Coffee with Colleagues is a casual, collaborative webinar series where instructors come together to share real-world teaching experiences, explore educational tools, and exchange practical strategies. Each session is designed to spark fresh ideas and foster community among educators—all over a virtual cup of coffee. We will provide you with the top tips and tricks that were taken away from each session. Read below for insight into designing a low-stress classroom for your students—our first event of the semester! How can we design learning spaces that are both rigorous and relaxing? This session tackled that question head-on, with instructors swapping strategies for building community, using humor and music, and making assessments feel less intimidating. If you’re aiming to reduce anxiety and boost motivation in your classroom, this content is a must-read. ... View more

Tackling Stress and Anxiety: Strategies For Resilient Students Presented by Christine Mancuso and Julie Moore Supporting students through stress and anxiety doesn’t have to add to your workload. This session offers practical techniques to help students manage mental health challenges while staying engaged and motivated. Discover how AI can simplify creating low-stress assessments, streamline feedback, and personalize support for struggling learners—all while giving you more time to connect with your class. Leave with actionable strategies to build a calmer, more resilient learning environment where students can thrive.   Watch the recording ... View more

Fostering belonging with AI Presented by Erika Martinez Creating an inclusive classroom is more important than ever, and AI tools can help make it easier. This session explores how to foster a sense of belonging for every student, with practical tips for designing activities, assignments, and communication strategies that support diverse learners. Learn how AI can streamline tasks like creating personalized materials or facilitating peer engagement, freeing up time to focus on what matters most: building connections and making every student feel seen and supported. Walk away with ready-to-use strategies and a new confidence in using AI to enhance your teaching.   Watch the recording ... View more

Read about iClicker's impact in first-year experience courses at Boise State University below. ... View more

As part of iClicker’s ongoing mission to make active learning more accessible to every educator, the team is always brainstorming features that make it easier to engage students and deepen their learning. You may have noticed iClicker’s newest feature, the Pre-Created Quiz. These are quizzes that you set up in advance for students to take during class within the iClicker Student App. Unlike Quick Start quizzes, a Pre-Created Quiz allows you to add an answer key and feedback ahead of time, randomize questions, and include a short-answer format. With these new in-class options, we wanted to share some ways that Pre-Created Quizzes can enhance learning in your course: 1. Checking for Understanding As an educator, you can kickstart your class with a Pre-Created Quiz to assess students’ understanding of assigned readings or homework – or quiz them at the beginning and end of class on the same topic to gauge what they’ve learned that day. These in-class quizzes will introduce students to your testing style in a low-stakes environment and help identify areas that may need further attention. 2. Flexible Learning Pace Pre-Created Quizzes give students the ability to navigate between questions and respond at their own pace. With this flexibility, you can promote individualized learning experiences and accommodate diverse learning speeds.  3. Efficient Grading and Immediate Feedback When you create your quiz before class, you can upload a pre-set answer key and feedback for each question. When students complete the quiz, their responses are instantly graded, and they can see your feedback and the correct answers for each question. Educators save time on grading responses, and students get immediate feedback that reinforces the concepts they’re learning.  4. Customization With Question Variety iClicker’s Pre-Created Quizzes support both multiple-choice and short-answer question formats. Customize your quiz questions with a variety of question types to keep quizzes engaging, promote critical thinking, and cater to your students’ different learning styles. 5. Encouraging Academic Integrity Pre-Created Quizzes give educators the ability to randomize question order for each student as they take their quiz in the iClicker Student App. Differing the question sequence from student to student helps mitigate the risk of cheating during quizzes, ensuring a fair and secure assessment environment. 6. Digital Transition Pre-Created Quizzes are an easy way to start replacing traditional paper quizzes with digital alternatives. The digital format lets students work in the environment they are most accustomed to, and it helps you make the transition to a more digital classroom. It also contributes to environmental sustainability by reducing the need for physical materials in the classroom. A Pre-Created Quiz may require a little more work up-front to create, but it offers so many advantages when it comes to streamlining your grading and feedback process and engaging students in new ways. As the expert on your own course, you’re sure to uncover even more ideas for making the most of this quiz format. How do you plan to use Pre-Created Quizzes with your students? ... View more

Learn how iClicker makes active learning simple! In this video, instructors share how they use iClicker to enable students to answer questions in real-time, effectively assess their comprehension and promote active participation. By integrating IClicker into your classroom, you can facilitate new teaching methods like peer instruction, where students initially respond to questions individually and then engage in group discussions. This method is just one of the many ways iClicker fosters collaborative learning, making the classroom an engaging and interactive environment. iClicker is more than just a tool—it's a catalyst that can help you create a vibrant, participatory, and collaborative learning experience in your classroom. ... View more

