Removing Orphaned CourseSites Assignments

CourseSites Assignment

My new project is to update the course materials for an online course, originally setup in CourseSites, see www.coursesites.com. Last week, I was happily making online changes, including adding new quizzes and tests, and deleting old assignments and tests. But, this weekend, I looked at the Grading Center and was surprised by the large number of orphaned entries. Turns out that deleting assignments, quizzes, and tests does not automatically remove them from the grading calculation. What could be done to cleanup this mess?

  1. Before Cleanup:
    • Have a clear naming convention between old and new
    • Luckily for me the old entries were named 1., 2., 3… and the new ones 1.1, 1.2, … 3.1, 3.2…
    • If this is not your case, rename your old assignments, or your new ones, to differentiate them from each other
  2. Cleanup:
    • Login to CourseSites as an administrator or instructor
    • Open the course you are editing and make certain that edits are enabled (top right option)
    • On your left, find the Grading Center and open it (see screen shot)
    • Click the assignment dropdown button… a popup appears
    • Select “Edit Column Information” from the popup menu
    • Scroll down until you the Options section
    • Set all three radio buttons to “No”
    • If you also had a due date on this assignment, scroll up and uncheck the due date checkbox
    • Click the Submit button to save your changes
  3. Validation:
    • Logout as an Instructor and login as a student.
    • Goto the My Grades feature
    • Look for the due and upcoming assignments… are all the removed ones really gone?

While I was cleaning up my course, I found that five of the old assignments had due dates, and the rest did not. So, this was a feature the previous course author had begun using, but then abandoned.