What’s New? We have a few new features that just released that will be, we hope, inordinately helpful for your 2022 classes.  You can learn more in our Community.    The instructor can pick the day of the week that the assignment view begins for all of their students in that class.   Achieve will remember the last My Course view any user was on and show that view when you return to My Course.   Instructors will be able to delete their unwanted custom assessment grade settings policies.   Instructors will have new options to control solution visibility.   Password protected assessments are now available.     Learning Objectives will now be visible to instructors when building or editing their assessments, as well as when reviewing students' responses. (Not in Essentials or Read & Practice courses)     Goal Setting and Reflection Responses will now be automated and available in the Reports / Insights tab.   A simple calendar view is available now with enhancements expected throughout the spring.      What came out earlier this fall?  Multi-take Assessments (as a new option as a Grade Settings Policy) allow students to take an assessment up to five times and keep the highest score.  Group Exceptions allow you to create a group of students to use for exceptions (like time extensions) repeatedly.  Course Start and End Time and Institution Name are part of the Course Details and give you the power over exactly when your course starts and ends, and what students see about your course.        ... View more

We have officially released "multi-take" as a grading setting in Achieve. Check it out!  (And yes, the team has already updated the KB with info on multi-take, if you're interested.)  Multi-Take Quiz Grading Setting Details on Multi-Take Quizzes                ... View more

Gradebook categories can be reordered Instructors can create a group of students and give that group assignment exceptions, or create group-specific assignments  Content added to the course will appear at the top of the course content view  Instructor can set time for course start and end date  On writing assignments that have MLA/APA features, instructors can now view all the components in one view and leave feedback on all features (English Only) ... View more

Recently we had one of our major releases and there is some more new functionality in Achieve that you should know about.  Students with 1 term access will be able to switch their course enrollment  Student-specific assignments will no longer be visible to those students who aren't assigned the assignment  Coordinators will be able to change Assessment grading settings at any time, from within NGA or the single assign widget, in their Section Manager Instructors can edit or create their own multiple choice, multiple select, numeric entry, free response, and math equation questions for use in their Achieve courses. See the help article here.    Instructors can “favorite” assessment items that they really like so they are easy to find for later assessments or for use in other courses. See the help article here.    Instructors will be able to grade writing assignments using the rubric score, with optional weighting for rubric criteria (only in English courses using Writing Tools). See the help article here.          ... View more

The Achieve product team is always looking for new ways to improve our systems and solicit customer feedback. One thing we’ve consistently heard from our customers is that the assessments performance overview page is challenging to navigate, and that as an instructor, you’re looking for quicker ways to determine: How the class is doing as a whole Which questions are causing problems Which students are performing poorly or falling behind   We spent an intensive month conducting collaborative design and testing with over 20 instructors from a variety of schools and disciplines to develop a brand new and improved responses page.   In the past, when we’ve introduced major changes we’ve simply implemented the change on the given day, but this time we’re going to give you a behind the scenes view! Beginning in May, inside of your assessments, on the responses page, you’ll have the opportunity to try a beta view of the new page -- don’t worry you can always opt-out if you just want a sneak peek. When you opt-in to the new page, you’ll see all of your student data for that assessment including some new data that you’ve been asking for, including time spent and activity time stamps for each student. You’ll also have the opportunity to let us know what you think. We’ll still be making changes behind the scenes so we’ll be actively monitoring your feedback and continuing to make improvements. We’re really looking forward to hearing from you and to opening up the curtains a little bit and sharing our work with you sooner than we ever have before.   Current page with toggle:     New View:     ... View more

Students whose first semester course was deleted are able to transfer their remaining multi-term access to a second semester course The gradebook export includes the "ungraded" category Instructors can select multiple resources to batch update, and then make the batch updates from one page instead of in multiple steps Instructors can select multiple resources and batch update visibility date range Instructors will no longer be restricted in batch updating due dates for assessments with late penalty and diagnostics   ... View more

Instructors can copy all resource types (except for Diagnostics and items under the content type Interactive)   Instructors can sort gradebook columns in ascending or descending order                         ... View more

