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There is a report in the ANGEL gradebook called the “Publish Grades” report
that colleges and instructors can use to track changes in students’ grades over time
and that can be particularly useful for retention purposes.
The sooner that students who are beginning to struggle can be contacted
and offered additional support, the higher the likelihood
that they can be successful.
This tutorial will show you how easy it is to use that report,
and also how to create your own copy of it, if you wish,
and the reason that is necessary is that this report
is not at all like an export from your gradebook.
The Publish Grades report is not a public, downloadable file.
It is in fact stored in the central ANGEL database on a server in a secure location offsite.
The report is only accessible by your college’s ANGEL Coordinator and others at your college
specifically authorized to access it, such as the “retention specialists”,
which is a general term I’ll use in this tutorial for
anyone at your college specifically working with retention initiatives.
Because each college tailors those retention initiatives for its unique population of students,
exactly when and how often to use the Publish Grades report
is decided independently by that college,
and sometimes by individual departments or programs within that college.
It’s very important that instructors stick to whatever deadlines they are given,
because that provides the most useful information for the retention specialists.
They need to be able to compare a student’s grades
across all his or her courses at the same moment in time in order to
have the most complete picture of the student’s progress and any potential needs.
Before I show you how to create the report, let me show you an example of it.
Again, this is not something that you as an instructor have access to,
but at least you can see what an example looks like.
These are just sample students for training purposes,
and if we take a look at this first one here, Training Student 1,
you can see in these first three lines
that at Checkpoint 1, this student had an A, 91%.
At Checkpoint 2, it had slipped to a C, but by Checkpoint 3
the student had managed to bring it up to a B.
I’ll explain these "checkpoints" in just a moment.
There’s also a place for instructors to add comments to this report
that the retention specialists can see.
One quick note before we go to the report-
the accuracy of the report depends on the accuracy of the gradebook.
It is extremely important that you have set that up correctly and are entering grades accurately,
and just remember, if you make sure that the gradebook is set up
correctly in your Master course, then it will copy into all future courses
and you won’t have to keep re-creating it each term.
What you see on the screen is just a sample course with a few training students enrolled.
We’re going to go to the gradebook, which is on the Manage tab, and over here on the left.
The “Publish Course Grades” link is down here on the left, but before we go there,
I’m going to set up a grading scale in this course, so that ANGEL will put the correct letter grade
in the report for each student and I don’t have to do it by hand.
If I choose not to add a grading scale now, then I will have to enter
either letters or a numerical score by hand before I can publish it.
To add a grading scale, select number 4, Grading Scale, here on the right.
Note that some colleges and departments have standard grading scales for their courses,
others allow instructors to create their own.
If you’re not sure which of those options applies to you,
check with your department head or your college’s ANGEL Coordinator.
Also, don’t forget that whatever you enter here has to match what’s in your syllabus.
Under “Label” I will enter the letter grade, and this field is asking for the minimum percentage,
or in other words, the low end of the range for this particular letter grade.
Let’s say that in this particular course, 90-100 is an A.
Here’s an important note, though: ANGEL does not automatically round up decimals,
so if you do in your course, you will actually need to enter 89.5 here.
If I leave this as 90, then a student with 89.9
will still receive a B, because ANGEL doesn’t round up.
So I’m going to move this back to 89.5,
and I need to click Add New here on the right to save it and get a new line.
So I’ll finish this grading scale: 79.5, click Add New.
[typing sounds]
For F, the minimum percent is actually zero, and even though it's the last one
on my scale, I still need to click Add New in order to save it.
Now I can click Back To Main Menu.
The Publish Course Grades report is down here on the left.
This drop-down menu lists the types of reports you can publish,
and there is one Practice report and eight Checkpoint reports.
The term “checkpoint” just refers to a particular day or date
on which all instructors are asked to publish their grades.
As I mentioned earlier, those days and dates are decided by individual
colleges and sometimes programs or departments within that college.
That’s why the checkpoints have been given numbers instead of names or dates.