Every instructor has heard that dreaded question from students: “When am I ever going to use this in my real life?” As an instructor, it may seem clear that if the material wasn’t relevant, it wouldn’t be taught. But oftentimes, simply telling students that what they’re learning is relevant isn’t enough. Many students have a difficult time making connections between their coursework and the outside world on their own, and they need instructors to provide context. These students often get labeled as disinterested, but they’re just missing that deeper connection to the material. What really is relevance in education? Relevance in education means relating the material to another concept or topic in a way that is meaningful and engaging. If students aren’t making connections between the material and their own lives and experiences, they’re going to have trouble remembering and engaging with the material. This can lead to disinterested students and poor learning outcomes. Creating an active learning environment for students has proven to be one of the most effective teaching methods and yields better results in the classroom. A great way to actively engage students in the learning process is to ask them to think critically about the communities they are a part of. Some ways to encourage students to think about their communities include using real-world case studies, getting students to interact with the environment outside the classroom, getting to know the students and using culturally responsive teaching, and providing students with intended learning outcomes. Methods to help make the material relevant to students: 1. Use real-world case studies and examples By using real-world case studies, instructors provide a necessary link between the classroom and the world beyond it. Case studies allow students to process concepts in action and create a deeper understanding of the material. 2. Get students to interact with the environment outside the classroom The author of Adding Relevance to a Biology Lab Experience With Plastic Waste and Social Media Justin Shaffer has some fresh new ideas on how to get students to interact with their outside environment. After first establishing a connection between course content and the outside world, Shaffer recommends having students talk about the content and its connection and share it with tools they’re used to using. Since so many students actively use social media, Shaffer has students “take pictures, record videos, and interview themselves and each other” about the content and the connection to the outside world, and share the final outcome to the social media site of their choosing. This helps students document and share what they’re learning, and how it’s relevant. 3. Get to know your students and use culturally responsive teaching Instructors can’t provide relevant examples to their students if they don’t know their students. Getting to know students and their interests can help instructors provide context and examples that stick with the students. Culturally responsive teaching allows students to draw on their own lived experiences to make connections with the material. Once familiar with the students, culturally responsive teaching becomes that much easier. 4. Provide prospective students with the intended outcomes of the class Providing prospective students with the intended outcomes of the class will help students pick the right courses for their interests and learn about transferable skills. The course name often doesn’t provide students with information about what the day-to-day is like and what knowledge they will be leaving the classroom with. A course that might not seem relevant to a student’s life might provide the transferable skills they need for a future career they’re interested in pursuing. Providing upfront and reiterating throughout the term the objectives of the class is extremely beneficial to students and can set them up to appreciate the relevance of the course from the beginning. 5. Frame the course around a question students care about The author of Becoming a Learner: Realizing the Opportunity of Education Matthew Sanders does this with his own courses and recommends other educators try it. Try to frame the course around a question that students really care about and want to know the answer to. By framing the course this way, each lesson goes toward answering the question. This provides relevance to students as they see how the material relates to the question to be answered. Relevance is an important part of teaching, and can have lasting effects on students. Most importantly, providing students with relevance for their course material allows them to make connections that help the information stick. Learning doesn’t happen independent from the real world and experience; these connections help all of us retain information and contribute to our communities. Relevance also helps students to prepare for their careers by being able to relate their course to the outside world, and recognize transferable skills. With a deeper understanding of their course materials, students will be able to discuss the importance of what they’re learning with family and friends. ... View more

Why not include all of your grading and student evaluation in the same place? That's what the "Gradebook" in LaunchPad is specifically designed to do. In this blog post, I will walk you through some of the key features of the "Gradebook" page in LaunchPad as well as describe my own experience using it for my courses - things that I have found helpful or ways in which I let it inform my teaching.  On the main screen, you will notice under the menu column on the left-hand side, there is a button named "Gradebook" - clicking on this will take you to a table that lists the current scores for every student in your course.  The below screenshot is what appears after clicking the "Gradebook" button. In this course, you may notice that I have left the display options set to their default settings. As an alternative, you may tell LaunchPad to order the grades by highest to lowest overall score, the amount of time students are logged into the system, or other factors of your choosing. In the furthest left column, this is the current total grade for the particular (redacted) student in the course. This is nice because it gives me, the instructor, as well as the student a convenient place to view the progress in the course - without having to calculate anything. You may also notice the import and export scores options in the row towards the top. This is an excellent feature if you are required by your institution to keep a copy of your grading in their own LMS platform as well. By clicking on a specific student name, you will be taken to a screen that provides more details germane to that student. This allows you to make changes to that student's grades - for example, you may alter the points for that exact assignment, give the student an exemption, or provide individual feedback. In order to do this, you will need to click on the specific assignment you want to access. See the below yellow arrow and circle as an example.  Once selected, the options highlighted in the following screenshot come up. Again, you will notice how the system allows you to provide two forms of feedback - one that is viewable to the student and one that is only accessible by the instructor. This screen will also allow you to see the specific items within the assignment that the student completed, either correctly or incorrectly. The yellow circle below indicates the place where you can add feedback to the content after or before the student completes it. In order to help you evaluate the class in a way that is more fair, LaunchPad also provides several statistical analyses. This has helped me in terms of receiving feedback on specific assignments that may have been too challenging or the concepts within the assignment may not have been explained by me as well as they could have been. As a result, this sometimes leads me to alter the point structure and curve of that specific evaluation. By clicking on "Class Statistics" you will receive statistical feedback. You will find, below, that LaunchPad represents that data in graph form making it easy to visualize the distribution of scores. This is presented with the numerical analysis adjacent to and below the graphic outputs. The "Gradebook" gives you, as an instructor, the option to see this kind of data as per each individual assignment or, in a more macro sense, for an entire student. There are so many 'deep features' that I was not able to talk about in this post that the "Gradebook" allows you to do. In my experience, it is helpful to just get in there and play around with the different options, perhaps in a dummy or test course. This lets you change options and settings without having to worry about it effecting the grade of the students you may be currently evaluating. Furthermore, by migrating all of your evaluating to the "Gradebook" in LaunchPad, it gives both you and the students a convenient and accessible place by which to access and monitor progress in the course. "Gradebook" in LaunchPad is comparable, if not more so, to evaluation tools found in other LMS platforms and systems. It is for these reasons that I have chosen to store my evaluation data solely within the LaunchPad system - and I know the students appreciate the ease of this, too! ... View more

