Buzz: Questions & Answers

Hi Josh,

Those are excellent goals for the course, and I hope to assist you in achieving them.

1. To allow students to submit their work up to one month after the due date, I recommend defining a grace period of 30 days. For a visual representation of this activity setting, please refer to the following link: Assignment activity editor - Agilix Help Center.
2. To ensure that students complete each activity before progressing to the next one, you can enable the "Students must complete each activity in order" checkbox in the course settings. Please note that this course setting requires the "Enable advanced course settings" domain feature to be enabled by your domain administrators. For more information on enabling or disabling features in your domain, your domain admins can visit: How do I enable/disable features in my domain?.
3. If you wish to allow students with IEPs or late transfers to bypass the one-month grace period for late work, you can create a group specifically for these students. Once the group is created, you can configure group-specific activity settings to ensure that the group is always permitted to submit late submissions. For detailed instructions on creating and managing groups, please refer to: How do I create and manage groups? and How do I configure group-specific activity settings?.

I hope this information is helpful to you. If you have any further questions or concerns, feel free to let me know.

Hi Steven,

Thank you so much for the informative response!

I do have a couple of follow up questions.

1. If a student misses the grace period of 30 days for an assignment will they be prevented from "moving forward" in the course? Since they have not technically completed the assignment but the setting requires students to complete each assignment in the order they are assigned? 

2. I followed through the links you sent about how to create groups, but it wasn't very clear on how I can extend due dates on multiple assignments for a specific group. Can you explain how I would, for example, create a group with IEPs that have extension on late work for an extra 30 days of work on all assignments? Is there a way to make that happen automatically for all assignments or will I have to manually change a setting for every assignment in the semester for that particular group?

Of course! I'm glad to help.

By default, if a student fails to submit an activity within the 30-day grace period, they will no longer be able to submit that activity. Additionally, with the "Students must complete each activity in order" course setting enabled, Buzz will prevent them from progressing to the next activity. However, as a workaround for these rare cases, teachers can grade the activity (perhaps with a 0 in this case), excuse it, or use the "Override Complete" button in the Grade Editor for the activity to be marked as complete. This will allow the student to continue in the course.

Furthermore, should your students encounter challenges in submitting their activities either prior to or within the grace period, you may want to consider extending the grace period or enabling the "Automatically assign zero scores to past-due activities" course setting. That course setting would result in overdue activities negatively affecting students' grades, creating an incentive for them to promptly complete outstanding activities and meet submission deadlines.

To create a group of students with IEPs who require an extension on late work, and allow them an additional 30 days to complete all activities, please follow these steps:

1. Go to the Editor tool for your course.
2. Click on the Tools button in the toolbar and select Manage Groupings.
3. Click the Add Grouping button.
4. I recommend setting the Group Prefix to "IEP Group " the Group Creation Method to "Fixed number of groups," the Number of Groups to "1," the Group Assignment to "None," and then clicking the Generate button.
5. You can then enable the checkbox under "IEP Group 1" for each student with an IEP that requires a late work extension.
6. Once you have selected the students in the group, click Save.
7. Return to the Editor tool for your course.
8. Select the Activity List tab.
9. Enable the Gradable checkbox filter.
10. Click the top-most checkbox to select all of the listed activities.
11. Click on the Bulk Edit tool in the toolbar.
12. Near the top-right corner, click the Apply To Group button and select your IEP group.
13. Enable the checkbox next to Allow Late Submissions.
14. Use the dropdown menu to select "With a grace period (days)."
15. Enter the number of days for the grace period. If students without the IEP are allowed a 30-day grace period, you could use a grace period of 60 to allow students with the IEP an additional 30 days to complete all activities.
16. At the bottom of the page, enable the "I understand that these changes are permanent, and I confirm that I want to proceed" checkbox.
17. Finally, click on the Update button.

Please let me know if you have any further questions or concerns.

Thank you so much for the detailed instructions! That is incredibly helpful and I will be using that starting next week.

My last question regarding students who do not complete assignments before the grace period is over. Is there a way to "override complete" multiple assignments for multiple students?

For your reference, I assign a large number of small assignments each week so having to go in to each students' gradebook and marking override complete does seem cumbersome. I am just wondering if there is a way to do it for all students who missed the grace period for a particular assignment or even multiple assignments if possible?

I'm happy to hear that, Josh!

The "Override Complete" button in the Grade Editor was designed to allow a student to progress further in the course, even if they have not met the completion requirements. We don't recommend using the "Override Complete" button outside of that scope, and there currently isn't a bulk method to use the "Override Complete" button.

Another option would be to use the "Mark As Missing" button in the Grade Editor before the grace period ends to help alert students and encourage them to submit. You can check out some screenshots of the "Mark As Missing" option in our 2023-10-19 Release Notes.

I recommend scoring the activities preventing students from moving forward, either individually through the Grade Editor or in bulk through the Activity Grader. If you'd like to automate this process, you can enable the "Automatically assign zero scores to past-due activities" and "Mark auto-zeroed activities as complete" course settings. That would allow the students to move forward in the course, and teachers could issue a retry to the students if they prefer. In that case, the students can continue working in the course and can resubmit previous activities the teacher has issued a retry on if they'd like.