Google Classroom Second Light with references to Schoology and Canvas

I had a brief, cursory, undocumented look at Google Classroom fall 2019. At that time the package had too many missing pieces to be used in a collegiate classroom. This is a second look a year later. 

Creating a class is straightforward.

I joined as a teacher, so I have the option of either joining a class or creating a classes. Classes have join codes that can be used to join a class. 

Class specifications include a name, a section, a subject area, and a room. That a room is listed does give the package somewhat of a elementary level feel. The course opens to an announcements page.

The announcements dialog box is not a rich text editor. Text only. No embedded links. Small side note: the image was not actually chosen by me, that appeared automatically, perhaps feeding off of the subject type being a recognized common subject type (physical science). 

The editor dialog is "jumpy" - pressing backspace while the cursor is in the editor to delete a character autoscrolls the web page to the top, very disconcerting. Bear in mind that I am working in Chrome, so the resulting feel is that the package was a result of an amateur hour hackathon. 

Links in announcements are clickable after posting, but the link is bare metal only. No embedded links, no HTML accepted. Contrast the above text only editor with that offered in Schoology:

Or the even fuller featured editor in Canvas:

This is why I refer to a text only editor for announcements, no embedded links, no embedded images, no rich text capacity, and certainly no math equations, as too basic. The Classwork tab allows the addition of the following assignment types:

Contrast that to the Schoology assignment types options:

Or to Instructure Canvas, which has layers of options that go three deep.

I would note that while many of the Canvas options are present in Schoology, options such as peer review and anonymous grading are not available. Note that I cannot take Canvas as far as I would like because I use Google Drive Assignment LTI in Schoology as my prime mover for assignments, and the Google LTI integration for Canvas is, as in Schoology, appears to be an institutional option only. 

Here too the instructions are limited to text only, not rich text. One new feature is the plagiarism checker on the far right, this is limited to only five assignments per class unless the institution upgrades to G Suite Enterprise for Education:

• If you have a G Suite for Education account, you can turn on originality reports for 5 assignments per class. To get unlimited originality reports, ask your G Suite admin to upgrade to G Suite Enterprise for Education.
• You can view originality reports for 45 days. After that, you can run another report in the grading tool.
• When you turn on originality reports for an assignment, students can run 3 reports on their work before they turn it in. You can’t see the reports students run. After students run their last report, they can continue to work on the assignment before turning it in. 

I can see I will have to rebuild my rubrics, but there might be an option to import that from a Google Sheet file.

I was going to import a file from my drive - all of my files are in my drive.

But then I realized those files are in a different drive than my classroom. So off to work on getting the file I need.

File created in my school drive, essentially a content copy and paste from my other drive. I am sure if I was more clever I could have shared the file, but this way the file originates in my school drive. Here my use of Google Drive Assignments in Schoology is paying off, and this is also the dead end I hit when using Canvas free. All of my classes use Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides for assignments. Here in Google Classroom there is no LTI interface, Google suite is the assignment suite.

The first and second option are available in Schoology, the second option is not automatically available, the instructor would have to set that up through some sort of sharing of a linked document. So that is a nice touch. 

Although there is a way to import a rubric formatted in a very special way in Google Sheets, ultimately if one has pre-existing rubrics they want to create, one has to copy and paste from elsewhere. The sheet format is fussy about line breaks and certain characters, so I opted to copy and paste in Google Sheets raw.

Rubrics do not appear to have to be "square" - each criterion supports a unique number of levels. 

As far as I can tell students can "see" the rubric and there is no option to hide the rubric from the students as one has in Schoology. This renders impossible using the rubric in an assessment manner where one is testing the students on their ability to perform without the guidance a rubric provides. 

The rubric total possible does not automatically flow into the Points field, the Points field is a manual entry field. The upside is that one can set a different total possible points than the rubric. How Google Classroom would decide to map the points in the rubric to a different total possible is unknown to me.

I did not recall seeing rubrics as options when I first looked at Google Classroom. From videos I later watched, I gather that rubrics are a new feature in Google Classroom, along with the gradebook. This serves to remind me that Google Classroom began as a framework for distributing and receiving assignments done in Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, not as a learning management system. Other pieces are getting glued on as the framework develops, but this is very much a "glued on" feel, not a package that was envisioned from blank sheet as an LMS. Thus there is a sense of things being disconnected under the hood.

Quiz setup is straight forward enough.

A basic multiple choice question.

Question types mirror those in Schoology Basic and the existing test/quiz module. 

The Answer key is actually a clickable link to a dialog box that sets up the answer. A nice feature here is the option to add an answer feedback, a feature available only for true/false questions answered incorrectly in Schoology.

Feedback is available for correct and incorrect answers.

I use a lot of fill in the blank, so this is an important option for me.

Also important is the ability to have multiple correct answers, which appears possible. 

One puzzlement, apparently one does not save a quiz, one sends a quiz. 

Quiz questions can contain images

Quiz composition is aided by some basic AI that suggests likely next answers. When I entered A as an answer, the AI suggested I would want B, C, and D. Even after I manually entered B and C, the AI was still active and helpfully suggesting D.

