On May 21, Buzz will be making several improvements to help students understand more accurately how they are performing in their courses and highlighting opportunities to complete activities that are past due. If you have any questions or need further clarification, please reach out to Agilix Support or create a new Help Center post.

Automatic zeros will be removed from activities if no longer past due

If a teacher has enabled the feature to Automatically assign zero scores to past-due activities (see How do I manage Course Settings? Advanced options), students receive a zero score for the activity once it is past due. In this update, if the activity’s due date either gets removed or extended to the future, Buzz will now automatically remove the zero that was previously automatically assigned.

“To-do List” to display activities with retries

The student’s To-do List (see How do I use the Home page? To-do List Screen) has traditionally displayed only activities with due dates (future or past) that have not been completed and have not received a score. In this update, the To-do List will be enhanced to display activities with due dates in several additional scenarios. These include:

• Activities that have been allowed a retry and the due date or grace period has not expired.
• Activities that have been automatically assigned a zero for being past due, but the student can still complete the activity because the grace period has not expired.

“To-do List” to display all gradable activities for continuous enrollment courses

For a continuous enrollment course (see How do I set up a continuous enrollment schedule course?), Buzz automatically creates target (or suggested) due dates for all activities to help a student stay on pace in their coursework. However, only specific activity types would ever get displayed in the student’s To-do List. In this update, all activities that are gradable will now get displayed in the student’s To-do List.

More predictable auto-generating of due dates

The course setting When auto-generating due dates, provide less time for activities that require only viewing currently only applies to Assignment, Custom Activity, Rich-text, or Website link activity types that had disabled the This activity is gradable option (i.e., API activity types AssetLink or Resource). In this update, this setting will be enhanced to apply to all activities, regardless of activity type, if the activity is not gradable. If using this option, the student’s target (or suggested) due dates may shift depending on the quantity of non-gradable activities that were not previously considered.

Teachers can clear a zero that has been automatically assigned

The best teaching occurs when a teacher understands the needs of their individual students and personalizes their learning journey. Sometimes this means making exceptions to the grading rules. Previously, if a course was configured to Automatically assign zero scores to past-due activities the teacher could not clear the student’s zero unless they also changed the student’s due date so that it was no longer in the past. In this update, teachers will be able to clear a student’s automatically assigned zero without Buzz automatically assigning the zero again, regardless of the due date.