Excerpts from the Handbook

Manage Students with an Offline Gradebook Using Excel™

Overview:
Benefits to Instructor:

• The power of Excel allows an instructor to manage, enter and calculate grades or curve grades more efficiently and with less chance of error than within WebCT.
• By keeping grades offline in an Excel file, the instructor has a secure copy, which only s/he can access.

Listed below is an overview of the seven basic steps in this process. This chapter will breakdown each and every mouse click that must occur to complete the process. Although this chapter seems lengthy, in fact, the process is not.

Prerequisites to this Process Are:

• It is assumed that the instructor will have Microsoft Excel.
• The instructor must have a basic working knowledge of Excel. This would include creating worksheets, managing cells, basic calculations and saving worksheets.

Overview of the Process:

1. Create student gradebook in WebCT.
2. Download WebCT gradebook into a Tab-delimited text file (.txt extension).
3. Open Tab-delimited text (.txt) file in Excel.
4. Enter grades in Excel (add new columns etc.).
5. Save as an Excel workbook (.xls extension). This is your working file.
6. Save a second time as a Tab-delimited text (.txt) file. This is your upload file.
7. Import Student Data into WebCT (this uploads and imports the data from the revised Tab-delimited (.txt) file above (#6).

After the initial downloading and re-uploading of grades, the instructor will only have to do steps 4 through 7 above for future updates.

Suggestions and Tips:

• It is recommended that the Tab-delimited text (.txt) file be removed from My-Files after the upload has been completed. This is a safeguard from hackers.
• Use Tab-delimited files because a comma delimited file can cause columns to get out of alignment if commas are in the data or column titles.
• Always make changes in Excel even if it is only one grade. Otherwise you run the risk of forgetting to keep your versions synchronized and overwriting a grade with an earlier one. Students get really alarmed by this.
• Always keep the columns in the same order in both the Excel and the Manage Students gradebooks.
• If you add a column to your Excel gradebook, then the new column will be added to the end of the Manage Students gradebook. However, if you add a titled, numeric column without data in Manage Students in the position you wish, then add the same titled column in the same position in Excel, you can upload quickly and keep both gradebooks synchronized.
• You can do sorts in either Excel or WebCT. The rows do not have to be in any particular order for an upload to be successful.
• In Excel you can freeze the name columns so that as you scroll to the right you will be able to see the students' first and last names. These are the steps:
1. Click on the letter of column, which is to the right of the columns you want to freeze. For example, if you want to freeze columns A and B, click on the letter C.
2. On the Standard toolbar, click on Window.
3. Then click on Freeze Panes. Columns A and B will now remain visible as you scroll horizontally to the right.

This is very useful when you have so many columns that you cannot see them all without scrolling. This is also another good reason to keep your grades in Excel.

• You must upload First Name, Last Name and User ID columns or the upload will not be successful. WebCT uses the User ID column to match up the rows.
• You can add columns in Excel and they will upload and create a new column in Manage Students. You cannot add rows in Excel because they will not upload. So if you have late-added students to your course, we have two suggestions:
• Do not download from WebCT until the drop/add period is over.
• Manually add the rows into WebCT and Excel. You must be exact in the names and the User ID.

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