For example, College A may ask instructors to publish grades every two weeks in a term,
so Checkpoint 1 is the end of the second week, Checkpoint 2
is the end of the fourth week, Checkpoint 3 is the end of the sixth week, etc.
That would be a total of eight checkpoints in a 16- week term.
At College B, however, they decide to publish grades every four weeks,
so they only use Checkpoints 1 through 4,
and therefore, the instructors at that college can simply ignore Checkpoints 5-8.
Let’s do a practice run first to try this out, and that’s exactly what the Practice Report is for,
and you can come back here and use it over and over again any time that you want a refresher.
Select Practice and click Go.
This is what the Publish Grades report looks like,
and now you have the opportunity to make a few changes
before officially publishing it to the main ANGEL server,
which is done by simply scrolling down to the bottom
and clicking this button that says “Publish All Displayed Grades”.
It’s actually that simple, but before we get to that,
I’m going to explain the different parts of this report
so that you know exactly what is being sent
to that main ANGEL server.
This Only Students checkbox will remove the names
of instructors, course assistants, etc.
from the list below, and you definitely want to do that.
Here you can select how many students to display at a time.
The Show drop-down lets you sort students by teams, if you use those.
In this sample course I have put withdrawn and dropped students
on a team, instead of deleting them from my roster,
and I don’t need to publish those grades,
so I’m going to select my Current Students here
and then click Update on the right.
Under Gradebook view, Full shows the Comments column,
and Condensed shows only the grades. I want to select Full.
I’m going to briefly explain this red text here, but it will make more sense
as you become more familiar with publishing these reports.
The first part says that if you have published this grade type for a student
that will be the value in the Grade to Publish field, which is this column here.
That is only correct if you are looking at a previously published report.
The second part of the sentence says, “otherwise the field will be initialized
according to your grading scale" (if you have set one up),
and that’s what we just talked about.
These letter grades come from the grading scale that we just set up;
if you don’t have one, you will need to enter letter grades
by hand, or a numerical value.
If you’re not sure which of those you should be using, touch base with your department head.
Let’s look at these columns: obviously, here are the students’ names and ID numbers.
The Current Course Average column is exactly that.
It will show whatever grade is in the gradebook at that moment in time.
You can think of it as a "live" link to the gradebook, if that helps.
That means that even if you go back and look at an old published report,
this column will always be up-to-date and will show the current grades.
This column, Previously Published Grade, is unfortunately a little bit misleading
because it doesn’t always show that.
In particular, every time you publish a new checkpoint,
it will say “none”, even if you have previously published grades.
As soon as you click the Publish button, this column becomes identical to this
third one, Grade to Publish, and this is the column with the grades
that will go to the Publish Grades report on the main ANGEL server.
In fact, it’s only these two columns that go to the report.
There must be something in these boxes,
either a letter grade based on the grading scale
or a letter grade or numerical value that you have entered by hand.
If any of these boxes are blank, you will get an error message when you try to
publish the report so you’ll have to come back here and fix that.
The comment boxes can be blank, but these boxes cannot.
You can edit these grades if necessary, and you could even change this to a W
for a student who has withdrawn and then add a date here.
You can obviously enter other comments here as well, but be as concise as you can
because there is a limit to the number of characters you can put in each box, 250.
Also, keep in mind that although this report
is not a public one and is normally only seen by you
and your college’s retention specialists, and possibly your ANGEL Coordinator,
that doesn’t guarantee that no one else will ever see this report-
all Technical College System of Georgia records are subject to the Open Records Act.
There are several colleges that ask instructors to enter
attendance and tardy information in the comment boxes.
If you’re not sure whether you should be doing that,
check with your department head or ANGEL Coordinator.
[typing sounds]
There’s a useful tool down here at the bottom, the Batch Update tool.
If you need to make the same change for multiple students,
you can clear those boxes like this.
You can enter new information in here, with a comment if you like,
and then click “Apply Batch grade and comments”,
and it will fill in any empty boxes with that information.
Let me correct that again.
Once you’re sure all the grades and comments are correct,
you simply click Publish All Displayed Grades right here, like that.
