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

Just this week we released a new feature to all LaunchPad and Writer’s Help courses: REEF Integration. REEF, i>clicker’s mobile response system, enables you to poll and quiz students using the devices they already bring to class--smart phones, laptops, tablets, and even i>Clicker remotes. What does this mean? As of today, you can link your REEF course to your LaunchPad course and quickly synchronize your students’ grades to LaunchPad. This allows students to have single sign-on with REEF and LaunchPad, and keep all their grades in one spot. We have a quick explanatory video for you. How does this work? In REEF, navigate to your REEF course’s Settings and copy the link from the LMS Sync tab (which is accessible from the REEF Settings icon/page). Then in LaunchPad, you will select “+ Add a new assignment” and you will now see the option for “Reef Course Link”. Set up the assignment, making sure to paste in that URL from REEF. Voila!  You now have a column for REEF in your LaunchPad gradebook. How much does this cost? As of today, 6 months of REEF access is only $5 when packaged with a Macmillan Learning Product. What a deal! How can I learn more about REEF or this integration between REEF and LaunchPad and get access to REEF? Reach out to your local Macmillan Learning representative for more information. ... View more

It is important not to forget that a main part of student learning takes place from actually reading the textbook - whether this textbook is either a traditional hardcover book or, with regard to what we will be talking about, an online version of the text. As a result, it is exceedingly necessary that an educator choose a text that is conducive to their own pedagogical values. What's more, given the increasingly online nature of higher education and content delivery, picking a text that excels in both of these areas may also be high on the priority list for instructors looking for a classroom textbook.  The eBook in LaunchPad does just that: it provides an integrative and immersive experience for student and educator alike. In what follows, I am hoping to show you some of the features of the LaunchPad eBook that I have utilized in my courses. But first, you will see below, that I have highlighted how to access the eBook from the main screen within the LaunchPad system. It is always displayed in the left tab menu for easy access. Let's check out "Chapter 1" and see what happens... Educators that have used LaunchPad in the past will be familiar with the drop down menu that breaks the chapter into various themes and sections. The eBook is organized in the same way. As such, it becomes easy to navigate because the student or instructor can topically navigate through the content, as opposed to having to thumb through the pages as is the case with a traditional textbook.  Within the actual eBook, you will see a couple of things I have highlighted in yellow below. First, I wanted to point out that the eBook in LaunchPad will always display the page number that corresponds to the material 'brick-and-mortar' textbook. This is especially helpful if you have a mixed bag of students, some of which may be using the eBook and others a traditional textbook. What's more, in terms of standard citation practices, I have found that having this page number easily allows students to cite the eBook using various scholarly formats - for example, APA or MLA. This way, there is no confusion, which is generally the case when citing an eBook or an online source. I also wanted to show you how there is interactive media content integrated directly into the eBook. For example, you will see that the yellow arrow shows a video clip that students can play from within the actual eBook - not having to jump back and forth between the book and some other place within the LMS platform.  In the screenshot below, there are several items which I have noted. Looking at the text that I highlighted, you will see that the instructor can add notes directly into the eBook, and these notes can be viewable by the entire class or made private, accessible exclusively to the instructor. You may also see that I can add a note to the highlighted material (more on this later).  Next, the circle in the upper right hand corner will draw your attention to additional notation features. For instance, you may add a general note to the top of this eBook page, you can clear all of your highlighting, or you can delete all of your notes. This allows for the ability to master edit this section of the eBook. Finally, I also wanted to highlight how the "Read On" button at the bottom of the page allows students to seamlessly continue learning and reading, right into the next section. In other words, there is no skipping back and forth between different screens or apps, giving both educator and student an environment that is similar, if not better, than a 'normal' reading context. Returning to the highlighting feature I mentioned earlier, you will see that once I select to actually highlight the text it will turn yellow. I have also, in the example below, selected to add a note to that particular highlighted material. The note, again, can be made viewable students or retained just for instructor notation. I have found this feature helpful when I have wanted to draw attention to a certain concept that the class may be using in a term paper or in that week's discussion post.  All in all, I have tried to give an overview of the eBook that is integrated within the LaunchPad system - highlighting, along the way, the quality of integration, between media and text, as well as the ability to pedagogically insert your own values as an educator directly into the eBook. As a result, I hope I have gone to show that the eBook is another example of the great interactive tools that are a part of the LaunchPad suite! ... View more

