In Part 1 of the series “LaunchPad”, I focused on how to use LaunchPad in your classes and what tools are helpful to use.  Part 2 of the “LaunchPad” series went on to discuss the most important aspect, the benefits to the students in using the product. The 3 rd and final part of the “LaunchPad” series is the benefits to the instructor. As an instructor, I continue to appreciate the benefits of efficiency, ease, and freeing up class time to teach using hands-on activities.  In freeing up class time, I have been able to improve my teaching to apply the information, complete activities, and drive concepts home more for students.  The use of digital products also enables our culture’s desirable use of technology in the classroom.  Breaking down these instructor benefits in more detail, let’s start with the most significant benefit to me…efficiency. I am so grateful for the time digital learning saves me from grading and entering grades.  Assigning LearningCurve assignments, as well as learning to use LearningCurves, is fast and easy.  Having students take their LearningCurves and quizzes online frees up more class time for me to teach and complete application activities.  I also appreciate that the quizzes and LearningCurves are already created for me.  Again, it saves me time not to have to write these, and I can even edit them if I wish.  I am also so pleased and confident when I can provide students with more affordable options since purchasing the online version is usually lower cost.  A repeat from a previous post, it forces students to actually USE their text, and delve into the material.  Especially in the communication discipline, I find it provides students with a better understanding, with the ability to apply it, and to RETAIN it.  Thus, I have seen my students be more successful and have higher grades.  Since students all have different learning styles, it adds the benefit to serve many different learning styles.  To reiterate, it also gives students an opportunity to use technology in their learning. In summary, my 3-part series “LaunchPad” discussed the digital products I use, how I use LaunchPad, the benefits to the students and to the instructor.  The benefits I’ve seen have been well worth the use.  If you have any hesitation on beginning the process of using digital products, I emphasize that it is not difficult, and is fast and easy to use.  If you still waver on the decision, Macmillan offers many opportunities to train and help you.   With the benefits to the students and instructor and the ability to get ahead on the latest technological savvy classroom, I encourage you to jump on board. ... View more

In Part 1 of the series “LaunchPad”, I focused on how to use LaunchPad in your classes and what tools are helpful to use. The important aspect, besides how and what to use in LaunchPad, is the benefits of using LearningCurve to the students.  I discovered these benefits from observation of students and their grades, speaking with them, and surveying students at the end of the semester.  I ascertained most students see the benefits and appreciate use of LearningCurve.  Students are benefitting by preparing in reading their material more, retaining more information, appreciating the ease of use, being provided an affordable option, and providing successful learning opportunities in a stress-free environment. To break down the benefits more precisely, the most common benefits include:  Students learn and retain the material better. In the past, I always struggled with encouraging students to read their text; however, they now actually read the e-text and remember the content!  The digital platform is user friendly.  Students appreciate having to only log in through one site (through BlackBoard), and once they have logged in the first time, they never are required to log in again if they enter through BlackBoard.  It surprised me how much students dislike login pages because they won’t remember their login information.  Having immediate access to the text online anytime from anywhere is extremely helpful.  Students have been known to access the text and quizzes from school, home and even work during their busy, mobile schedules. Students concur that online quizzes from home are preferred over in-class quizzes and exams.  They value the ability to take an exam on their own time when they are comfortable, because they are able to use resources, and have the ability to take the quiz during the time of day they learn best or when they have time.  Students also like that they can start an assignment, save it, and return to it later.  In short, students are “testing” well because they are completing it in a stress-free environment. It is also satisfying for students to see their grade transfer and appear in their BlackBoard gradebook.  It provides for a productive feeling with immediate feedback.  It also keeps students from having to “record-keep” or save hard copies of assignments, quizzes and exams. Students expressed gratitude that the professor actually used the materials that students were required to purchase, and they were grateful for the reasonable price.  As surprising as it is to me, students complain that many professors never refer to or use the products students spent a lot of money on.  In using this product, students are offered an affordable option that they will indeed use and learn from. The digital product saves students time in many ways, from the ability to purchase e-text access online (no trips to the expensive bookstore!), having access any time, having their grades tracked and transferred for them, etc… In the high technology culture we now live in, most students have trouble keeping their technology devices put away.  Further, many young students arrive at college having greatly used technology in their middle and high school education.  Whether we like it or not, simply put, this is how they now learn.  Therefore, if many students learn from technology, prefer technology, and don’t want to go without it, I see it as a benefit to harness technology and incorporate it into their learning. Check back for the third and final post on how using LaunchPad can benefit you, the instructor. ... View more

