ANGELINA DOHRE
Ad. Sales Manager
Last semester, conversations began between members of the Student Association Board of Directors about a lack of grades on OnCourse.
Two of the members, senior psychology major Jillian Beard and sophomore social work major Shannon Keane, realized they weren’t the only students having issues with OnCourse’s grading system.
According to Beard, the initial issue is that professors are currently mandated to post grades only twice a semester: during midterms and finals.
“What’s happening is students are asking professors to release grades to kind of know how they’re doing in a class,” she said. “In some cases, professors will not have graded things to begin with, and they don’t use OnCourse which is a primary method of communication for grading.
“We can’t really track, as a whole, our academic success in certain classes, which is causing slippage when it comes to people’s GPAs.”
At the time the conversation started last semester, the SAs presidential elections were coming up. Keane recalls the issues the board were personally facing as students themselves and what they had heard from other students as well.
They decided to give out a survey to students during Activities Night asking if professors should be required to post grades to OnCourse. The results were overwhelming.
“So many students, as soon as they saw [the survey], were so excited,” Keane said.
Senior economics and marketing double major Carolyn Tomasine stepped in to help Beard and Keane
after the conversations began to turn into actions.
“This is something that Beard and I usually work on together,” she said. “Every time we need to go meet with faculty or someone higher up and important in the school, we’re there. We go to the student cabinet to represent the SA together.” she said.
The two have also been meeting with a union representative from the United University Professionals.
“Nothing will happen if the students and the faculty are opposed, so the union representative helps us get on the same page,” said Tomasine.
According to Beard, OnCourse statistics were provided to them by Fredonia’s Interim President Dennis Hefner during a cabinet meeting a few weeks ago.
The statistics show that 80 percent of professors actually use the OnCourse system, but only 54 percent input
grades.
Online Learning Coordinator Lisa Melohusky works at the Office of Online Learning. She said the statistics provided by Hefner are very similar to the data she was provided.
According to her, 88.5 percent of courses on OnCourse were being utilized, and 51.2 percent of the gradebooks were active and turned on by the professor during the Fall 2019 semester.
However, Melohusky said there are several factors to keep in mind when considering these percentages.
“For a course to be counted as ‘active’ there needs to be more than four users enrolled and have more than two activities in the course,” she said. “The campus has many courses that are independent studies, capstone projects and music lessons which would not use OnCourse, so we are excluding courses until they enroll five students.”
As a default, all gradebooks are “off” until the professor manually turns it on and begins sharing grades. The count for the gradebook is only if it is turned on.
Melohusky said that while these numbers indicate some of the ways OnCourse is being used, it does not give the full picture of how feedback is provided to students throughout the semester.
“Faculty provide feedback when returning papers, exams and assignments by writing feedback directly on the document returned to each student,” she said. “Students attend office hours and are given personal one-on-one feedback, and general feedback is provided during class time. All of these methods, and some I haven’t named, should all be considered when discussing student feedback.”
Assistant Professor of Communication Angela McGowan uses OnCourse for all of her classes and sees it as a useful tool for both herself and her students.
“It enables us to keep track of grades, share assignment resources and post readings along with supplemental material like videos, podcasts and news articles,” she said. “I like that I can change the settings to fit the needs of my course and that students are always aware of what their grade is in the class.”
Although there are professors like McGowan who provide grading information on OnCourse to their students, many professors still don’t utilize its grading system.
“Not all faculty members use OnCourse to begin with … but everybody has to upload their syllabus onto it,” Beard said. “If everybody has to upload their syllabus on there, then they do use OnCourse. It’s just going that extra step to keep on top of grading.”
Beard wants the SA to work collaboratively with professors.
“As of right now, I can say Dr. Hefner spoke with me and brought it up to his personal cabinet. What they did was email me a list of things that we might want to bring up in resolutions,” she said. “To me, that’s a good sign. That’s a sign that the faculty do want to work with us and do want to see this brought up, but they also want to see this as a collaborative effort.”
In terms of a first step toward a final solution, Beard said a resolution is being created to present at a General Assembly meeting. The meeting includes all the class representatives to help represent the student body and their concerns. Their hopes are to be able to take it to the University Senate as the next step.