It automatically takes you back to the top, so scroll down again
and look for this phrase, “Grades Were Published.”
That’s your confirmation that the report
has been sent to the main ANGEL server.
That’s it, you’re done.
The information in these two columns is now in that report,
and each time you publish a new checkpoint in this course,
the new information will be added to that report.
Now, explaining all of this has taken a few minutes,
and may have made it look like it’s a complicated process,
but remember that in most cases you won’t be making a lot of changes
to the grades or the Comment column, and in most cases, therefore,
this will probably only take a couple of minutes per class.
Let me show you by publishing two checkpoints in this sample course
so that you can see the process from start to finish.
I’ll go back to the main gradebook page
and select Publish Course Grades down here on the left.
Let’s pretend that today is the end of the second week of the term,
and that at my particular college that has been designated as Checkpoint 1,
so I will select that from the drop-down and click Go.
I’ll make sure that Only Students is checked.
I will select the Current Students team and click Update,
and I’ll make sure that Full is selected because I want to see the Comments column.
Remember that this column shows the current grade in the gradebook as of right now,
and because this is our first report (the Practice one doesn’t count),
these grades should match this column, Grade to Publish,
because that’s exactly what we want to do: we want to publish
the current course average to the report on the ANGEL server.
As I explained earlier, this column will always say “none” for every new checkpoint.
If I have any changes to make I can do that now.
For example, let’s say that this student has been absent once
so I will type that in the Comment box, and this student has two tardies.
I'll double check that everything else is correct,
and then simply scroll down and click Publish All Displayed Grades.
As before, it automatically takes me back to the top, so I’ll scroll down again
and “Grades Were Published” is my confirmation that it’s done.
That’s it. It’s the same for every checkpoint-
select the checkpoint, select the right options at the top,
make any changes, if necessary, and then click Publish All Displayed Grades.
Click Done over here on the left to return to the main Gradebook page.
Now let’s go back to Publish Course Grades and publish Checkpoint 2.
I will select Checkpoint 2, and click Go.
Make sure Only Students is checked.
Filter the correct team, and click Update.
As before, this column shows the current grades,
and you may or may not have noticed but
they’ve actually gone down since Checkpoint 1.
This column says “none” because this is a new checkpoint.
Also like before, this column matches the current course average
because these are the grades that we want to add to
the Publish Grades report on the main server.
In the Comments column, I will add a little bit more attendance information.
Note that comments that I entered for Checkpoint 1 don’t show here anymore,
but they are saved on the report on the ANGEL server.
Anything I type in here now will be added to what I wrote in Checkpoint 1.
[typing sounds]
When that’s done, I will scroll down and click Publish.
Scroll down again,
and verify it with the phrase Grades Were Published, and I’m done.
I'll click Done on the left to take me back to the main gradebook page.
Hopefully now you can see how easy this tool is to use.
In the vast majority of cases it really should only take a few minutes per course, per checkpoint.
Now let’s look at how these reports can help you track changes in students’ grades over time.
Remember, the ANGEL gradebook only shows you the current grade,
so unless you have a separate record of past grades,
it’s not always that easy to know when a student’s grade has changed significantly.
That’s what these reports can do for you.
It’s actually a very simple process, and it all depends on the fact that this first column
always shows the current grade, no matter what report you’re viewing.
In new reports, this column shows the grade to be published.
In past reports, it shows the grade that was published.
When you’re looking at past reports you can compare
the current grade in this column with whatever the grade was back then,
and ANGEL will highlight any changes.
Let’s go back to Checkpoint 1.
Do you see these boxes highlighted in yellow?
Those are the grades that have changed since the date that this report was published,
which for the sake of this tutorial we're pretending was two weeks ago.
Back then, these were the students’ grades: A, A, A.
Now, these are their grades:
this student had an A, but the current grade is a B.
This student also had an A, and the current grade is a B, and so on.
In this particular case the students' grades have all gone down,
but ANGEL will highlight any change since the published report,
and that makes it easier for you to see which grades have changed,
even on a really long roster of students.
