About Mallard
Mallard is a powerful course management system developed at the University of Illinois. It allows instructors to develop sophisticated assessments, including quizzes and surveys.
Some of the benefits to using Mallard include: a multitude of quiz and survey question types to choose from, an easy-to-configure grading policy, and the ability to embed hints and provide conditional feedback.
Instructors can use Mallard's Extended HTML Syntax to create rich content. Mallard also offers instructors several options for tracking student progress.
Features include:
- Course Announcements
- Lessons Page
- Content Creation using Mallard's Extended HTML Syntax
- Course Material Manager
- Quiz Manager
- Survey Manager
- Access Manager
- File Management
- Course Gradebook (Statistics & Histograms)
- Roster Manager
- Student Progress Tracking
Requesting a Course Site
To request a Mallard course site, please complete our Site Request Form.
Please request your site as soon as possible. If the Mallard course site already exists and you need a roster upload, please indicate so by choosing the option "Copy content from existing Mallard site" in the request form.
Back-ups and Archives of Course Sites
Back-ups will be stored on CD ROM in the form of .tar files. The back-ups include all the data on the course web site: course material, quiz and survey questions, images, multimedia, rosters, and student grades. After courses are backed-up, course sites will be purged of all student data (rosters, grades, and log files). If you request, course sites that will not be used during the fall can remain unchanged (i.e. student data will not be erased) until needed again. If an instructor desires, there is a toggle switch that will make the course site unavailable to students. Follow this path to find the switch:
Developer Link > Course Configuration > Restrict Access to this Mallard Course > Choose to block access to the site to all students.
Downloading Grades
Each instructor can create their own back-up of their Mallard site gradebook by using the download grades option.
Instructor Link > Course Gradebook > Download Grades
If you have only Mallard quizzes (and did not use the Mallard gradebook) look for the special link at the top of the page: "Click HERE if you wish to download only Mallard quiz grades." These options will produce spreadsheet-ready files that can easily be imported into Excel or other spreadsheet software for future reference.
Due Times for Quizzes
Since most students complete their homework during the evening hours we experience the highest loads on our servers between 8:00 P.M. and 2:00 A.M. Please do no set quiz due times between these hours because this practice places unnecessarily excessive loads on the Mallard servers. If due times are set during these times, we will experience system-wide slowness and possible failures. Therefore we recommend setting due times between 8:00 A.M. and 8:00 P.M.
Roster Uploads
Our policy is to upload your student rosters a day or two before the first day of classes (email edtech@uiuc.edu if you would like your students to have course access earlier than this). Rosters are updated daily, Monday through Friday, until the last add/drop day of the semester.
Server Down Time
Although we rarely need to do so, we reserve the right to take the Mallard server off-line for service every Wednesday between 5:00 A.M. and 9:00 A.M.
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