How would you like to give your students a form of assessment that only an online system, like LaunchPad, can offer? LearningCurve, one of the most exceptional features of LaunchPad, can do just that. By way of a brief introduction, LearningCurve is a form of adaptive assessment that conforms, dynamically, to how the student is doing during the duration of the assessment. For example, if the student is doing well, LearningCurve will select progressively harder questions and, conversely, if the student is doing poorly, LearningCurve will know to use easier questions for that specific student. In addition, if a student is struggling in one of the content areas of the chapter material, then LearningCurve will select more questions from that domain for the student to answer. For a more extensive account of LearningCurve, make sure to see the FAQ on LearningCurve embedded within LaunchPad and also the instructor's guide on the publisher's website. For the current blog post, I want to give you a brief glimpse of LearningCurve while, along the way, letting you know the experiences I have had using this product. If you have a test course set-up in LaunchPad or have used LaunchPad in the past, you will already know that there may be a couple 'mini' LearningCurve activities embedded within each chapter or module. As a case in point, below, there is a LearningCurve assessment that is focused in on the challenges of caregivers.  Clicking on it will reveal the following. You will see that this LearningCurve is focused on two content areas: caregiving styles and becoming boys and girls. You can also see that in order for the student to 'pass' the assignment - in other words, to earn full credit - they have to get to 300 points. This brings up another important point about LearningCurve. Students are guaranteed to earn full credit as long as they finish the assessment. If they do not, then they receive a zero. Personally, I have had many students tell me how much they prefer this form of testing over a traditional, timed quiz. Not only do they like the fact that they are certain to get full credit if they complete it, but they also tell me that the more engaged nature of LearningCurve helps them better retain the material from the chapter.  It is important to realize that the 300 isn't the point value for the assignment. This can be set from the home screen in LaunchPad and is usually, by default, assigned between 5 - 10 points. The 300 just signifies the points the student must earn within that particular LearningCurve. This makes for a kind of game-like experience, which I will explain in more detail later.   If you were to click on "View Sample Results" the system will display the following for you to see. Make sure to note that these sample results are in-progress, meaning that none of the students displayed have actually finished the assessment (since their grade would be 100%). It is also important to realize that if these students were not to finish this LearningCurve they would receive a zero from the system, since LearningCurve is, by default, a pass/fail adaptive assessment. What also is helpful is how the system breaks down the scores as per the content domains: caregiving styles and becoming boys and girls. As an educator, this allows me to see that material that the students are struggling with the most thereby informing my next lecture or what I want to present to the class during our next session together.  Let's click on "Preview as Student" at the bottom and see what happens... This screen, below, is what students will see when they login to a LearningCurve assessment. Listed are the content areas that are going to be covered so the student may go back and review these parts of the book or eBook if they so choose. Also shown is a link for students if they want some tips on how to do well on LearningCurve - this is especially helpful if the student has never used an adaptive assessment like this before.  Clicking on "Begin Activity" will take the student right into the first question. There are several things to note on this page. First, following the yellow arrow, the student can review the eBook directly from the LearningCurve assessment. Pedagogically, this is fantastic because it gives the student a seamless experience, not having to click out of the assessment to access the text, but being able to do it right from LearningCurve. What's more, the button will take the student directly to the section with the relevant information on it - talk about being easy and convenient.  The two yellow circles indicate possible options if the student doesn't feel like they know the answer to the question. They can select "Get a Hint" which will give them some clues as the nature of the answer; but, as you will notice, selecting this will also deduct a few points from point bar at the top, meaning they will likely have to answer additional questions to complete the full assessment. Alternatively, the student may pick "Show Answer" which would result in not earning any points on this particular question and would most likely prompt LearningCurve to select similar questions from this content pool in order to challenge the student before the assessment completes.  