“Professor, may we take more quizzes than what’s assigned?  Will you go ahead and assign more LearningCurves?  I’d like to do some ahead of schedule.”  Do these questions from students seem like an unrealistic dream?  As unrealistic as they sound, they have indeed been asked on numerous occasions since I started using LearningCurve assignments through LaunchPad. Before using digital products, most instructors dream of having motivated students who plan ahead and have a desire to learn.  Although we may have a few of these students here and there, they are not common.  Therefore, when I have a product that encourages a student to work hard and work ahead, I jump on it.  Using Macmillan Digital Products, including LaunchPad and its LearningCurve, have proven to be extremely beneficial to my students and me (the instructor).  I’d like to encourage you to jump on board, too, by sharing the following four helpful aspects to using LaunchPad:  1.) Which products I use; 2.) How I use LaunchPad; 3.) The benefits to the students; and 4.) The benefits to the Instructor.  In this first part of my LaunchPad series, I will focus on which products I use and how I use them. First, let’s start with which digital products I use.  I have used several different publishing companies’ digital learning, and LaunchPad is easily the most user friendly thus far.  I currently use LaunchPad for both “Real Communication” (Intro to Speech Communication) and “A Speaker’s Guidebook” (Public Speaking) texbooks. Second, how I use LaunchPad may be helpful.  It’s important to note that when using digital learning, such as LaunchPad, it should appear in your syllabus so students realize the importance of their use of the product to their learning and overall grade from the beginning of the semester. I have LaunchPad mentioned in four places within my syllabus to drive home the significance.  Within my syllabus, LaunchPad appears in the sub headed sections, “Required Text/Materials”, “Course Policies: Exams/Quizzes”, “Grading Evaluation”, and “Class Schedule.” An example of one of the places in my syllabus that LaunchPad appears is in the image below.  You will also see from the image that students have immediate access to the Publisher’s Help Desk contact information.  This will ensure the instructors do not have to deal with any technical difficulties that may arise. Next, let’s also look at how LaunchPad appears in my BlackBoard (Learning Management System/LMS), because this makes access to LaunchPad for both the instructor and students so easy.  Additionally, it enables integration so grades can be transferred over from LaunchPad to the BlackBoard gradebook. Now, more importantly, what types of assignments are in LaunchPad?  The specific assignments I use in LaunchPad range from a PRCA (Self-Assessment Score of Communication Apprehension), the e-text, Chapter LearningCurves, “What About You?” Self-Assessments, Tips & Techniques (for Anxiety Reduction), and Videos (Speech samples) and 2-minute video clips.  All of the assignments help students retain and apply the material. As you’ll see, the home page of LaunchPad is similar to a modern technological look students are familiar with.  Furthermore, it is user friendly by having gradebook, calendar, e-text, and assignments with due dates all at first glance when they enter LaunchPad. A favorite assignment feature on LaunchPad is the LearningCurve.  Macmillan describes LearningCurves as an adaptive quizzing and personalized learning program that puts the concept of "testing to learn" into action. It is game-like quizzing motivating students to engage with their course.    In the sample question, you can see students will be shown if they answered correctly.  If they answered incorrectly, it will further explain why he or she missed it, followed by an opportunity to try again, get a hint, access the e-text, or have it look up the answer for them.  The student has a total number of points to reach to finish the quiz, so the more they answer correctly from the start, the more points and faster they will reach their total.  If they are missing concepts, they will be asked about those again to ensure they learn the content.  At the bottom of the screen, they are able to track their progress. After covering how I use the digital products in my classes as well as the great tools available, return in a few days to read part 2 and 3 of this series which will focus on the most important part: the benefits of using LaunchPad to the students and instructor. ... View more

Do you get frustrated by computers, tablets, and phones in your class? Do you feel that students are not paying attention to the material you carefully crafted? In a recent conversations with a few intro biology instructors, I discovered some innovative solutions to the in-class technology conundrum. Firstly, acknowledging that everyone is a different learner is important. Sure, some students might be browsing Twitter, but some individuals need stimulation and input to be engaged and effective listeners. In the same way, a student with back problems might choose to stand rather than sit for an hour of class. If one student's screen is distracting other students, that is a different scenario. You have the option to intervene. However, consider instead creating a “digital district” at the start of class to proactively prevent this issue. You know that all the students with computers are going to cluster on the side of the lecture hall with electrical outlets. So at the start of class, indicate that students using devices can sit in a particular area. Now comes the fantastic part of this deal. You have instant access to any online resource through the students using devices in-class! You let the digital district know that you may call on any student with a device at a moment's notice to look up a fact or confirm a finding. So imagine you are midway through a lecture and a student asks a questions that you don’t know off the top of your head. You might normally respond, “I’ll get you an answer for next time”. But now that you have a Digital District, the world wide web is at the fingertips of your students with devices. Simply ask one or two of them to investigate and come back to get an response a few minutes later. This makes researching, fact checking, and understanding additional material part of the learning process. ... View more

