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Points for Progress

Increase student engagement and combat AI cheating by awarding points for studying.

Updated over a week ago

Blended Teaching provides real-time data on student progress throughout your course , showing exactly what percentage of the videos in the course have been completed. This allows you to award points based on how much students have studied. This guide lays out how to award points for progress, broken into:

  1. Points for Progress

  2. Setting the Rubric

  3. Creating The Assignment

  4. Awarding Points

1. Points For Progress

Until recently, summative exam and quiz performance has been a reasonably reliable representation of student ability. But with online examinations and the rapid development of AI, there has been a lessening of the correlation between student ability and exam / quiz performance. It's now possible for a student using AI to score 100% in any quiz and exam, without having to study at all.

In addition to rewarding summative assessments, we recommend to reward effort. One proxy for effort is how much of a course a student has studied. Blended Teaching can show exactly what percent of videos a student has completed in your course, allowing you to award points for progress.

At the end of the semester, you can see the percentage of the course each student has completed through your Blended Teaching Control Center, and award points in your course LMS based on a simple formula and scale. We recommend to do this once only at the end of the semester, and not in stages throughout the semester - the simpler the better.

2. Setting the Rubric

Let's start by setting up the rubric - and more specifically, the number of points available, and how those points can be earned.

  • Total Number of Points: In order to encourage students to progress through the materials, we recommend the sweet spot of between 10% - 20% of the course points be allocated to progress. Less than 10% and the incentive isn't significant enough. More than 20% and you may start having issues with traditional summative grading expectations.

  • Minimum Points Threshold: This is the minimum percentage of the course a student must have completed before they start earning points. You can set this any where between 0-50%. The sweet spot for us is 40%.

  • Maximum Points Threshold: This is the maximum percentage of the course a student must complete to earn all points available. You can set this between 60-80%. Warning: Avoid setting this at 100%, that will really frustrate students as students would have to watch every single video, including intros / outros etc. The sweet spot for us is 80%.

Note: For Points for Progress to work effectively, it's better to avoid having optional / supplemental chapters in your textbook. Only include what they need to study, as they are earning points for studying each chapter.

3. Creating The Assignment

3.1. Canvas

Go to the gradebook in Canvas and create an assignment using the following steps.

In Canvas, start in the Home screen.

  1. Click on Assignments menu.

  2. Click the blue + Assignment button.

  3. Write in the assignment name. It could be something like Progress.

  4. In the big text box, write in your instructions. We've written some sample ones in the box below for you which you can copy and paste to save time.

  5. Select the number of Points.

  6. The submission type should be On Paper.

  7. We typically leave the rest. Then hit Save & Publish.

Example Instructions for stage 4 above. Just change the numbers to suit your intent.

This assignment rewards you for your hard work studying. As you complete the videos in the course, you will be earn points, which will be awarded to you at the end of the semester.

There are a total of 100 points available to you. You will start scoring points for progress once you have completed 40% of the videos. You can earn points all the way up until you have completed 80% of the videos.

For example, let's say you complete 70% of the videos. There are 100 points available for completing more than 40% and up to 80% of the videos. At 70%, you will have earned:

  • Percentage complete above minimum = 70% - 40% = 30%

  • Maximum completion window = 80% - 40% = 40%

  • Percentage of Points earned = 30% / 40% = 75%

  • Points earned = 75% x 100 = 75 points.

You can check your progress throughout the semester in your My Progress dashboard in Blended Teaching.

3.2. Blackboard / Brightspace / Moodle

Each LMS will follow a similar approach to the Canvas instructions above. So please use the approach best suited for your LMS.

4. Awarding Points

Once the semester is completed, download the progress of each student from Blended Teaching.

To download the student completion data:

  1. Go to the Student Progress page in the Control Center.

  2. Click on the Export button to download an Excel version of the progress tracker.

  3. In the Excel file, we recommend to use the % Videos Completed column.

From this Excel file, you can calculate the points to allocate to each student. Then manually write them in to the assignment in the LMS.

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