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

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 Kelli Mayes-Denker on August 11, 2014. As an instructor who has taught a variety of economics classes, both principles and intermediate, I find that making the connection to real life application is key. In daily life, economics surrounds us and can be found through the evening news or even during a shopping trip. For the principles student, these concepts need to be connected from the text to real life to inspire a search for economics examples outside of the classroom. You can find relevant articles by searching the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, The Economist, Time or Newsweek. Each of these can be another way to add the connection outside of the class that makes an impact for life. For instance, in my classes using forums, articles and videos have been effective ways to make this connection while providing additional ways to engage students beyond the traditional lecture. Forums for fun analysis, interactivity and connection In Sapling Learning, forums can be created allowing students to comment on current events and apply analysis tools learned in class. My classes tend to be structured week by week allowing students to examine 1-2 chapters of content per week. Then one application of that content is analysis on the forums. For instance in talking about supply and demand, the students might be given a current event article on a relevant hot topic such as Amazon, Tesla, Google, etc. The students can read this article as an example illustrating what they have just learned. Then it is their turn to go to the web and search for a relevant article related to supply and demand. They then post the link for others in the class to see and comment with a bit of analysis of why this is interesting and how it relates to that week's content. Making forums part of your class: do-it-yourself or email your Tech TA 1. Find several current event articles and then determine which chapter of your text they would best align to illustrate the content for that week 2. Go into Sapling Learning and Turn Editing On (found on the top right side of the main page) 3. Find the week that the article aligns with and then click Add An Activity from the drop down under that week, then select Forum. 4. You will be directed in a new page to Add a New Forum Topic where you can name the forum with a title and enter the web link of the example article with instructions for students to find an article and do their own analysis. 5. Click Save and Continue and your forum will now show under the week you originally chose. Shown here in week 1 as Forum: Student Bio and Introduction and then in week 2 as Forum: Provide a Microeconomic Current Event. ... 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

Cheating on homework: how can you stop it? Originally posted by Rebecca Celik, Ph.D. Today’s students have access to more online information than ever before, and with that access comes increased opportunity for cheating. Whether we use online technology in face-to-face courses or teach distance learning classes, we cannot afford not to be thinking about cheating. In fact, we must do as much as possible to prevent it. While the emphasis of this post is on cheating in the context of online homework, online sharing of homework solutions is just the tip of a very large iceberg. There are websites dedicated to making old quizzes and exams available for students taking the same courses from the same professors (e.g., Koofers.com, CourseHero.com, PostYourTest.com). It doesn't take much time to find PDF copies of entire textbook solution manuals available for illegal download. Search Craigslist in almost any city with a college or university and you'll find people offering to take entire online courses for students for a price. Many schools provide on-campus exam proctoring services for distance learning courses and make-up exams, and companies like ProctorU and Kryterion offer similar services online for a fee. However, homework typically plays a different role than exams, serving as a low-stakes formative assessment that gives students a chance to practice new skills and receive valuable feedback. Ideally, the student will learn from their mistakes and demonstrate a deeper level of understanding in the future. Likewise, students should complete homework outside of class on their own time and, usually, at their own pace. Therefore, by necessity, homework assignments are almost always unproctored. Most of us are aware that students can and do post solutions to online homework on websites such as Chegg or Cramster. This is true for any homework method, including pencil-and-paper homework. So, how does Sapling Learning help to prevent cheating? Where possible, Sapling Learning homework questions are randomized so that different students have different answers. This way, students who work together must communicate how they solved the problem rather than just the final answer. Additionally, questions may be pooled to add even more variability between students. Pooled questions assign similar yet unique problems, preventing them from sharing exact solutions. The grading policies an instructor chooses also influence how likely students are to turn to cheating. In my experience, the best way to deter cheating is to keep the homework low-stakes. That is, I make homework worth only a small percentage of the course grade, and I keep the grading policy relatively lenient (i.e., low attempt penalty and high number of attempts). That way students are less incentivized to cheat on homework, and those who do tend to fail the tests and the class. Think of the homework as a learning tool for students rather than strictly summative assessment. Sapling Learning excels in this capacity. If you’d like, you can also set the solutions to be hidden until after the due date. However, you should consider that students often benefit more from the learning opportunity worked solutions provide if it is presented immediately after attempting a problem, when they still have a clear memory of their approach. Another concern involves extra dummy accounts, which some students set up in hopes of obtaining correct answers to submit through their legitimate accounts. Anticipating this possibility, Sapling Learning makes it easy to remove fake student accounts. You can access and download your Sapling Learning roster. Use this process: Course Management > Participants > Export roster to open in Excel or similar software. This process allows you to compare the list of registered users in your Sapling Learning course to an official class roster from your school. Once you have identified a student to remove, click the Remove button found on the Participants page. When you are asked about refund options, keep the first option selected: the student will be given a refund, credit, or nothing as appropriate. Alternatively, your Tech TA can assist with the roster comparison and account removal process: send your Tech TA your final class roster after the add/drop period ends, and he or she can check it against your Sapling Learning roster and remove any accounts that do not belong in the Sapling Learning homework. At that point, your Tech TA can lock enrollment or set an enrollment password so that new students can’t enter without your permission. Finally, when it comes to searching for homework solutions online, Sapling Learning solutions are much more difficult to find. Our team of experienced educators create our questions including all feedback, hints, and solutions. As a result, there is no risk of students obtaining a solution manual with all of the answers in one place, because such a thing simply doesn't exist. Compare this with a publisher-based online homework system, where the majority of questions are end-of-chapter questions with solutions widely available. In addition, solutions cannot be printed, making it cumbersome for students to share answers to problems. The ultimate benefit of Sapling Learning’s approach to online homework is that students typically find it more efficient to learn the course material than to cheat on problems. Students are met with a mastery-learning approach, targeted feedback, and detailed solutions. That, in turn, makes Sapling Learning uniquely suited to prepare students for your proctored exams. Have you tried other methods to combat cheating? Let us know in the comments below! ... View more