I got my assignment for teaching courses next semester. I’m teaching four sections of a course that I have not taught in two years: the research essay. I’ve composed my themes (two, because I’m an overachiever): Conservation and the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, two of my research and teaching loves. This next semester is particularly rough because right now I’m teaching the course just before the research paper course, and those students who choose to take my course again are going to call me on my every move and complain that I “did that last semester.” I need to shake things up, and LaunchPad can help with this. When I was teaching at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, two librarians, Vicky Lebbin and Dave Brier, taught a 50-minute class to first-year composition students on the research question. In that workshop, they asked students to draw (artistically) their research question or thesis (depending). The theory, Dave explained to me, is that if the student can’t draw it, it isn’t concrete or specific enough.  I’m taking that one step further and having them storyboard their research essay. A storyboard is frequently used in the film industry as a planning tool to describe or demonstrate a television episode or film. It is also used in larger graphic novels. These storyboards set the tone for what is to come. Unlike the film storyboards, however, the storyboards I assign are not complex and not drawn or pasted on some type of sturdy material. They do, however, serve the same function.  I will have students post up their storyboards on LaunchPad in Powerpoint form, allowing other students to view them. Viewing other people’s work helps students to increase their self-efficacy because viewing success in others can lead to a student saying, “I can do that!” In the way I’m describing, the storyboard acts as an outline to the research essay. The PowerPoint slides can be arranged any way a student wants, allowing a student to play with organizing an essay in different forms, giving him or her the opportunity to branch out of tried and true ways (think five-paragraph essay, which while having its place, really won’t work for every type of writing students will encounter while in college). Having peers review the storyboard helps a student to refine what he or she wants to present to a reader and provide him or her with yet another tool to help piece together a fully fleshed-out idea of what that final research product will look like. Yet another benefit to the storyboard is that a student can then self-identify what areas of the essay need more support or to tighten the focus and to eliminate some sections of the proposed essay altogether. One of the things that I love about LaunchPad is that I can use it as an archival database. If I start to notice trends or want to check to see if a method or modality works, everything is contained in one place. I can go back to test my theory to see if it has merit. Because I teach using multimodality and digital tools, my students ultimately benefit from LaunchPad, too. Through the use of LaunchPad to upload the assignments on to a discussion post, the students then have an archive to turn to, to view different ideas of presenting material--it’s another tool in the proverbial toolbox, and it’s a tool with many examples. Keeping the storyboards in one place also allows me to demonstrate previous successes to a new group of students every semester that I teach this course. I can access previous courses easily and quickly through LaunchPad’s dashboard, and those storyboards I show to students can create a new generation of storyboards that are even better than when I first created this assignment. For me, having easy access to digital assignments is helpful in multiple ways. College freshmen need to see successful examples, and LaunchPad can provide me with the digital archive that helps me to not only teach courses, but to keep previous assignments, refine those assignments, and ultimately (if I choose to go down this route) to write a publication on the assignments and trends that I’ve noticed. It all adds up to a more robust classroom that I can access any time to help me design, refine, and demonstrate. ... View more

The first thing that your students will see when they sign onto LaunchPad is the "Welcome Page." The default settings automatically include a couple widgets: an RSS feed from Scientific American and a list of upcoming assignments that are due. However, there are many ways that you can customize this page to fit your teaching style.  In this post, I am hoping to show you how I have used the "Welcome Page" in my courses. This demonstration will aid you in both learning about ways to customize LaunchPad as well as give you some pedagogical tips that could be incorporated into your own teaching style and LaunchPad courses.  You will notice, below, that when you are in instructor view you have the ability to edit the "Welcome Page." Following the yellow arrow and clicking on the "Edit Page" button will bring up the edit screen. The edit screen, featured in the screen capture below, lets you do several things. For example, you can rearrange the different widgets to different spaces on the page, you can add a new widget, and you can delete a widget. You may also notice that the two widgets that are enabled by default are an RSS feed for Scientific American and a list of the upcoming assignments that are due.  Let's say that we want to add a new widget. To do this, you would click on one of the empty yellow boxes or where it says add new widget.  