I hope this message finds you well. We have been facing a critical issue that affects our operational integrity. Our educational platform hosts a number of base courses, each with the potential to generate hundreds of derivative copies. When specific grading activities occur, the grades of students enrolled in earlier versions of these courses remain unaffected due to a "grandfathering" process. However, there's a significant oversight regarding the adjustment of course weights under this system.
Here's the challenge we're encountering:
- Active Derivative Courses: If I alter the weight of a category (e.g., the "semester exam") in the base course, it inadvertently alters the grades for all actively enrolled students across every active derivative course.
- Completed Student Grades: Similarly, if a weight change occurs in an active derivative course where some students have already completed their studies, it retroactively affects their grades—even those I've already graded and reported (the completed or withdrawn students.)
- Inactive Derivative Courses: The issue persists even in inactive derivative courses (for courses from previous years), where any weight adjustment unexpectedly modifies historical grades. This presents a serious compliance issue when generating transcripts or reports of final grades, as the altered grades no longer match the originally issued records.
To circumvent this problem, the only solution currently seems to be creating a new base course and reconstructing each derivative, which is a daunting task that could affect 20 to 100 courses. Could the Buzz team investigate this matter? We need a feature that prevents weight adjustments from affecting inactive courses and provides an option to specify whether grade adjustments should apply to all students or only to those actively enrolled.
Your guidance on this matter is crucial. We need to find a way to update our master base course without affecting past grades. Thank you for your attention to this pressing issue.
Comments (4)
Here are some screenshots I took from my sandbox. These are not real students or teacher. Thanks!
Additionally, I think if there is even just a derivative course with 300 enrollments and 250 are completed and the weights are decided to be adjusted for just that course, again, at least provide an option to update all enrollments or only on active ones.
Good afternoon Tabatha,
I hope you are having a great week.
Thank you for the detailed post and the screenshots. It is very helpful!
Weighted course categories are part of the course data and will inherit through child courses. As I am sure you are aware, what you encountered is expected behavior. In this situation, the best option would be to make static courses and implement changes to the weights on those new static courses, and create child courses that will use those course weights.
Alternatively, you could use a combination of static and Derivative Sibling courses where the edit to the course category weights occurs on the lowest level sibling course for the courses that should inherit those changes--thereby excluding other course siblings and hierarchies from inheriting those new course category weights. You can refer to this article for more information on that as well.
In short, as you know, data changes inherit down. So, if you can structure your courses in a hierarchy manner so the courses that need to avoid being changed are not lower in the hierarchy of the courses that need a change, it will work in the manner that you desire. In other words, courses that need to avoid being changed from inherited changes need to be located above or outside the hierarchy of courses where the edits will take place.
I sincerely apologize for any additional work or frustration that this may cause your organization. I hope that the suggestions above might give you a little bit of direction for ways to possibly handle your unique scenario.
Allison Shepherd Hello. Yes, I know all this information. My question is WHY you have it built this way? Right now I have 54 base courses, each with 15-200+ derivative copies (most are inactive or completed.) Some of these copies are up to 10 years old. Processes and educational objectives change. My customers do not want a new course master every time I need to adjust our master to meet standards. I understand it changing ACTIVE enrollments and courses, but why are the INACTIVE/COMPLETED/WITHDRAWN enrollments and INACTIVE courses changed too? This makes absolutely no sense that Buzz allows for inactive and completed historical grades to change at all. I need to be able to update my base course without changing historical data. I can't remaster 20% of my courses, this would easily create 100s of hours of time to rebuild all the derivative copies in my 100s of clients and my subscription clients would have to spend 10s of hours remastering all of their courses too. Just on my side, this is thousands of dollars in man power, because you are allowing inactive/complete enrollments and courses to inherit grading changes. I really need a solution here. Thank you!