Answers can have images as well, a feature that is not a part of Schoology quizzes/tests material item but is, as I recall, an option in Assessments.

Perhaps a tad puzzling to me, at least for now, is that the quiz shows only as a draft document. 

The quiz is retained, and can apparently be distributed, but remains displayed as a draft. Since a quiz is "sent" and not saved, perhaps what is "sent" is the version at that time, hence the version in Google Classroom is perhaps always a draft in progress that can be edited but does not change what might have been sent earlier.

I am all too keenly aware that quizzes are built on top of Google Forms, a format with which I have no experience. From the classroom stream view the quiz can be edited. 

Editing permits access to what I think of as the "wrapper" which carries settings such as the number of points, whether grades will be pulled from the form. This is essentially the assignment wrapper. 

Ah! The trick was to select the Assign option:

With that done, the item was posted to the stream.

The stream works in reverse chronological order like a blog. The only option to resort is to move an item to the top of the stream. Posted material ahead of the term but out of order could be problematic in getting the material into order - there appears to be no re-ordering mode such as found in Schoology where items can be dragged and dropped into the desired order. Post things in order or else I guess. 

Post-script on quizzes. I would later learn that there are a series of settings options behind a gear icon that is available when one is editing the Google Form. This is not where I might have expected the settings, but they are apparently attached to the Form and not to the Google Classroom wrapper. 

Some key capabilities for instructors are tucked away on setting tabs.

One of the earliest requests at the college was to have the ability to lock the browser. In Schoology this required purchasing Respondus. In Google Classroom, locked mode is natively available only on Chromebooks and Chromebooks only. There is no option in Google Classroom to use an LTI app such as Respondus. Google Classroom does not support LTI and this may be the deadkill switch for Google Classroom at this time. Our students primarily use MacBooks and Windows laptops sold by the bookstore. The inability to lock down quizzes and tests is a showstopper for some faculty. Not for me personally, I am keenly aware that many students have multiple devices, so locking one has no useful effect that I can see. The student can use their second device to access whatever information they choose. Tests do not test. 

Static materials can also be posted to the stream.

Posted material can derive from Google Drive, be a link, a file, or a YouTube link.

Here a PDF has been uploaded to the stream.

This is a link to a YouTube video. YouTube is clearly the video choice for Google Classroom. Others could be posted as a raw link.

The "stream" - effectively a timeline for the course - does not provide graphical insight into the nature of the materials posted, just generic icons. 

Only in the Classwork tab, and then only when one clicks on an item, does the item expand to provide clues as to the nature of the item.

Grading is setup from the setting. 

Grades can be attached to categories and categories can be weighted. 

In this course the weight is built into the points, so I do not need to separately weight the categories.

Categories are one of the options on the right hand panel when editing an assignment. Once set up in the settings, the drop down list populates for assignments. 

The upshot is that the basic tools I would need for delivering physical science are present in Google Classroom. My decision to use Google assignments and YouTube videos meshes well with this environment. The types of quizzes and tests I use are also deliverable.

What is missing is of course the whole assessment side of course delivering: the mapping of work to student learning outcomes and the resulting assessment of that which occurs in Schoology in parallel to grading. 

Inviting a student meant typing in the correct email address, my account did not access a college contacts list. 

With a student logged into the account, the gradebook instantiates. The process for a student to access, work on, and submit a paper is different than that in Schoology. I was able to sit and watch the test student navigate the process, but it was a confusing process as there were no prompts to help the student know what to do. The assignment presented the option of opening the template I had provided, generating a wholly new file, or importing a file from a Google Drive. The latter option proved very confusing as the computer the student was using was logged into their previously existing Drive account. The student attempted to bring a file from that account, but the process failed.

I told the student to just open the template and attempt to submit the template. The student and I stumbled our way into the assignment submitting. Clicking on the "1 turned in" led to the following screen.

The student had opted to download an actual lab one report as a Word document to end run a locked sharing issue on the Google Docs file submitted in Schoology. Then the Word document was uploaded into Google Classroom.

This brings the document up for viewing and marking.

On the right side I can unfurl my rubric, but the side panel is far more cramped in terms of space than that in Schoology, a 15 criterion rubric such as I use will be awkward to work with. 

The rubric is point and click to enter values. At this point the rubric is incomplete with only a single criterion. 

The score now appears in the gradebook, but note that the appellation draft has appeared. Note that earlier the word draft did not appear, yet now the word draft does appear:

Why the word draft has appeared is unknown to me. Perhaps that is how Google Classroom labels a marked assignment.

I watched the student successfully take the quiz I deployed. I can see their scores in a Responses subscreen, but something is set wrong by me as the quiz mark is not flowing into the gradebook and some subscreens show that the quiz is not yet submitted. 

This document is very much a "stream of experience upon encounter" and is colored by six years of experience in using Schoology and even more so colored by a 1984 Apple Macintosh disdain for reading any manuals. A few videos later and I have absorbed that there are some key differences from Schoology that will trip up instructors transitioning between the packages. And those differences are, to some extent, reminiscent of having to think more like a K12 instructor. 