Once you do this, the following gray box will appear - I have circled it in yellow. You have a few options here of what you can do. You can, of course, add or re-add an RSS feed from Scientific America, add your own custom RSS feed, add or re-add the upcoming assignment widget, and, finally, you can create your own. As a tip, in the past, I have had students use the Scientific America RSS feed to write a one page article that summarize some of the current research coming out of the psychology field. As an educator, I think it is important to stay as up-to-date as possible on the current literature and latest developments within the field. And, as a result, having this continually updated feed on the home page is a nice resource to utilize if you want to have students engage with current research in this manner.  To give you a concrete example, let's click on "Create Your Own." This will bring up a dialogue box that looks similar to an HTML page you can create within the module and chapter system of LaunchPad. This is great because it allows you to edit and customize the widget pretty extensively. Below is an example of how I have used this to create my own widget on the "Welcome Page." A lot of time, I have found it helpful, especially when teaching a fully online course, to post a class wide, at least weekly, update about the upcoming material that may also include technical and logistical notes. You can do this on the "Welcome Page" and students will see this every time they sign onto LaunchPad.  Posting a weekly update on the "Welcome Page" is one way I have used this LaunchPad feature in my courses. Also, as I have indicated, the Scientific American RSS feed is great if you are trying to help students stay on top of the most recent research and literature coming out of your discipline.  Overall, I hope that I have been able to give you some ideas about ways to customize the "Welcome Page" in LaunchPad and, in addition, given you some ideas about how to incorporate it into your own teaching style. ... View more

Customizing the content in your LaunchPad course is the first step toward making it uniquely yours. For this blog post, I want to show you how to do precisely this. I will first walk you through the different kinds of assignments and features that can be added to LaunchPad while also providing a few personal anecdotes from my own experiences teaching. Then, I am going to show you one of the customizable features that I use most often: "Document Collection". By adding this to your course, you will be able to attach virtually any file format (for example, PDF or a PowerPoint file) so that it is accessible and downloadable by your students. To begin, you will see below that I have highlighted the "Add New" button that appears in the home screen in LaunchPad. Click on this to access the customizable content window. Once selected, a window with eleven different options appears. I am going to briefly walk you through each of these. You may also be able to read the description that LaunchPad provides in the window as well.  The "Unit" selection is generally used as a kind of module placeholder for other content. In other words, it will help you build and structure your course. Use this if you want to create a unique module on the LaunchPad homepage. I typically select this to advertise extra credit opportunities or to post a large assignment like a final research paper. Next is the "Discussion Board" option. Be sure to check out my other blog post that goes into more detail about this feature: Using Discussion Boards in LaunchPad.  But, again, this is an excellent way to integrate your course fully into a single LMS platform - this is something that I have done and found it very convenient and helpful.  Third on the list is "Document Collection" which is something that I am going to go into a lot more detail later on in this blog post. As a result, I won't say too much right now other than this will allow you to upload and make accessible various kinds of documents to your course. You will also be able to type on an HTML page and include instructions or other kinds of content like URL links. Speaking of links, the next option will let you post a URL exclusively by itself. This can be helpful if you want to give students quick and direct access to a certain webpage or online resources. This would be opposed to having them click into a HTML page and then selecting the link from within the text. In general, this is a pretty standard and straightforward feature. The "Homework" content is somewhat of a new feature to LaunchPad. It will allow you to provide a very customizable experience for the student by bringing together and interlinking eBook content, APA or other professional standards and learning objectives, and quiz questions over chapter or lecture material. I would recommend creating a test course, like I have done here, and playing around with this one as there are many ways in which it can be deployed in your course. Next, the "HTML Page" is a pretty standard feature on other LMS platforms and other university content delivery systems. In it, you can edit a page much like you can a word processor page. I have found that this is helpful if I want to provide quick instructions to students or include a link with some context around it.  The "Offline Assignment" option is great if you are teaching a hybrid course, both online and in person. For example, if you give a large exam or assign a big research paper in the brick-and-mortar classroom, then you can use this to provide an entry in the gradebook in LaunchPad. This way, the students will be able to view current and up-to-date grades even though the assignment was not provided through LaunchPad.  "Link Collection" that is pictured below, is a hybrid between the "Link" and "HTML Page" features. It is pretty straightforward in that you will be able to edit an HTML page and attach, in a separate way, a URL link. By selecting "Quiz", you will be prompted to create your own quiz questions or select them from the pre-established test bank. I am sure you are familiar with at least a similar feature if you have any experience with teaching online. An analogous logic applies in LaunchPad, allowing you to develop your own form of timed quizzing (or you can use the built-in adaptive quizzing found in LearningCurve). Using the "Video Assignment" feature is great if you want to upload your own media lectures to the course thereby making it much more personable and, perhaps, more pedagogically effective. You don't have to be super proficient in internet and video technology in order to do this. For example, you may embed a YouTube video you record right on the site or you may upload, for instance, a .mpg or .mpeg file recorded on your computer.  Finally, the "Dropbox" gives you a place to let students submit any kind of document - whether that be a final paper, research proposal, or weekly journal reflection. This will also create an entry in gradebook where you can render a grade for the document; furthermore, allowing you to provide personalized feedback to individual students.  In the last part of this blog post, I will take a more detailed look at the "Document Collection" feature largely because I use it so extensively and I would guess, by extension, that other instructors do as well.  Below is the screen that will appear after having selected it from the original menu (above). You will notice that there is an option for you to select "Attach a Document".  Once you click on this, a prompt will show-up for you to browse for the file you want to upload. Again, the file type is really irrelevant, since the system can handle anything from a PDF file to a PowerPoint slideshow or a Word document.  I have selected a PDF file. You can also see that the "Description" box acts as basically an HTML page where you can provide context for the file or instructions on what the students are supposed to do with the attached document.  This last screen shot is virtually the same screen that the students will see. You will notice that I have highlighted how the uploaded document appears giving the students the option to download it.  I hope that this outline of customizable content in LaunchPad has been helpful in giving you an overview of the ways in which you can add your own material into the system or, at least, riff off of the default assignments that are already provided.  I have found LaunchPad to be extremely user-friendly when I have attempted to incorporate my own documents and brick-and-mortar assignments into an online platform. By extension, I think that the students, as well, have appreciated how seamless and efficient it is to have mid-semester content (like an extra credit assignment) appear within the user interface.   ... 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

When I first started working with LaunchPad, I took one look at that Instructor’s console and shivered. “What could possibly be in there that I would need?” I thought to myself. I didn’t exactly vow to never open it, but I certainly avoided it. My energy was turned toward populating the course I was scheduled to teach. As a result, I knew what I wanted to do with LaunchPad, but I was unable to make it work within the grade book. I became frustrated. Assignments were not in the order I wanted them; there had to be a way to organize the grade book to suit my need for order. Knowing that the current line-up was not what I had envisioned, the second semester I decided to populate Launchpad by simply putting in each assignment as it appeared on my syllabus. For certain, I thought, anyway, that this way my assignments would be in date order. In other words, I opted to follow the schedule on my syllabus to populate LaunchPad. This method worked a little bit better, and I found myself not needing to rearrange my grade book--or wishing I could. However, as I insert new assignments, the same problem arose: the assignments would be out of order. I finally got brave. Enter the instructor console. I overcame my aversion to the console and learned that this little button could help so much. The general navigation and Launchpad settings is pretty self-explanatory. Click on that and the title of the course can be changed as well as what timezone the class is located, which is important because I teach in two different time zones, Hawaii and the Pacific Time Zone. From here, I can arrange the home page on LaunchPad. Since many of my students were requesting to have the most recent assignment on top of the screen rather than sorted by the default settings in LaunchPad, I discovered that I could change this section to suit their needs. The batch due date update is really important if you're going to be teaching the same class the following semester. In this place you can easily plug in the previous semester’s start and end date, the new start date, and all of the assignments will fall into line (assuming, of course, that you’ve copied your previous course instead of starting fresh). In other words, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. All of the due dates will be adjusted accordingly. The only downfall to this is if you are changing your syllabus for the coming semester, keeping some items and eliminating others. If that's the case, it appears as if your new assignments will be out of order from the previously included assignments, but that is simply not the case. There is a place to go to reorder all of your assignments to accommodate changes in the syllabus.     