You can grade student participation in synchronous courses, whether they meet via Zoom or in person. To explore three approaches for grading class participation, click the tabs below.
Manual Tracking
The Manual Tracking approach works well if all students have an opportunity to participate during your class sessions. Students can demonstrate participation through:
- Delivering individual or small-group presentations.
- Providing a critique or analysis of another student’s presentation.
- Contributing to an open discussion.
- Completing an in-class exercise individually or in a group.
- Writing a short reflection response at the end of your class session.
For this approach, create a tracking spreadsheet with rows listing each student’s name and columns for each class session. Then, you will note whether each student participated during each class session. In Canvas, you will need to create a “no submission” assignment in your course. This will add a column in the Gradebook where you can manually enter students' participation grades. You can update participation grades after each class session or any time during the quarter.
Self Tracking
The Self Tracking approach to grading participation is where students track their class participation individually. This approach works well if students will be doing small-group work during class time and/or have primary responsibility over their participation.
To set up self-tracking, create a participation log template using Word or Google Docs and attach it to a Canvas assignment. Each student will record their contributions on the document.
Polling and Quizzing
The Polling and Quizzing approach allows students to participate together in a class activity.
If your class meets via Zoom, you can simply use its built-in polling feature. Zoom will provide you with a poll report after every meeting that tracks who responded to all of the poll questions you launched during your meeting.
For all courses, you could have students log into Canvas to answer a short quiz or survey. You can set availability restrictions so that students can only access your quiz or survey while your class meets.
Please Note: Many other polling and quizzing applications offer free versions, like PollEverywhere and Kahoot!, but they will not report individual user participation, so they are not good options for tracking in-class participation.