We added new "Average Time to Complete" data to the top of each LearningCurve Adaptive Quiz. This data (as shown below on the right) is just calculated for your class for this particular assignment. The data is only calculated started on 4/15/21, so you will not see data for any assignments completed in say January of 2021; this is only for assignments from here on out. (And teaser...we have more data coming for instructors assigning adaptive quizzes in Achieve for the Fall of 2021...) Enjoy!  ... View more

Foundational Experience Instructors can rename Adaptive Quizzing assignments and Instructor Activity Guides When instructors update due dates in batch using the option in the preview table, it will default to 11:59 p.m. Section Management Instructors can edit the target score and topics of a Adaptive Quiz or Read & Practice activity even after they've created section courses. When instructors create section courses, they will immediately become accessible to all instructors enrolled in them. Improvements Assignments with custom visibility settings will have the "hidden" indicator and tool tip Assignments with custom visibility settings or are hidden until # days before the due date will display in student preview Sapling migrated assessments will display in the Resources tab in the order that they display in Sapling Filtering by learning path designation will be sorted in pre-class, in-class, post-class order Due date exceptions will no longer display to all students (not just those with an exception) in their institutional LMS courses Instructors who want to override the lack of a grade and give their students a 0, will be able to save that 0   ... View more

2021 is off to a great start and we have improvements to Achieve to note already!  Students with multi-term access will be able to transfer their enrollment to a second semester deep integrated course Deleted iClicker sessions will no longer be included in the Achieve gradebook From within the Achieve e-book, students and instructors can access "read aloud" text to speech features from within course readings. (Note, available on iOS outside of the Macmillan app) From within the Achieve e-book, students and instructors can access content formatting options like font size, font type, line height and background color from within course readings.   ... View more

We just added a number of new features to Achieve in order to make your experience (and that of your students) even better in 2021. Here’s a quick recap of the changes. Foundational Experience Instructors can set an assignment to be worth 0 points or ungraded, which means it has a due date, but doesn't report to the gradebook Instructors can make an assignment extra credit   Updates to completion status indicators in the item for instructor and students   Instructors migrating from Sapling can surface their assessments in Achieve (if they have a course in Achieve) If you integrate your Achieve course with your LMS, nongraded content can now be integrated in addition to any graded assignments you have integrated.  Reporting and Insights Instructors can view time-on-task data for assignments   Writing Students are now able to meet MLA and APA style guide requirements (e.g. page numbers, headers, and works cited) and access in-tool support to ensure proper documentation; instructors are able to view properly MLA/APA formatted documents as well.   Diagnostics Students can take practice and final tests past the due date without instructors having to set a late penalty. Students submitting past the due date will receive 0 in the gradebook but they will no longer be blocked from moving on to the study plan. Instructors can still customize the late penalty in diagnostic settings.   Gradebook New gradebook categories added to a section manager will be reflected in restricted access sections   Help The help has been improved and expanded (and moved to the bottom left of your screen) to make it easier to get point of service help when you need it.      (And if you want to know what else has happened this fall, check out this earlier article.) ... View more

Keep track of all the updates to Achieve throughout the semester! I will update this as releases occur--and there will be a different blog post for Spring 2021 releases.  New Features: The session timeout duration has being extended to 8 hours from 4 hours Instructors can view students' individual results for a diagnostic pre-test, study plan, or post-test Instructors can download LearningCurve student data to a CSV file "Master section" is now renamed to be "Section Manager" The confirmation banner that displays when admins and customer support copy a template for an instructor course so that the banner will include a link to the course. New insight cards available for student login activity and assignment score snapshots Changes:  Instructors will be able to preview and view results for diagnostic study plan items Added a message that tells students when they reach the target completion threshold in a diagnostic study plan Updated LearningCurve challenge question feature so users can identify the issue type and add an email if they want to be contacted Updates to assessments made in the section manager will flow down to section courses Students will no longer be able to access hidden assignments from the gradebook Copying a course will retain the weighted gradebook categories of the source course Empty gradebook categories won't be considered in the total course calculation Draft due dates will push from the manager section to restricted access sections (right now only the final due date is reflected) - (Writing Tools Only) Instructors will be able to edit a writing assignment up until the moment a student starts drafting a paper - (Writing Tools Only) ... View more