The grade book preferences really is the Holy Grail of the instructor console. In this spot, you can easily put in the percentage for passing the class (even though the universities I work for state that 60% is passing, I put it as 70% so that the students strive for that “C” grade), ask LaunchPad to put in zero grades for any assignment that has not been completed on time, and re-arrange each of your assignments so that they line up according to your syllabus and sensibilities. A word of caution here with respect to the automatic “0” grades: if you have assignments to be graded manually, on the day after the manual assignment is collected, “0” grades go through. My students didn’t panic here--I told them what was going on, and they seemed to accept it as if it were a part of daily life. To re-order the assignments, click on the blue “Show Assignments” toggle. There, your categories will appear. You can then open up the categories to show everything that is contained under each category. You can not only re-number the categories here, but you can also re-number the assignments within each category. You can also remove categories that you may have accidently set up. This is now your customized grade book that reflects your own sensibilities and your own preference for order. One other fast note: You don’t have to go back out to the assignments page to go to another section on the Instructor Console. Just click on the blue button on the top that says, “Instructor Console” and you will arrive back at the main navigation for the Instructor Console. I hope this blog on using the Instructor Console is helpful for everyone! I can assure you that I was frightened of this spot--I didn’t want to break anything. But now that I have figured out how this can help me and make my life easier, I’m happy to share my findings with you! As always, email me if you have questions. My email is jilldahlman@yahoo.com, and I am happy to answer questions, share course materials, or even help you to come up with ideas to make your classroom LaunchPad friendly. ... 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

Keeping Students Engaged: A Tale from Introductory Chemistry (Part II) By Kevin Revell, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Chemistry and Consultant · Sapling Learning I’ve been experimenting with differentiated learning; that is, using different techniques to connect with students’ unique learning styles. As I mentioned in Part I, I’ve found using Sapling Learning’s online homework to be one of the most effective tools for student engagement, and it is fairly common for me to see >90% of my students doing their homework assignments. In this post, I would like to mention another technique which I’ve found helpful:  lecture recording. I first tried lecture recording with my organic chemistry class in the fall of 2012. Our school has a subscription to Tegrity (other products like Echo360 are also available), which enables the professor to record a voice-over of the screen projection. I use a tablet PC in class and provide skeletal slides beforehand. During class, I would work through the slides, and record the conversation. Because it was recorded in a live class and unedited, the audio was rough in parts, but if the students missed a topic, they could go back and listen later.   A few weeks into testing this out, our instructional technology coordinator let me know that my recordings had been watched 110 times! This was encouraging, so I continued it the following semester, in my large, introductory chemistry class. What I found was really interesting: while only 40% of my introductory chemistry students watched the lecture replays even once, about 10% of my students watched them voraciously. By the end of the semester, I had multiple students who had watched over twenty hours of class recordings. These results were included in paper published in J. Chem. Educ., available here. I found that many of the heaviest users were international/ESL students. Through the semester, several of these students told me how helpful this was for them, since they sometimes struggled to catch the subtleties of what I said in class. In fact, by mid-semester, if I said anything in class without turning the recording on, anxious hands would go up, reminding me to hit “start”. In the two semesters since, I’ve transitioned to recording content outside of class, and using it in either a flipped format, or simply having the lecture material available online for review. I increasingly find that students love the video format - it seems to be the preferred learning style for many in this generation. What about the correlation between viewing time and class performance? From what I’ve seen, the highest performing students don’t watch the recorded content as much, perhaps because they get it in class the first time. I think that completing homework correlates more closely with performance. Still, I believe that recorded lecture content can go a long ways toward supporting struggling students by helping them catch up on things they may have missed. And the more ways we can help our students learn, the better. Do you use online homework or lecture capture in your flipped or hybrid classroom? Tell us how these techniques have impacted engagement among your students in the comments below. ... View more

Keeping Students Engaged: A Tale from Introductory Chemistry (Part I) by Kevin Revell, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Chemistry and Consultant  · Sapling Learning Just before the spring 2012 semester, I learned that I would be teaching the introductory chemistry class at Murray State University. I confess that I was less than thrilled with the assignment. It was two nights a week during my son’s basketball season, it was a large class that I had not taught in a long time, and it was largely freshman, with plenty of non-science majors meeting gen-ed requirements.   