Online PE Software That Grades Activity Automatically
An online or hybrid physical education section asks students to move on their own time, in their own neighborhoods, on days you never see. eFit reads that movement straight from the tracker or phone the student already carries, scores it against the goals you set, and hands you a gradebook file formatted for D2L, Canvas, Blackboard, or Moodle. Faculty accounts are free and your institution pays no license fee. Student access is $59 per semester.
eFit by the numbers
Verification Is the Hard Part of an Online Section
Every other piece of an online PE course transfers cleanly to the web. Readings, quizzes, discussion boards, and reflection assignments all behave the way they do in any other online class. The activity requirement is the piece that resists, because the whole grade rests on movement that happened somewhere you were never present to see.
Most programs fall back on a student-completed log. A student types thirty minutes into a form on Sunday night for the week that just ended, and the instructor grades a memory of exercise. Video submissions raise the standard, and they hold up for a seminar-sized group. Once a section carries eighty or two hundred students across a term, watching the footage becomes a second job, and the rubric quietly softens to keep the workload survivable.
- Weekly logs filled in from memory after the week has ended
- Honor-system minute totals with no dated record behind them
- Video submissions that stop scaling past a few dozen students
- Attendance substitutes that award activity credit for a login
- Grade appeals with nothing on file to answer them
What an activity grade needs to survive review
How eFit Runs an Online or Hybrid Section
Four steps, and the platform handles the logging and the math between them.
Students connect a tracker
Students connect their activity tracker to Google Health, then link Google Health to eFit. On an iPhone, activity reaches eFit through Apple Health. The connection is read-only and takes under two minutes.
You set the standard
Create the course, set your point scale, weekly activity minute targets, and step goals, then post the join instructions in your LMS. A first course takes about fifteen minutes, and onboarding support is free.
eFit scores the week
Steps and activity minutes sync throughout the day and score against your criteria. Weekly and semester grades calculate on their own, and automated email reminders reach students whose activity drops off.
You export to the gradebook
Select your LMS, choose the grade type, then download the file and import it. Weekly, mid-term, final, custom date range, assessment, and combined exports are all available.
Full support covers D2L Brightspace, Blackboard Learn in Original and Ultra course views, Canvas from Instructure, Moodle 3.x and 4.x, Schoology from PowerSchool, and SAP Litmos. Every file arrives already formatted for the system you pick on the LMS integration page.
Any Tracker That Reports Into Google Health
Remote students bring the hardware they already own, and a phone alone is enough.
A distributed section arrives with a scattered inventory of devices, and eFit is built for exactly that. Any tracker that syncs to Google Health works, including Fitbit, Apple Watch, Samsung Galaxy Watch, Garmin, Xiaomi Mi Band, and Fossil smartwatches. Fitbit is the recommended device. Once the tracker reaches Google Health and Google Health is linked to eFit, steps, activity minutes, and heart rate flow in throughout the day with no manual entry from the student.
Buying hardware stays optional. A smartphone counts steps with its own motion sensors, and that data reaches eFit through Google Health on Android or Apple Health on iPhone. A student on a tight budget takes the same course, meets the same targets, and earns the same grade as the student wearing a watch. Guidance for the students and instructors making that choice sits in our companion guide on how to choose a fitness tracker for a PE course.
What the connection does
- Read-only access to activity, fitness, and nutrition data
- Daily steps and Active Zone Minutes pulled automatically
- Nutrition entries available for the meal-plan assignment
- No write access, so eFit changes nothing in a student account
- Students disconnect at any time from their tracker settings
Scope details are published in the privacy policy.
What Gets Graded, and Where Each Piece Comes From
Every component of an online section, traced back to its source.
| Course component | Where the data comes from | How eFit handles it |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly activity minutes | Tracker or phone through Google Health or Apple Health | Scored automatically against your weekly target and point scale |
| Daily steps | Tracker or phone through Google Health or Apple Health | Totalled daily, weekly, and for the semester against your step goals |
| Resting heart rate | Tracker through Google Health or Apple Health | Shown as a cardiovascular trend for the student and instructor |
| Fitness assessments | Student enters pushups, crunches, and 1-Mile Walk Test results | Scored against age and gender norms, with VO2MAX and BMI calculated |
| Nutrition assignment | Food logs through the same read-only Google Health connection | Macronutrient charts generated for the assignment the student submits |
| Reflection writing | PocketAI Journal entries tied to the week the student logged | Graded against your rubric, with entries private by default |
Pre and post assessment scores give an asynchronous course a direct measure of improvement for each individual student, reported in both absolute and percentage terms. See the fitness assessment page for the full battery.