We had another release today and there are two things in there that you should know about: Timed assignment accommodations Insights widget library Timed Assignments: To start, the original assessment needs to have a policy with a time limit on it. Then, once that’s set, you will go to the Student Exceptions. Put in the student(s) name and select “Time accommodation” and adjust the amount of time that that student or group of students gets on the assignment. It’s that easy!        Insights Widget Library: Using this new functionality, you can pick the insight cards that make the most sense for you.  From the Insights tab, instructors will be able to “Add a Widget” You will be able to view the available cards and pick the ones that make sense.  Then, once the card is on your dashboard, you can always remove card and, even cooler, edit the card so that it works for you--for instance, adding a time range:     You can add a card more than once to have one version showing data for the last 7 days and one version showing data from ‘all time.’ You can also move the cards around to put the most important one first.  We will be adding more ‘cards’ throughout the year and we’ll be monitoring their usage so we know which insights are, well, the most insightful for our customers.    ... View more

Throughout the spring and summer, we’ve been listening to you and working on ways we can keep improving Achieve to make your experience and your students’ experience with the product better. As a result, here’s a long list of what you’ll see changed for Fall 2020 classes (and all of this is live as of today, save one noted item).   Start of Classes:  Students who attempt to register into an LMS deep linked course via the Achieve “enroll in a new course” option will see a message directing them to use their LMS. Instructors who attempt to use the “invite students” functionality will see a message alerting them that this invite functionality is not available to deep linked courses.    My Course: Under My Course, we have combined the Assignments and Course Plan tabs into one place, but with a filter that will allow you to select your View by Assignment or Course Content or Resource type.       Browse: The Browse tab has been retitled as Resources and the content reorganized and renamed to make it easier to find materials. In addition, we altered the view a bit so you can see more of the item name when you are selecting materials. In addition, we added a ‘select all’ option so you can find a series of content items, select and assign them at once.      Navigation:  We added navigation to make it easier to get back ‘home’ when you are in another part of Achieve.      Section Management: If you are using Section Management, instructors will now always see “View Sections” that will take them to a list of their sections. Sections are now listed on a single page (or more than one page, if you have over 100 sections). Section Coordinators can now add and remove questions from their assessments after students have started working and then push those updates down to restricted access sections. Once students have started the assessment in any of the sections, coordinators will see a new option that allows them to add and remove questions (but not to edit questions).    Orientation Quiz:  Each course will have an Orientation Quiz for you to assign to students (within the Welcome folder) to help students quickly understand how to work in Achieve.    Time Accommodations: As part of the assignment settings, instructors will have the option to add a time accommodation for students who get additional time on particular (or all) assignments. (This will be live before Fall 2020 classes start, but is not available yet.)    Batch Assignments: We have added the option to batch update gradebook category & assignment visibility, as well as the option to batch update assessment grading policies. (The latter is not in Read & Practice.) There is a new “add select all option” to the content library.   Instructor-Created Content: You will be able to name files and links while uploading your materials to the course. We have also added the option to rename files, assessments, writing assignments and links after those materials have already been added to the course.    Assignments: In certain types of Assignments, we added tags to show if the answer is correct or has been revealed, and we added a new visual to show when the assignment is complete.      Gradebook: Instructors now have the ability to add weights to Gradebook categories. And for LearningCurve Adaptive Quizzing assignments, instructors and students can view the date and time when a student reaches the target score.       Diagnostics / Study Plan (only in English and Chemistry): The study plan completion selector has more options (25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%) for the instructor to assign to students. In addition, for instructors, we combined pre- and final tests into a single reporting page for easier viewing.    Side by Side View of Writing Tools (English Only) Instructors can turn on a side-by-side view to see any draft alongside the current draft including peer reviews, view comments from previous feedback, and highlight and comment in this side by side view.  Students can also turn on a side-by-side view to review instructor feedback and access content support just as they would in full screen mode. Students will also be able to draft in side-by-side mode, use simple format commands and access their revision plan and mark tasks complete.   Updates to Peer Review with Comment Tool (English Only) Instructors are able to quickly scan all peer review comments made by a single peer reviewer and leave a comment. Instructors can come back any time and revise the comment to the student as new peer review activity happens. In addition, instructors can click on selected text and be taken to that spot in the draft for comment context.   Improved Peer Review Submission Tool (English Only) With this new view, instructors can now efficiently monitor peer review activity from a single view. Instructors can click in to view peer writer submission and leave a comment, as needed.     ... View more