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Grading Student Participation in Echo360

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Echo360's engagement analytics feature is helpful if you are teaching a distance learning course, using a flipped classroom structure, or wanting to encourage students to review material outside of class. The Analytics tab in Echo360's active learning platform (ALP) can help you calculate customized participation grades, keeping track of whether students view presentations, participate in Q&A, take notes, and complete assessment activities. Engagement grades can also be synchronized with the Moodle grade book or exported as a spreadsheet (.CSV). This page explains how to configure grading for student engagement.

To learn more, contact the Instructional Media Lab (413-545-2823 | instruct@umass.edu).

Course and Student Analytics

Course navigation menu: Classes, Q&A, Polling, Analytics, Settings, and Search

You can view and track engagement analytics for all classes (meetings or sessions) in your course. After logging into Echo360, navigate to the Courses tab and select the course you want to work in. In the course, click the Analytics tab. Depending on the structure of your course, some, but not all of these will be relevant to your grading. You can select which criteria you want to be weighted as part of the calculated engagement score.

  • Attendance: Whether or not students access the class content during the date and time the class is scheduled. This metric only tracks whether students open the online classroom, however does not track how long students had the classroom page open or viewed any of the material.

  • Video Views: The number of times each student has viewed a video recording. This metric will count the number of times students have viewed at least 5% of the video recording. When graded, students receive credit for the percentage of the total recording that they've viewed (For example, if a student watches 8 minutes of a 10 minute video, they receive a score of 80%).

  • Presentation Views: The number of times students have viewed presentation slides. This metric will show whether students review all or only some presentation slides. When graded, students receive credit for the percentage of the total slideshow that they've viewed (For example, if a student views 4 out of 5 slides, they receive a score of 80%).

  • Q&A: Whether or not students participate in the discussion associated with that class session. When graded, students receive full credit for asking at least one question or replying to a question by a peer.

  • Notes: Whether or not students write notes while watching a recording or reviewing a presentation. When graded, students receive a percentage score for the word count of their notes until they reach a minimum of 100 words.

  • Activities: Activities are interactive elements built into a presentation that can be used for assessment. Responses are graded automatically and receive credit based on marking correct answers. Activity types include:

    • Multiple choice questions: students mark the correct answer out of a list of choices.

    • Short answer: students enter a text response receiving full credit (there is no option to manually grade questions).

    • Image quiz: students click on an image and identify an area of the image (such as a diagram or map) predetermined by the instructor.

    • Ordered list: students must take a list of terms and place them in the correct order.

    • Numerical: students enter a numerical response.

Scoring Engagement

Students receive a cumulative engagement score for their participation in the class, and this score can be configured to value the kinds of participation important to your course. By navigating to the Class list page, then the Analytics tab, then selecting Engagement, you can change the relative weights of engagement criteria using the sliding bars. When adjusting these metrics, Echo360 will balance weights to ensure criteria add up to 100%.

Engagement score menu, color sliding bars controlling percentage weights for grading criteria.

For additional information on Analytics and instructions on configuring the engagement score, see Echo360's help article, Course Analytics - Overview