Accountability Without a Gym Period
In a face-to-face class, accountability is ambient. You see who showed up, who moved, and who spent the hour on the bleachers. Online, that visibility has to be rebuilt on purpose, and eFit rebuilds it out of the record the devices are already producing.
The analytics dashboard shows each student day by day across the whole term, so a quiet week is visible in week three while there is still time to intervene. Automated email reminders reach students whose activity falls off, on a schedule you set. Students see their own real-time grade and progress charts, which turns the weekly target into something they check on themselves.
Goals adapt where a student needs them to. Open a student profile and set individual step goals, activity minute targets, and accommodations, which matters for students with disabilities, injuries, or different fitness starting points. Growth can be measured against that student's own baseline through pre and post comparison, so improvement from a low start earns credit.
How activity tracking worksWhen a remote student appeals a grade
A grade challenge in an online course usually comes down to one sentence: the student says the work happened and the instructor has no way to check. eFit answers that with the record itself. Activity arrived from a connected device dated as it occurred, the weekly threshold was published before the term started, and the dashboard holds the day-by-day history for every week in question.
Faculty can produce a student's full activity and assessment history as a CSV or PDF export, which gives a department chair or registrar an answer drawn from the course record. Under FERPA, that record belongs to the institution offering the course.
98% partner renewal rate
Read our security practicesThe Sections This Was Built For
Fully online, fully asynchronous, or a hybrid that splits the week.
College activity and lifetime fitness courses
Walking, conditioning, weight training, and lifetime fitness sections delivered online carry large enrollments and a hard activity requirement. Lone Star College runs more than 1,200 students per semester across six campuses this way. Departments running these at scale should read eFit for higher education.
Virtual and credit-recovery high school PE
Virtual academies, homebound students, and summer credit recovery all need a PE credit that stands up to a transcript audit. eFit runs in a browser as a progressive web app, so a school laptop or a shared tablet covers the teacher side. District details live on the K-12 schools page.
Hybrid sections that meet part of the week
Hybrid courses grade two kinds of work: the day you supervise and the days students train on their own. eFit covers the at-home half automatically while you administer assessments in person, and both halves land in one export at the end of the term.
Courses with a written or nutrition component
Online PE often carries a wellness curriculum alongside the movement requirement. The PocketAI Journal gives reflection assignments something concrete to reference, and nutrition data supports a graded meal-plan assignment.
Programs Already Grading This Way
More than 50 institutions and 17,000+ students served since 2018.
Lone Star College
1,200+ students per semester across 6 campuses in Houston, Texas.
“eFit allowed us to scale our online PE program while maintaining academic rigor across all campuses.”
Madison College
80% time saved, 40% more engagement, 500+ students per term.
“The eFit Software program has been a valuable tool for my activity component classes. The registration process, technical support, and the ability to have automated activity grading has been awesome.”
Lois Heeren, Physical Education Instructor
St. Philip’s College
92% completion rate and a 4.5 out of 5 student rating in San Antonio, Texas.
“Our students love using their phones to track activity.”
Full write-ups for these programs, along with Midwestern State University, are in the case study library. Course design notes for remote sections are in our guide on teaching PE online.
Try the Interactive DemoQuestions About Online and Hybrid Sections
What instructors and online learning leads ask before the first remote section.
Departments that route or cover student payment take one of two paths. List eFit with your course materials so students buy an access code at the campus bookstore the same way they pay for their other course materials, or purchase seats in bulk on a single invoice or purchase order when the department covers student access. Bulk pricing is quoted per institution, so email sales@efit.software for a quote or for the listing details your bookstore needs. All three purchase channels are on the pricing page.
Faculty accounts are free and there is no license fee for your institution. Student access is $59 per student, per semester, covering the full platform for the whole term. Our accessibility statement answers accessibility questions in writing, and the team takes calls at 346-222-3348.
Walk Through It With Your Own Roster in Mind
The interactive demo needs no sign-up and no credit card. Open a section, set a weekly target, and run an export before you decide whether this fits your online course.
Start Your Free DemoProcurement reviewers should start with our data security practices and the privacy policy, which documents the read-only scopes eFit requests. College sections are covered on eFit for higher education, and district programs on eFit for K-12 schools. For device guidance, read how to choose a fitness tracker for a PE course.
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