Obviously, you can’t just rely on this report to tell you
how your students are doing and when their grades are changing,
but it’s another tool to make it easier for you
to identify students to follow up with, to offer support
or to offer praise for improvements, which is just as important.
One quick caution here: since this is a previously published report,
be careful that you don’t absentmindedly scroll down to the bottom
and click Publish All Displayed Grades again.
You don’t want to inadvertently make any changes
to the data was already sent to the report.
The last thing I’m going to show you in this tutorial is how to create your own copy of this report,
because as I said in the beginning it’s not downloadable
or otherwise accessible to instructors
because it’s stored on the central ANGEL server.
We do recommend that you do this, and it is pretty easy,
but if you prefer not to, or you are not required to by your college,
you can stop the tutorial now. You can come back here any time for a refresher,
and then you can use the Table of Contents to skip directly to the section that you need.
I’m going to use an Excel spreadsheet to create my own version of this report,
but you can use a table in Word or any other program
that you prefer; whatever works for you.
First, I’ll go back to the report from which I want the data, which in this case is Checkpoint 1.
I’ll filter by teams again, and then I will copy the information in this report
by clicking and dragging my mouse from the top left corner
out past the bottom right corner, and letting go.
Now it doesn’t look like these two right-hand columns of the report
were selected because they’re not highlighted in blue, but as long as you drag your mouse
out past the bottom corner before letting go, they are in fact selected.
I will right-click anywhere on the highlighted text and select Copy,
or I could use the CTRL and C keys on my keyboard,
and then I will go to my Excel spreadsheet, click on a cell, and right-click to paste the data.
Depending on what version of Excel you have,
you may get several pasting options here, like this.
My first option is Keep Source Formatting, but if I use that,
then the comment boxes appear like this, and I don’t particularly want that,
so I will undo that, right-click again, and this time I will select
Match Destination Formatting, which looks like this.
Once again, whichever option you choose is entirely up to you.
This report is for your purposes.
I’m going to widen these columns,
and at this point I could fiddle a little with the formatting, if I wanted to.
I could make these bold, for example, or perhaps
put a line underneath the column headings.
I could move all of this text to one line, or change the color of the font, etc.
I’m not going to take the time to do that, but I do need
to clean up a few things for the sake of clarification.
This is a past report, and I therefore don’t need
the current course average (so I’m going to delete that column),
or this column, I can delete that. I only want these two.
I also need to add dates to these columns,
since I’m going to be adding more checkpoints as we go.
I think I will actually insert a line at the top and add the dates.
Let’s pretend that the date of Checkpoint 1 was January 6th.
I’m now going to save this spreadsheet.
For simplicity sake, I’m just going to put this on my desktop,
and I will add my last name and part of the title from the course.
I would recommend that you add your CRN and the term.
Again, whatever makes most sense to you.
To add the data from the next checkpoint, I go back to ANGEL,
go to Checkpoint 2, make sure the right team is selected,
and once again, click and drag to copy the data.
Right-click and Copy, back to Excel.
I’m going to temporarily paste this down here below the other data,
because once again, I don’t need all of it, so I’m going to
do a little bit of cutting and pasting to get exactly what I want.
I want these grades, so I will carefully select all of that,
right-click and Copy, scroll up and line it up here.
This time I can just select a regular Paste command.
I’ll go back down here and select the comments,
Copy, line it up, and Paste.
I may have to clean up the formatting again, and so on,
and then I will add the date again, which is two weeks later and therefore January 20th.
Once I’m sure I got everything I can come down here and simply delete this.
So now I have my own simplified version of the Publish Grade report,
and I can just keep adding each checkpoint, as it happens.
If you’re familiar with Excel, you can set up some rules
that will highlight changes in the grades just like the report in ANGEL does.
There are many very good Excel tutorials online to show you all of that.
You can check out the Microsoft.com training website, or even just YouTube.
We’re done.
Come back and review this tutorial any time you need a refresher,
and as always, if you have any additional questions about
anything that we’ve covered here, contact your department head
or your college’s ANGEL Coordinator.