/help/completing-and-submitting-an-assessment/
In Crowdmark, an attached student image file appears as an image, and
non-image files appear as links in the student's answer. The grading
tool only annotates answers with highlights and comments for the 'Text'
question.
A student's attached files cannot be annotated in the grade tool for
this question type in Crowdmark or in a LEARN quiz.
A LEARN dropbox student file submission can be annotated in the grade
tool.
In a LEARN dropbox or in a quiz text question, an instructor can include
a file (attached or linked) to the feedback reply.
Similarly, feedback files can be dragged into a Crowdmark grade
tool comment box as a link.
- Can you bulk create a larger number of questions (e.g. 50) or does each question need to be manually created?
- Each question has to be manually created, even if that means just
typing a single character into the 'Question content' input box
and attaching a document of questions to the assessment.
Crowdmark has to know how many questions and the point value of each one.
Learn has a way to import a .csv file of questions into the Quiz
question library. And, a Word document formatted in a specific
way can be translated into a .csv question file using tools
shown on this Brightspace help page:
https://brightspacecommunity.force.com/s/article/Quiz-Question-Converter
But, there is no such import feature in Crowdmark.
Once you have made one 'generic' Crowdmark assessment - one with
with many questions and question point values but no question text,
you can clone it for re-use.
- This may be a better question for the open Q&A at the end, but I've heard that it is challenging to 'randomize' questions in Crowdmark. Can you describe how this can be done and what the limitations are? (i.e., Is there something similar to the Question Pool tool in LEARN?)
- Crowdmark has no concept of a 'random' selection or order of questions.
The other UWaterloo quiz platforms LEARN and Mobius both do.
This is why Crowdmark is a grading platform more than a quiz platform.
Several different assessment variations can be made manually in
Crowdmark and used with the 'section' feature so that everyone
gets one of a small number of different assessments.
LEARN and Mobius have been used to deliver questions to students
(using all the random features they offer - order, selection, algorithmic
variations) who view their questions on these platforms but submit their
answers to Crowdmark. Instructors who do this know they will be manually
grading from a larger set of questions and will have to look up the
student's quiz in LEARN or Mobius to know which questions they are grading.
- Is there a notification in LEARN that a Crowdmark quiz has been released?
- Is it possible for us to manually upload all end-of-term assignments from students and just use Crowdmark to facilitate online marking? (So the students don't need to upload their assignments to Crowdmark, they just submit them in the existing system.)
- If you don't have to grade 'a-question-at-a-time' but can grade
a whole 'assessment-at-a-time' then the LEARN dropbox is better suited.
It offers document annotation, rubric, and feedback comments and
attachments.
Crowdmark allows an instructor to manually submit an assessment for one
student at a time. If you want to upload student work in bulk, Crowdmark
offers the 'Administered" paper-based assessment type. You can read
about it here: https://crowdmark.com/help/choosing-an-assessment-type/
You would have to make the assessment outside of Crowdmark,
hand it to Crowdmark to stamp some unique student info onto each booklet
(see the help page above about the QR codes added to the booklets),
download the assessment pdf booklets from Crowdmark, find a way
to send a different booklet to each student, have the students print
and complete the questions by hand on the printed booklet and
give the pages back to you for scanning, and upload to Crowdmark for
grading. This assessment type is meant for assessments taking
place in a classroom.
- Can students submit more than once before the deadline? Or do they only get one chance?
- Are there only links between crowdmark and LEARN via the sync lists and output grades? (ie. only these functions?)
- The Only Crowdmark-Learn linkages are: sync student roster,
sync staff roster, import LEARN
course from LEARN list, sync grades to LEARN gradebook, login from LEARN.
- Can "graders" create tags as well?
- Yes. Instructors, graders and facilitators can grade the same way.
See: https://crowdmark.com/help/what-is-the-difference-between-roles/
-
- Are "tags" not visible to students?
- Tags are private to the grading team, invisible to students.
Comments are feedback to students from the grading team.
- Is there a way to create a timed 'assignment' (e.g., once started you have two hours)? Or only a calendar deadline (e.g., due March. 10 at 11:59 pm EST)? Also, as a follow-up, if there is a timed assignment option, how would AAS accommodations be applied to specific students?
- When the option to add checks to the page is showing does Crowdmark add up the checks?
- Points are attached to comments rather than to the stamp characters
checkmark, question mark and X.
When there are both positive and negative comment points,
the overall point total is not set by the simple sum of comment points.
See this help page describing the summation of comment points:
https://crowdmark.com/help/adding-comments/
- Can students upload an essay or other type of assignment that they complete in word or powerpoint etc.? Is this just done by the the image/PDF upload? If so, in order to have separate answers it would then be necessary to add individual questions and students would need to upload multiple files, yes?
- Students can compose their answers in any software they like, even paper.
They then have to turn their document into either a PDF file or
a sequence of images. MS programs can export to PDF format.
Students can use a phone app to snap images of paper pages.
When a multi-page PDF file is submitted to a Crowdmark question,
all the pages in the PDF are shown in minature. Students can delete
and reorder any of the pages.
- Can students resubmit a specific question?
- Students can re-submit to any questions they wish to answer
as often as they like before the due date/time.
- How do you know what question the student is answering?
- Students upload their answers to specific questions on their
submission page. Graders click to be taken to the next ungraded
instance of the question they are grading. Graders can also
look at a student's whole submission and click the question label
to grade that question.
- I've heard you can create like three different full assignments/tests and assign a subset of students to each assignment, but that its really clunky and I don't know how that would work when importing grades into LEARN.
- See the answer to question 3 above.
And, this help page about creating Crowdmark sections:
https://crowdmark.com/help/managing-students-in-a-course/
Each Crowdmark assessment is exported into its own LEARN gradebook item.
You can create a LEARN gradebook category to hold all the gradebook
items that represent the different sections of the same Crowdmark
assessment e.g. Lab1-section1, Lab1-section2, etc.
The LEARN gradebook category 'Distribution' setting can be set
to drop all of the lowest grade items but 1 of the Lab1-sectionX grades.
In effect, this keeps a student's only real grade and drops their 0 grades
from the category.
Paul Kates
Mathematics Faculty CTE Liaison
pkates@uwaterloo.ca, x47047, MC 3044
Last modification date: Tue Mar 2 00:09:20 2021.