After teaching organic chemistry for so long, this was going to be an adventure. To help things out, I decided to try a couple of new tools. For years, I had used a tablet PC in my lecture – posting skeletal notes before class, then fleshing out the concepts as we went through the class period. This semester, I decided to take this one step further and record the screen and audio for each lecture. And I wanted to use online homework. I had tried Sapling Learning in my organic course the semester before with terrific results. I was curious how this would translate to less-motivated students. About four weeks into class, I began to notice a few unusual positives. First, in a room with a capacity of 144 students, there were almost no empty seats. Second, the students were doing WELL. Even in the second unit, I found that over 90% of the students were attempting the homework. This was not the high-attrition course I had expected. Based on this, I decided to do a more systematic study: what was helping them succeed? How did the tablet-based lectures, the recorded lectures, and the online homework really contribute to student success? In order to investigate this, I began to correlate student performance with usage of the lecture-replay and online homework, and I administered a year-end survey to assess the student impressions of each tool. The full study was recently published in the Journal of Chemical Education, available here. One of the biggest gains I saw was in the area of retention. In the previous five full-semester classes, the pass rate for this course was 71%. In my spring 2013 course, it jumped to 90%, with no significant change in the standardized test scores. Interestingly, the number of A’s didn’t change much. It turns out there are students who will work every problem, study aggressively, and get the A regardless of how the course is presented. The big jump was in the number of B’s and C’s earned. Based on these results, I believe that the combination of tools helped students stay more engaged, practice more, and earn a B instead of a C, or a C instead of a D. And perhaps the most striking thing? Teaching introductory chemistry was an absolute blast. This semester, I actually asked to teach it again. I look forward to writing more on that in the weeks to come. ... View more

How to start flipping your course: part 3 Originally posted by Rebecca Celik, Ph.D. What’s the most important part of an experiment? Results. Flipping a course should be treated like any other scientific investigation, and the best way to measure its effectiveness is by analyzing student outcomes. In the final installment of this series, Dr. Amanda Brindley, University of California, Irvine, shares her results and how her flipped general chemistry course altered the engagement and success of her students. Flipped classrooms engage students in active learning Most students are used to vegging out in lecture, especially in a huge lecture hall. A flipped classroom really forces them out of their comfort zones. On in-class assignments, they all work together with at least one other person. . . but that has been problematic. The first time I taught this way, I had a lot of difficulty getting them to consistently collaborate with classmates, and one of the main complaints on the midterm evaluations was that “the people next to me won’t talk to me.” But now I make a big deal of the fact that if your neighbor refuses to work with you it’s your responsibility to move and find new classmates to sit with. Discussing the concepts with peers is a big part of the learning process. I’m fine with a little bit of chaos and moving around to make sure that happens. What I end up with are a group of individuals in the back left corner of the room who refuse to interact; you are never going to eliminate that completely in a 400 person class. I do spend extra time up there trying to engage them, but they only stay on task if I am in the general vicinity. The rest of the class does commit to working together. And that’s much better for me, too, because when questions arise, there will be five people in a group who have the same problem. I’m not trying to get around to 400 individuals. I can more quickly identify topics that everyone is stuck on by talking to a handful of groups; and then I can stop and address the entire class to help clarify and move things along. So, everyone gets a lot more accomplished. Assessing for accountability One of the biggest problems I have with the flipped classroom is accountability, in part because of the very large size of the lectures I teach. I’m currently trying to deal with that issue by using pop i>clicker quizzes, but there are a few things I dislike about that approach. First, clicker quizzes take up valuable class time. Also, I have caught some students sharing clickers or taking clicker quizzes for other people. I’m sure there are others doing the same thing. What I’d like to do in the future is make a low-difficulty Sapling Learning assignment to go with each video lecture that students would do on their own outside of class after watching. The feedback the system offers and the opportunity to take as much time as needed to think about quiz questions and even go back to re-watch parts of the videos would even the playing field for the students and allow me make the quizzes worth enough to encourage more students to do the assigned pre-lecture preparation. What did the teaching evaluations say? It’s funny, because in terms of teaching evaluations, I got the same numbers in both my flipped and regular classes; but I got a lot of whining in the comments about the flipped classroom style. A large number of them made it clear that they didn’t actually like it, however many made it clear that they did. It was very mixed. But that didn’t really surprise me. My colleague did a survey with her flipped classroom students, and they responded that they didn’t prefer flipped classroom to traditional lecture, but that they would recommend flipped classroom to a friend. I’ve also seen a variety of polls from other groups of students presented at conferences, and the results are always pretty similar. Students complain about flipped classrooms, but they do learn more and end up more successful in the course, and they do recommend it to others. The second [time] was much more positive, but still divided. I attribute much of this to discussions I had with them (read How to start flipping your course: part 1), but also because the student makeup consisted of more at risk and underprepared students. The flipped class method seemed to resonate much better with students who know that they do not learn well in traditional classroom settings. Numbers speak louder than words Follow up discussions with students from the second course were much more positive. They enjoyed the class more, and while many still said the flipped class method wasn’t their preferred method of learning, the students who spoke negatively of it did so from a “personal opinion” standpoint. I showed them the class average for the first midterm from the previous quarter, when I’d taught with a flipped classroom, and the average from an earlier quarter taught the traditional way. It’s tough to argue with a 69% average versus a 60% average. Want to learn more about flipping your course? Visit FlippedChemistry.com and join the community of flipped chemistry educators, today! ... View more

