Hello Cypher / MyLearning representative,
As the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Anglo American University, Prague, I am writing to suggest that your team come up with a solution to a problem I expect you have been contacted about before. I met with a fellow faculty member recently, and he explained to me that he has been using a format for years whereby he quizzes his students weekly about the course readings. He uses 11 quizzes and then drops the lowest three scores, to achieve a "reading quiz grade" based on the highest remaining scores (8) of 11 taken by students in MyLearning.
This colleague works at another institution as well as AAU, and there they use CANVAS, a program which does offer the ability to "use" or "disuse" any particular quiz score when including scores in the final reading quiz column. We wrote you a few days ago to ask about doing this in MyLearning, and received the following in reply:
"Thank you for reaching out and for sharing how you would like to configure your grading setup.At this time, the system does not have a built-in feature to automatically drop the lowest quiz scores and use the remaining highest scores for grade calculation. To achieve a similar outcome, you would need to manually adjust the weights of the quizzes after all students have completed them — for example, by excluding the lowest quizzes from the final grade calculation or by re-weighting the remaining quizzes so they count toward the desired percentage."
... It is common pedagogical practice at many institutions of higher education to drop the lowest score/s in order to support students when they have a bad week or are busy with other courses. Why does MyLearning not offer a way to do this without a lot of additional work?
Please email me following a discussion of this matter with your team. If Cypher wants to remain in competition with their competitors who run similar online learning platforms, I think it is critical that you develop a solution to a simple teaching need such as this one. I would like this addressed, and or resolved, before mid December when my colleague/s will need to do manual calculations - if you cannot resolve it - in order to calculate and submit final grades. Thanks for your attention to this matter,
Dr. Angel Hoekstra
Director, Center for Teaching and Learning
Faculty, School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Anglo American University, Prague, Czech Republic