Highlighting the point bar, in the circle below, brings up how LaunchPad keeps track of the progress during the assessment. The goal is to get the blue, 15 points, all the way to the top of the bar, at 300. The student doesn't ever lose points, although they may not earn points and it may take them awhile to complete the assessment if they do not know the material very well. It is also almost impossible to complete the assessment by just guessing since LearningCurve throttles the questions according to the right or wrong answer. In other words, it would take a very long time to complete it by guessing at random.  Also, you may see that the student has the option to "Take a Break" as indicated by the button below. Selecting this will save the student's position within the assessment and will not deduct any points. In fact, the student has as much time as they need to finish or at least until the assignment comes due, as specified by the instructor on the homepage.  The ability to assess students in an engaged, interactive, and adaptive way in one of the major boons of the LaunchPad system. Without a supplemental online component, it is simply impossible to use an adaptive assessment, like LearningCurve, in a traditional brick-and-mortar environment. That's why, in the past, I have enhanced my 'in person' courses with an online LaunchPad and LearningCurve component. In this way, it is possible to get the best of both worlds. Plus, using an adaptive assessment like LearningCurve for an entirely online course is not a feature that every LMS platform has - thus making LaunchPad all the more appealing to instructors who want to use tools that are informed by the latest educational research showing the power of adaptive assessment to aid in student learning.  ... View more

There is a wealth of content and features in LaunchPad that are either not enabled by default, or take a little bit of digging to actually find. In this blog post, I am hoping to shed some light on this publisher provided material by showing where you can access it within the LaunchPad system and, then, by exploring what some of this content looks like. This includes, for example, things like lecture powerpoint slides, flashcards, video activities, and the instructor's resource manual. I will also add my own experience as an instructor in terms of what I have used in the classroom or what I have found to be helpful. Let's begin with where and how to access these materials within LaunchPad itself. You will notice that below, on the main screen of LaunchPad, the left menu frame contains the "Resources" button. Click on this to access another menu where you can sort these features in various ways. Below, you have the option to sort by type, chapter, or content that you've created. I have gone ahead and chosen to filter this by the content type to make it easier to categorize and understand. Once sorted in this way, it will bring-up the various categories of materials that are built into the LaunchPad system. Some of these include case study exercises, flashcards, videos, lecture slides, the instructor's manual, etc. You may also notice that I have indicated that there are two kinds of files: files that are geared toward students and can be accessed by them and files geared toward instructors. The yellow arrow pointing down indicates that there are more instructor resources that cannot be shown on the screen capture.  Taking as an example, under the instructor resources, the lecture slides, I have displayed a selected chapter below. I have used these kinds of materials in class before (when I was teaching a hybrid brick-and-mortar and online course).  I have found these slides to be extremely extensive and comprehensive, covering virtually all of the material that is embedded within the eBook or hard cover textbook. What also is nice is that you may edit, delete, or add slides in order to customize the lecture powerpoint toward your own pedagogical style.  As another example, in the following screenshot, I have included the instructor manual, which provides curriculum and pedagogical guidelines by which to structure your course. This can be really helpful if you are looking for an experiential activity or a new assignment to provide to your students. There are a lot of tips and tricks within each instructor manual and, making for easy access, they are broken up as per each chapter.  Lastly, I have selected the flashcard activity that can be available to students. This can be really helpful if you want to give your students a pedagogical aid by which to memorize or learn some of the key concepts of each chapter. You will notice that each flashcard also contains the page number where the student can go look-up the context wherein this concept is introduced.  In the forgoing, I have tried to highlight, briefly, some of the great resources that can sometimes remain "hidden" within LaunchPad. My goal was to demonstrate both how to access these student and instructor resources and also to provide a couple of examples of what some of these materials look like. I have found, as I have indicated as an example, the lecture slides to be exceptionally helpful in structuring my lecture and classroom time. What's more, it has been much more convenient for me to have these resources accessible over the internet and on LaunchPad as opposed to, say, carrying them on removable media or a USB drive. This way, they can be accessed from almost any computer or device - making you able to prepare for class or to teach virtually at any time! ... 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