The discussion board is one of the great features of LaunchPad that is not enabled by default and can sometimes go unnoticed. In this blog post, I hope to show you how to take advantage of this really useful pedagogical tool as well as offer my own insights as an instructor on how I use discussion boards, and what I have found as helpful in the past. Discussion boards are especially essential if you are using LaunchPad for an entirely online course or as your primary LMS platform. By integrating discussion board posts, responses, and feedback directly into the chapter module, the student gets a seamless learning experience being able to click through the content all in the same place. I will assume that you have a basic understanding of how to set-up and log into your LaunchPad (if not, there are excellent tutorial videos and blog posts on this site as well as others). On the main screen, under each chapter or module, you will see a button that says "Add to this Unit" - when you click on it, you will get the option to "Create new..." Clicking on "Create new..." gives you the "Add a new assignment" window. You will notice that I circled in yellow the discussion board option. Once clicking on it, a blank discussion board is added to your chapter or module. If the screenshots are any indication, I tend to place my discussion boards at the end of the chapter or module. There are really two reasons why I do this: First, it makes sense that applied learning should come after the more didactic material presented during the assignments and eBook. This gives the student a chance to show off what they have learned. Second, I have found that by being at the end of the chapter (and being worth 10 points, a large portion of the chapter grade), the student engages more rigorously with the material. I weight my discussion boards in this way in order to encourage original and substantive thinking - stressing that a couple sentences as a response is never going to be sufficient.  Once clicking on what I have labeled as the "Chapter 7 Discussion" the below window will appear in LaunchPad. You will notice that this image is taken from a course that I have taught in developmental psychology. I create my discussion post prompts by scanning for the main themes of the chapter and trying to have the students integrate them with other major topics that we have covered in the past. Here, you will see that I ask them to revisit the nature/nurture debate (discussed in earlier chapters) but this time in terms of autism spectrum disorder. My goal here is to push the students to engage critically with the material - not necessarily taking either the nurture or nature side but being able to cogently argue for each side of the paradigm.  When the posts are expanded, you can see the entire original contribution done by the student as well as the two responses that I require as part of their grading. This is helpful because the students are able to click through and easily see what post has responses, which ones don't, or whose post may be exemplary - garnering several responses or a longer discussion. While the below image is taken from my instructor view, the student sees a very similar layout and user interface.  Strickly accessible to instructors, in the image below, the "Results" button lets the professor grade the posts easily and efficiently. On the main page, you will see the various statistics for this particular discussion post allowing you - if you want - to curve or alter the assignment grading. Or, this can also be useful if you want to see how well the students performed on this assignment thereby perhaps providing feedback regarding the retention of the chapter content or the efficacy of the discussion prompt.   By clicking on the student name (redacted below), you can see where I circled in yellow the quick information that LaunchPad provides about the number of posts the student has completed and their number of replies. This allows me to quickly see if the student has met the criteria of one original post and two replies to their classmates. Furthermore, it brings up all of the students' responses so that I can grade them in one place - as opposed to having to search through all of the posts for this specific student. Not pictured but at the bottom of this screen, there is a place for the instructor to leave direct feedback to a particular student. This is really useful in providing individual instruction to a student that may be struggling with some of the chapter concepts or if you want to address a specific issue with the student's discussion board post; for example, 'you forgot to respond to your classmates' or 'the authoritative parenting style has shown to be most efficacious for healthy development and functioning, not the authoritarian style (see page 211)'. I hope that I have given some useful tips that will help you integrate discussion board assignments into your LaunchPad course! From my past experience, I can for certain say that students really appreciate having all of the assigned content grouped together in one place. Plus, it makes for a more streamlined grading and teaching process. ... View more

I'm a Macmillan Learning rep and I really enjoy empowering professors and students with our digital tools. Throughout the LaunchPad implementation process at any institution, I listen to what my professors need, pluck out the core questions, and find the answers. One common question is this: "How do I communicate with my students around LaunchPad in order to make it most effective?" In response, I compiled this document: LaunchPad Tips and Syllabus Snips Final Version.docx  The syllabus was originally crafted by two creative individuals, Professor Toni Henderson and her representative, Jennifer Cawsey. It has been helpful for both current and prospective LaunchPad adopters and I hope it will be helpful for you! ... View more