Course Home Page
rGrade™ 2.0 features more courseware
functionalities to support interaction between students
and instructors. The Course Home Page is a way for
teachers to customize an rGrade experience for their
students. Announcements, resources, and other
information for the course now has a defined home in
rGrade while the assessments and assignments defined by
the program continue their seamless integration with
the overall rGrade experience.
More Artifact Options
Instructors now have more artifact options for
designating the student action for an assignment or
assessment.
More Student Engagement
More tools are now available in rGrade to engage
students in the process of assessment and their
progress through a program of study. A program's
decision point model is now fully presented to each
student, showing her or his own progress through a
faculty-designed assessment plan.
Course Syllabus
As courseware, rGrade can now be used to share a course
syllabus over time. Part of a Unit Assessment System is
to plan curriculum and align courses to standards.
rGrade uses these alignments and the course metadata in
general to answer questions about the curricula of an
institution. These syllabi are available to students
and can be appended for instructional decisions made
during the semester.
Program Builder Evolves
rGrade's powerful curriculum builder now gains more
power. Decision point assessments continue but are
preloaded in courses now and delineated within a yellow
area. Students see their progress in their view of
their academic programs. More analysis tools are
available.
Improved Navigation Bar
The NavBar in rGrade™ 2.0 has been moved to the
very top of the screen to use to select the different
modules of rGrade. It's full-width now, giving us room
to add some more general-purpose navigation tools and
status information.
Rubric Click Values and Thresholds
rGrade has always had the most powerful rubric-based
assessment device on the market. In rGrade™ 2.0,
this gets even more powerful while maintaining rGrade's
simplicity. We've added a new dimension to the metrics
of rubric-based assessment: Click values. Instructors
can now set click values separate of the column
thresholds. Click values work with the rubric's radio
buttons to provide quick input of rubric row scores.
Threshold values--those values that are used to
calculate the categorical (columnar) designation based
on the row score--are used by default for click values,
which is how rGrade 1.x worked.
ViewPalette screen control tool
rGrade 2.0 has a new tool called the ViewPalette which
enables the instructor or student to quickly navigate
forward and backward in time, enlarge the text for the
entire display, or shift between normal (800 pixels)
and wide screen modes.
Wide-Screen Mode
We designed rGrade 2.0 to be usable in 800 x 600
pixels--suitable for the smallest laptop computers.
But, with the click of one button in the new
ViewPalette, rGrade redisplays the page in wide-screen
mode, equal to 95% of the width of your screen (leaving
just enough whitespace to frame out rGrade 2.0's
beautiful new interface!
New Interface
rGrade 2.0 has been redesigned from the ground up with
a new interface. Familiar interface elements remain for
our existing users but the new design is much more
powerful for the instructor and student. rGrade 2.0
uses a single frame design with i-framed external
content. What this means is much more screen real
estate for your coursework and assessment. We have
modified many icons and background colors for a "clean
paper" look. Also, we have added a common icon lanugage
for rubrics, courses and assignments. The icons allow
users to quickly detect if the element is "in use", "in
development" and/or a "unit assessment".