DL Tip of the Week - Inline Grading

This week’s tip is about Inline Grading.

With the future of online learning becoming increasingly paperless, it will be important for faculty to explore different ways to leverage technology to support a more paperless teaching and learning environment. In fact, a few of us have already been taking advantage of technologies found in Blackboard to accept and grade assignments and other work electronically.

In an effort to provide faculty a more efficient means of grading and communication in their online courses, Blackboard recently released a new Inline Grading feature. Inline Grading actually serves as an enhancement to the current Assignment feature already in Blackboard. For many faculty who are already used to accepting and grading work electronically, the typical grading workflow in Blackboard was to create assignment submission links to which students submit their work. Faculty would then later download the submitted work and provide comments and feedback in a variety of ways (the most common way is using the Track Changes and commenting features in Microsoft Word). Faculty would then save and upload the corrected work back to Blackboard, assign a grade, and repeat the same process for other students.

Now, instead of requiring faculty to download student-submitted files to view or edit those submissions, they will be able to take advantage of the new Inline Grading feature to view student-submitted files “inline” directly in the web browser without requiring any special plugins. Faculty can view, comment, and grade these assignments without ever leaving the grading page. This new Inline Grading feature also features annotation tools which allows faculty to provide feedback including comments, highlights, and even drawings/annotations directly on the document without needing to download and open the document in a separate program. Currently, this new feature supports the inline viewing of the following document types: Word (DOC, DOCX), PowerPoint (PPT, PPTX), Excel (XLS, XLSX), and PDF.  If students upload files in unsupported formats, faculty will be prompted to download and view the file. Students will not be able to add/edit faculty annotations on their work, but they will see their work in an inline viewer after submitting them.

Currently, there is a known issue where bulleted lists and some other general document formatting may be lost when using Inline Grading.  If a student’s work relies heavily on these general formatting tools, you may consider using your usual means of file submission and grading.  Your HCTC DL Department has submitted a help desk ticket concerning this “bug” that has been escalated to the next tier of support.  We will provide you with further updates as more information becomes available to us. 

If you’re interested in learning more about Inline Grading, take a moment and view the YouTube videos below when you have a chance.  The first video provides a general overview of Inline Grading; the second provides a more detailed look at the features available to you.  We’ve also included a PDF file that contains some very useful information.

Video 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3X9Rerz0VX0

Video 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T69nU7FykUs

Inline Grading Tips

If for any reason the links appear broken, or if you have an idea for a DL Tip of the Week, please email us at HCTC-DL@kctcs.edu.

Remember if you need assistance; please let a member of the DL Team know.

• Brad Roberts, DL Specialist (Faculty/Student Support) – Lees
• Paul Currie, DL Specialist (Faculty Support) – Hazard, Knott, Leslie, Tech
• Wendy Davidson, LoD Program Coordinator (LoD support and Student Support) 

Submitted by Brad Roberts