Weekly Quercus Updates

In this Weekly Update:

1. Breakout Rooms for MS Teams Meetings- Now Available
2. This Week's Faculty Question

MS Teams Breakout Rooms

For those of you using MS Teams to deliver your teaching, rejoice - for Breakout Rooms are finally here! For those who aren't using MS Teams and would like to, check out our Screensteps on Which webinar tool should I use (and when)? to help determine which tool is the best for you. Keep in mind that MS Teams Meetings is fully integrated with Quercus (unlike Zoom).

Creating the Breakout Room is easy - but please note that you cannot currently create breakout rooms before joining the meeting.

1. Once the meeting has been launched, click on the Breakout rooms icon to the right of the raise hand button
   
2. This will launch a new menu. Determine how many breakout rooms (max. 50) you would like to have in your meeting and select that number from the dropdown list. You can also choose to assign rooms automatically or manually.
   
3. When you return to your Teams meeting you will see that a list of rooms has been created. As the meeting organizer, you will be able to move between rooms freely. Participants cannot move between rooms without the organizer's approval.
   

For more information on how to setup Breakout Rooms, see the university's official guide: Organizing Teams breakout rooms.

This Week's Faculty Question

Each week, we'll answer a question that's been commonly asked in the faculty!

Q: How can I set an individual grade for a group assignment for one member of the group?

A: After grading a group submission at the group level, you can change the assignment's settings to allow for assigning individual grades. It’s recommended that you keep the grades hidden until the grading is finalized (i.e., set Grade Posting Policy to manual to avoid releasing grades before they are ready to be shared).

1. Grade the assignment as a group assignment in SpeedGrader (for more information, see How do I grade group assignments in SpeedGrader?) 
2. Go to the assignment, select Edit and scroll down to the Group Assignment options. 
3. Select the checkbox for Assign Grades to Each Student Individually (the warning in the orange box refers to the fact that you cannot change this to an individual submission assignment, not to the grading option). 
   
4. Save the assignment.  
5. Return to SpeedGrader and refresh the page. The SpeedGrader drop-down menu will now show individual student names instead of group names. 
6. Select the student whose grade you want to adjust and enter the individual score for that student. Include a comment (if appropriate). If adding a comment for the individual student, be sure to select the option Send comment to this student only (otherwise your comment will go to the whole group). 
7. Select Submit to apply the grade change.
   

Have a Quercus (or EdTech) question? Please contact FASE's EdTech Office.