One key difference is that unlike Schoology, work has to be "returned" to the student for them to see their mark on the assignment. I have been failing to return work.

In the Schoology system work is "unsubmitted" for further work by the student. Work need not be "returned" to the student for the student to see their work. Thus Google Classroom more closely mimics a physical classroom in that work has to be returned to the student for the student to know how they performed. 

Another key error I was apparently making was misunderstanding how to get quiz grades to appear in the gradebook. This happens automatically in Schoology with no intervention required by the instructor. In Google Classroom one has to Import Grades to flow grades from the quiz to the gradebook. A video I watched noted that the gradebook is actually a newer feature in Google Classroom. 

The need to Import Grades reminds me that while Schoology was purpose built from the ground up as an LMS, as was Canvas, Google Classroom is code being built around an existing Google Docs framework. There is some sense of kludgeyness to the interface. 

That the gradebook is relatively nascent also provides an explanation for the bare bones capability of the gradebook. 

Schoology includes bells and whistles such as excused, incomplete, missing.

And the ability to record comments on the grade including the option to display the comment to students. 

I use this capability extensively in my ethnobotany class where assignment pieces arrive across a span of time. So a student gets partial credit. I keep track of which pieces came in via this comments box. In the above comment a student was to submit a moss, lycophyte, and monilophyte observation over in iNaturalist. This student submitted two of the three, so they have 20 of the 30 possible points. I make a note that the student can see so they know which one is missing, this also reminds me of what is missing. One student turned in three monilophyte observations and then was confused as to why they received only 10 points. My note explained what happened. This is a key feature because I cannot put these comments over in iNaturalist and there is no submission in Schoology for me to comment upon. 

I cannot instantiate the Canvas gradebook without students, but from what I have seen the gradebook does appear to have some of the capabilities of Schoology, perhaps all. Google Classroom is far more basic in this regard.

With assignments, again, my Schoology background misled my thinking. In Schoology "unsubmit" is returning an unmarked assignment for further work. Here "Return" means "give the marked paper back to the student so they can see their grade." Only once the paper is returned can the student see the grade.

In the gradebook "returning" the lab report has caused the "draft" appellation to disappear. I now know too that "Private comments" are comments to the student on the assignment. These comments are not accessible from the gradebook, so they cannot substitute for the functionality seen in Schoology.

The update polling feature of Schoology is mimicked in the Question option for new assignment type. Interesting to me is that questions can be a marked entity with a score or ungraded. They can be short answer or multiple choice.

End notes

Can the college use Google Classroom now in its current form? The short answer is no. There are too many missing pieces. Instructors would rebel at all of the lost capabilities. 

The biggest missing piece, among many missing pieces, is the complete absence of student learning outcomes. There is no where to enter them, no functional way to use them in rubrics (because they do not exist in the LMS, one could kludge them into the rubric, but they would not be reported upon in a mastery screen such as Schoology Institutional offers). 

The longer answer is more complex and is multi-part.

Could I use Google Classroom in a pilot test during the next upcoming term? Yes. Google Classroom has all of the pieces that I need and offers the simplicity of a single login for students as opposed to the double login of Schoology.

Could the college one day move to Google Classroom if Schoology were to become unavailable to higher education systems? My sense is, yes. Google Classroom in the last couple of years has gained a gradebook, and more recently rubrics. Google is investing in this platform and new capabilities are being released. The platform has supporting capabilities such as Google Meet. The proviso is that the college would have to move to a paid institutional subscription to gain some of the capabilities that faculty will want - such as plagiarism checking of all assignments. 

How those costs will compare to those of an already capable collegiate package such as Instructure Canvas is unknown to me. Canvas will clearly meet the needs of faculty and students, but for me the inability to access Google Assignments without an institutional contract is problematic. 

If Google Classroom were to one day to support LTI tools, that would be a real game changer for the platform. 

One other local consideration: Nuventive TracDat targets integration to Instructure Canvas. As far as I can see, the absence of external tools in Google Classroom suggests that integration is not possible even if Nuventive were to attempt to build such a linkage. Locally that is an important consideration.

I think my other concern was best captured by the article, What it's like to get locked out of Google indefinitely, and by an interaction my son had with another major vendor. In the aforementioned article the user could only interact with bots. Google is too vast and large to provide human customer service. In contrast my son was having tech issues with a piece of tech from a major provider. He would wind up engaging in an extensive and informative chat with a real person who spent the time to help him get his tech up and running. This was a global tech provider and my son was only a retail consumer of the product, no service contract, but he got to speak to a real person who knew how to help him and did so. In the above is a concern I would have with Google Classroom: when things go horribly wrong, will there be a real person with real knowledge and real authority to fix things. Bigger is not always better. While I certainly do not know the level of support an entity such as Instructure can provide for Canvas to what would be a very minor community college customer, I have to hope that one would not be interacting with endless bots.