Article written by ASC Office of Distance Education Instructional Designer, Henry Griffy.
The Office of Distance Education has assembled this resource to share little-known or under-utilized Carmen functions that can save you a lot of time, energy, and frustration as you use the platform to build your course.
By default, Carmen releases your grading and comments to students as soon as you click save/submit.
While immediacy is a strength of using the Learning Management System, this can be a problem:
- Sometimes, you need to grade a few submissions to fine-tune your grading, especially when debuting a new assignment.
- Sometimes, you realize after several students answer a question differently than you anticipated that your prompt was ambiguous, or perhaps even mistaken.
- Sometimes, it takes a few initial responses before you develop effective comments, especially when you are using Carmen's save-comments feature.
- Sometimes, an assignment requires particularly delicate responses or nuanced grading, and you want to let some time pass and review your feedback before sending it to students.
Whatever the specific situation, sometimes you want to hit pause and grade the whole set of responses before releasing your grades and comments to students. If nothing else, pausing before releasing grades and comments can reduce the number of student e-mails you will need to respond to.
In those situations, you can use Carmen's Grade Posting Policies to control when your grades and feedback are released to students.
For details about how to use this feature, see this page in the Teaching and Learning Resource Center and/or this page in the Canvas Instructor Guide.
NOTE: Some situations in a Carmen Course may complicate the use of Grade Posting Policies. Namely, if you have multiple sections in your course, if there are TAs or graders involved in your course, or if you make extensive use of Groups, please contact one of the instructional designers on the ASC ODE team (or a member of OTDI's Carmen Support Team) to identify and address potential complications.
It is also important to ensure that all grades have been posted before submitting grades to the Registrar. Launching the grade transfer process when grades are still hidden can result in incorrect grade reporting.