Crowdmark Quick Start Guide For Instructors

Crowdmark is an online tool integrated into Brock’s Brightspace for the Faculty of Math and Science to facilitate administering, collecting, and grading handwritten assessments.

Instructors can link an existing Brightspace course site to Crowdmark to distribute assessments to students.

Crowdmark allows for easy distribution and collection of student work, offers tools for the assembly and management of grading teams, and provides an online workflow that streamlines grading and the delivery of rich feedback to students. Crowdmark has an excellent Getting Started Guide as a first stop for instructors, below you will find more details on the Brock and Brightspace context.



Recommended steps:

  1. Let your students know you are using Crowdmark

  2. Add the Crowdmark integration to your Brightspace site

  3. Sync your students

  4. Set up and distribute assessments

  5. Grade on Crowdmark

Inform students that Crowdmark is a Required Assessment Tool

Students must be informed that they will be asked to submit work through Crowdmark in the course Syllabus. It is also recommended that information concerning Crowdmark be listed elsewhere, where relevant, in the Brightspace site (i.e. announcements).

Instructors should include a statement similar to the following, along with their contact information:

  • The Personal Information requested through Crowdmark assignments is collected under the authority of The Brock University Act, 1964, Collection of Personal Information Procedure Page 2 of 2 and in accordance with the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (“FIPPA”). The information will be used as part of the assessment of this course.

Instructors may also choose to include some practical information similar to the following:

  • You will be asked to submit hand-written work to Crowdmark. Crowdmark allows students to use familiar devices like smartphones to take pictures of written work and submit them digitally. You will receive an E-Mail when the first practice assignment is available with instructions on how to access it. You can also access https://app.crowdmark.com/ at any time and sign in with your BrockU account.

 

Please feel free to copy and paste these statements directly into your course syllabus.

Syncing Brightspace Classlist to Crowdmark

After adding the Crowdmark integration to your Brightspace course site (Content > Add Existing > External Tool Activity > Crowdmark), you can sync your roster to ensure the students are appearing in the Crowdmark course.

The student enrollment to the Crowdmark platform is only updated through Instructor actions. Select the Enroll students from Brightspace LTI 1.3 button on the home screen during set up.

Please note that Co-Instructors, TAs, Marker & Graders need to be added to the Team as an Instructor or Grader by an existing instructor. These role types are not synced from Brightspace, so the procedure requires manual addition of faculty or staff email addresses.

Links to Crowdmark Instructions are below:

Adding the Student View

  • Instructors can add themselves as a student to review assessments and feedback from the student perspective.

    • Having two roles in a site allows you to toggle between Instructor or Student views in the Crowdmark site. Select the chevron beside your username in the top right to switch between views.

Create and Distribute Assessments

Crowdmark assessments are easy to create and distribute. Please see the following articles for detailed steps on each procedure.

Delivery Methods

Advanced features

Reuse assessments

Grade Assessments on Crowdmark

On Crowdmark grading is a straightforward process. Instructors can assign graders specific questions, or can assign specific groups of students to grade. Depending on what works best for the grading team, the course configuration, and the assessment content, instructors may prefer one method over the other.

The Grading interface on Crowdmark is called the “Dashboard”, in which instructors, facilitators and graders can review all questions and grade student submissions. After the due date the grading team can begin assessing submissions. For information on navigating the grading interface on Crowdmark please review:

Advanced Grading options

Releasing Grades on Crowdmark

Once grades are released students are, by default, sent an email notification. Students can access their grades in the “Results” tab.

Importing Assignment Grades to Brightspace

  1. Crowdmark supports an automatic gradebook syncing from Crowdmark to Brightspace. Details on how to complete this action can be found at Exporting grades from Crowdmark to Brightspace’s gradebook | Crowdmark.

  2. Or to import directly to the Faculty Gradebook, a manual CSV file export is required. This option can be adopted, however it is advised that faculty and teaching staff contact CPI (cpi@brocku.ca) for assistance to complete this action.

 

Need more information on Crowdmark?

Visit our Crowdmark Homepage which also lists additional resources for instructors under Crowdmark Help Resources near the bottom. Still have questions? Reach out to cpi@brocku.ca


 


Please contact CPI at edtech@brocku.ca with any questions or comments about the contents of this site.