How to start flipping your course: part 2 Originally posted by Rebecca Celik, Ph.D. Video is, of course, the preferred medium for delivering flipped lectures, but creating one from scratch can seem intimidating. Amanda Brindley, Ph.D., a faculty lecturer at the University of California, Irvine, has recently flipped her class. In part two of our blog series, we asked her to pass along some advice for curbing your video anxiety. How long does it take you to make your videos? Video lectures took me a ridiculously long time to make initially. I think it took me about 8 hours per 20 minutes of lecture for the first couple I created . . . and they still weren’t as good as I’d have liked. I’ve gotten much better, though, largely because I’ve learned how to edit much faster. What do you use to make your videos? I use Camtasia with the PowerPoint add-in for everything. For non-math topics, I just use PowerPoint as a slideshow. For math-based problem solving, I actually do the writing on my surface tablet as I record. I can’t write on an iPad, though my colleague uses her iPad with Doceri. The pressure-sensitive pen with my surface tablet works much better for me. It’s more like the Wacom tablets that artists have been using for a while. Do you script your recorded lectures? I learned that I absolutely have to script my lectures before recording. Recording a couple of unscripted lectures made me aware of all of my annoying little speech habits that go unnoticed in a live lecture but seem to become more pronounced when I don’t have an actual audience to interact with. It  prevents me from falling into those bad habits, like saying “so” too much. Scripting also helps keep the videos short and relevant. Putting objectives at the beginning and end of each video has also become a must for me. It keeps the expectations for the students clearer and keeps the video much more on task, which also shortens the time and makes it more apparent if [a lecture] needs to be broken into multiple videos. How do you make the editing process more efficient? Scripting makes the editing process go much more smoothly and saves time by preventing a lot of editing from being necessary in the first place. My approach is to record until I make a mistake; then I stop the video and restart the recording. That way, when I piece everything together, I know that my mistakes are right at the end of each clip; so it’s easy to find and cut out that portion. And editing in Camtasia is great. It’s extremely intuitive. My colleague, who has been doing a flipped classroom in her organic lectures for longer than I have, does things a little bit differently. She keeps a running list of timestamps where she makes mistakes or wants to redo something, and then she just re-records the parts she needs and replaces the old segments with the new ones. Both ways seem to work well! My biggest problem with recording right now is sound quality; there is a lot of background noise in my office and in my home. I find that [recording in] my office with giant blankets around me to dampen sounds in the background works best . . . but it’s not ideal, obviously. I’m working on finding a better place to record before I start the videos for my other course. ... View more

Originally posted by Rebecca Celik, Ph.D on July 17, 2014. How to start flipping your course: part 1 When Dr. Amanda Brindley, faculty lecturer at the University of Califoria, Irvine,  flipped her general chemistry course for the first time last fall she encountered challenges that are common to newcomers in the flipped community. She sat down with us to share her experience and pass along some of the tips and tricks you’ll need to start flipping your own chemistry course. Part 1 of this blog series will help you plan your flipped classroom journey. What is the format of a flipped course? For those who are unfamiliar with flipped courses, they employ a teaching style in which students review lecture materials at home in order to  prepare for class time devoted to group discussions, assignments, and activities. Amanda delivers lectures via her own custom-made video podcasts. She includes a five-minute recap of the relevant video lectures at the start of each class meeting before getting students engaged in active learning. Prior to class, I write up hints for all of the problems on the worksheet and make those available so that students have a starting point. They work together in small groups with their neighbors. Use online homework and/or clickers for assessment Amanda uses Sapling Learning for her online homework system, which offers easy access to assignment analytics. She packaged it with i>clicker to use as an in-class gauge of student comprehension. The homework and pop clicker quizzes served as low-stakes summative assessments. Devote an entire lecture period to explaining the flipped ideology Amanda’s first semester of flipped students didn’t understand what they needed to do to be successful in a flipped course, so she adjusted her approach. Amanda turned her typical “syllabus talk” into a scavenger hunt in her course website via a custom Sapling Learning homework assignment. This is a “best practice” tactic in the distance learning community as well. Visit FlippedChemistry.com for more resources and blog discussions. ... View more