The Sapling Learning content library contains a broad selection of high-quality questions, but there will likely be times that you can’t quite find the problem you’re looking for. When this happens, one of your options is to submit a request to our content team. When we receive a request for a new problem, we first decide whether it would be a valuable addition to our library. If we determine that the problem would be a good addition, one of our subject matter experts writes it out in detail. The problem is written in full Sapling Learning style, including a complete solution and specific feedback. Next, the problem goes through at least two stages of internal review to ensure accuracy and quality. After passing review, the problem is added to our library. From start to finish, this process typically takes about one week per problem, depending on the complexity of the problem. Questions involving graphics will generally take longer. In 2015, about 80 of the new questions that we added to the physics and astronomy libraries were written in response to requests from instructors. Some of our best content has originated this way, so please keep the requests coming! ... View more

As the semester winds down, it’s time to confirm that you have your LaunchPad gradebook set up exactly how you want it to ensure a smooth end to classes. Check your settings, attend to lingering unsubmitted scores, and export your gradebook so you can start summer vacation early! 1. Review the basics. Before you finalize your gradebook, it doesn’t hurt to review the settings to make sure you’re displaying the information you want and that you understand all the data the gradebook is reporting. Did you know you can toggle between student and professor view directly from the gradebook under the “Display Options”? Learn more about gradebook basics here. 2. Enable “Zero Scores For Unsubmitted Assignments.” By default, LaunchPad does NOT automatically give zeroes to students who don’t attempt assignments that are due for points. To set up your course so that students who fail to attempt work are given zeroes, be sure to enable the “Zero Scores For Unsubmitted Assignments” setting in the instructor console. Learn how to turn on the Zero Scores feature here. 3. Manually grade assignments. Some assignments, like those that require written responses, need to be manually assigned a score by the professor. In other instances, instructors may want to change a student’s final score after reviewing their individual circumstances. Both are possible by clicking on the area of the gradebook where a student’s point score is (or would appear) and typing in a new point value. If you’re unsure whether an assignment needs to be manually graded, look for the “paper” icon where a student’s score should be. Learn more about manually scoring assignments here. 4. Drop lowest scores. It’s easy to automatically drop a student’s lowest score(s) in a certain gradebook category. Just go to the Gradebook Preferences in the Instructor Console and edit the “Drop Lowest” number by clicking on it and entering a new number. Be sure to group similar assignment types (like quizzes or homework sets) into the same gradebook category to maximize the utility of this feature. Learn more about dropping lowest scores here. 5. Use weighted gradebook categories. If you like to grade your courses by percentage weights rather than by point distributions (for example, if you want to make homework assignments 20% of a student’s total grade regardless of how many points you make each assignment worth), you can do so by sorting your assignments into gradebook categories and then assigning percentage weights to those categories. Just access those settings in the Gradebook Preferences under the Instructor Console—you’ll need to turn on the “Use Weighted Categories” setting and assign percent values to your categories on the same screen. Learn more about Weighted Gradebook Categories here. 6. Import grades for offline assignments. If you use LaunchPad as your primary gradebook and want to import scores from an offline assignment into the system, use the import feature within the gradebook screen to add scores for tests, essays, clicker questions, and other types of assignments that are completed outside of LaunchPad.t Learn more about importing grades into LaunchPad here.​ 7. Export your gradebook. When the semester is complete and the gradebook is finalized, the grades can be exported to either a .csv or a .txt file via the gradebook page. Professors can choose which data fields from the gradebook to export, including specific data for each assignment. If you plan to transfer your grades into BlackBoard, Canvas, or D2L, you’ll want to be sure to export them in .csv format. Learn more about exporting grades here. If your gradebook issues aren’t addressed here or you need other end-of-semester assistance, we encourage you to sign up for a training session with one of our Learning Solutions Specialists by going to the Training Center page. Happy grading! ... View more

When we first released LaunchPad, one thing we would always talk about are the 'curated units'. For Macmillan, this means that within each chapter of the book (and ebook), we select or create high quality resources that go with that chapter and appear within the unit structure. Those resources might be LearningCurve quizzes or videos or multi-media activities, depending on the book or LaunchPad in question. With just a few clicks, you can assign all of these resources for the chapter at once, trusting that the curator has done just what you would do in your class. Now that LaunchPad has been out for a while, we know that not everyone wants to use these units. We survey students and instructors at the end of every semester and at the end of the Fall 2015 semester, 35% of instructors told us that they don't use the pre-built units, but rather create their course from scratch. Depending on how your course is organized and which assets you want to use, this makes a lot of sense for some people. So how would you do this? It's very easy! First go to the Instructor Console and then click on General, Navigation, and LaunchPad Settings. Then select LaunchPad from the menu on the left and you will see the option to "Remove these units from your course?" Once the units have been removed, you can then go and create your own units (maybe you organize by week or module or topic, instead of chapter) and then you can go to the resources and add in just the items you want (maybe you just want the ebook and LearningCurve or maybe you just want the video assignments you've created). In this way, you can completely customize the course the way you want to. And don't worry, if you remove those units, you can always add them back in by going back to the same spot and select "Add these units to your course." For more detailed instructions, check out the online user guide or talk to one of our Digital Solutions Specialists to find out which approach makes sense for your course. ... View more