Just a reminder that we will be doing maintenance on LaunchPad and our catalogs on Sunday, November 14th from 12:01am (just after midnight) until 7am EST (7 hours). During that time, no one (students or instructors) will be able to access LaunchPad or the catalogs, so please make any adjustments to your syllabus now. A notice will appear in LaunchPad as well, but please be sure to remind your students about this downtime just in case they skip that notice and plan on doing work at 4am on a Sunday morning. 🙂  Thanks for your patience with us!  ... View more

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

I use Achieve in two of my classes at North Shore Community College: an ALP (Accelerated Learning Program) course and a 6-credit integrated reading and writing course.  When I was first new to the product, I went with the pre-built course and it made my life much easier!  I had to tweak it slightly to fit my courses, but I felt like it was much less stressful than starting from scratch. In subsequent semesters, I’ve experimented with building out the course on my own, but my course tends to mimic the pre-built one! I choose to use the diagnostic tests with both courses, as well as the low-stakes short writing assignments. And in Composition/Seminar (our ALP), I use the writing projects connected to The Hub textbook. One of the most important things I learned with Achieve is that I don’t have to use every tool and option. I got very excited—and stressed out—at first when I saw what is available to instructors and I wanted to use it all! I quickly realized that I should have scaled it back for the first semester because I simply could not keep up with it all. Within writing projects, having three drafts for every essay meant I was constantly reading and grading. Instead, I cut back on the drafts and issued only one or two draft goals so that I wasn’t reading an entire essay each time. I also spread the diagnostic tests out over five weeks, so students don’t just feel like Achieve is one big test!  I also give my students the entire semester to compete any study plans associated with those diagnostics. I use a labor-based grading system in both classes so the Achieve assignments are graded according to whether they are complete, incomplete, late or missing. The gradebook in Achieve helps a lot with that—I can quickly see which students are completing things and which are not…and then I can take a deeper dive into their individual assignments.  Achieve assignments comprise about 50% of the work in my Integrated Reading and Writing course, whereas in my Composition/Seminar (our version of ALP), I use Achieve and The Hub to make up 100% of the assignments. I do a soft integration with my LMS Blackboard.  Since I use labor-based grading, I don’t weight my grades.  I don’t do a full integration with a linked gradebook because of this.   ... View more

 Learn More Today! https://go.macmillanlearning.com/black-history-black-stories-2021.html ... View more

What we have learned with Achieve: it is less about how many assignments, and more about the engagement with the assignments as planned.   Over four semesters (F19-S20-F20-S21), we worked with 4419 students engaging with more than half a million unique assignments from 149 courses across 6 subjects. We collected a lot of data from those studies (that we are digging into further with more studies in subsequent semesters), and here’s what we have found so far: What did we see helping student performance for students using Achieve? Students using more of their courses’ assignments and having higher grades on those assignments, had higher exam scores. Students with higher grades on their assignments (gradebook average) could expect to be 9 points higher on exams. Students that use less than the typical student, by course, can expect to perform 4% to 8% lower on their exams, while students that use more than the typical, perform 1.5% higher on their exams.     What did not help student performance? Neither the overall number of assignments for each course nor the percent of these assignments that were graded had an impact. The  overall number of assignments engaged by the student nor the raw number of graded assignments had an impact. Simply adding additional assignments does not appear to help course performance. In short, it is less about how many assignments, and more about the engagement with the assignments as planned.   Recommendations for customers: Allow and encourage students to engage and persist more, maybe even collaborate. Some assignments should be graded and tracked (e.g., check for understanding, formative and benchmark assessment). You do not necessarily need to assign more or increase the load on students. ... View more

OCTOBER 14 | 1:00 PM ET In the classroom, teachers not only confer students with knowledge of their academic course material, but they can also be part of students’ progress toward adulthood. “Adulting” skills are not often taught in the college classroom, yet many of us professors expect students to know how to do these tasks while in our course: study, work independently, send appropriate communication, meet deadlines and more. Soft skills tend to be wielded by successful students and lacking in ones who struggle. Luckily these skills can be taught and nurtured. Professors can use tools such as Achieve’s Self Reflection Surveys to help students develop these soft skills. This webinar will discuss how to incorporate and evaluate student self-reflection surveys to bridge the knowledge gap, improve student learning outcomes, as well as enhance students’ “adulting" skills.   Access the recording today! Watch Recording *NOTE: You must follow this link to register. Responding above as "going" will not register you for this event. ... View more

OCTOBER 13 | 1:00 PM ET Taken from the title of his latest book, Normal Sucks is a deeply personal and professional roadmap for teaching and learning for students who don’t fit the definition of academically normal students. Jonathan’s talk will be accompanied by a 5 minute demonstration of Achieve’s reporting and insights which are designed to help you monitor the performance of your entire class in real time.     Access the recording today! Watch Recording *NOTE: You must follow this link to register. Responding above as "going" will not register you for this event. ... View more

SEPTEMBER 28 | 1:00 PM ET Research has shown that students often learn best from other students. In this session, Kiandra Johnson will demonstrate how she uses remote response (in her case, iClicker) to facilitate just-in-time learning. This empowers students to be interactive, learn from one another, and get the benefit of students explaining concepts as a regular part of her class time.     Access the recording today! Watch Recording ... View more

iClicker Engagement Sweepstakes Grant Giveaway for Teachers Enter to win a $500 technology grant for your department or classroom! The past year has made one thing crystal clear: engagement is vital to student success. Learning Science research shows that creating connections inside and outside of the classroom with iClicker not only helps every student - regardless of preparedness - thrive in class, but actually boosts end-of-course grades too!  So, every month this fall, we’ll be drawing for a chance for an instructor to win a $500 educational technology grant for their department! How to Enter & Qualify for the Grant: To enter, all instructors need to do is use iClicker at least 3 times in a calendar month with at least 5 students — then submit a screenshot of your iClicker course history.  Ready to go?  Learn more about how to enter, rules, & deadlines here: https://go.macmillanlearning.com/engage-to-achieve-sweepstakes (This contest is open to anyone using iClicker, whether that's integrated with LaunchPad or Achieve, or by itself. We'd love to have you!)  What would you do with a $500 technology grant for your classroom?  ... View more

This fall, we are hosting a variety of webinars designed to Engage Your Students to Achieve More. Topics include: Go here to register today! (And if you can't attend, registering will give you access to any post-event recordings or documentation.) We hope to see you this fall!  ... View more

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

As classes begin, just a reminder that we have a host of fabulous training options for all of our digital products:  https://www.macmillanlearning.com/college/us/contact-us/training-and-demos    And you may say, "Nah, I'm fine. I don't need training. I'll learn on my own." You probably can, but we have data from our users that says that customer satisfaction increases when a training happens--because you aren't frustrated in trying to figure out what to do. So give it a shot and sign up for a training today!  ... View more

Hopefully you have seen all the announcements, but Sapling and SaplingPlus will not be available for Fall 2021 higher ed classes; we are upgrading to Achieve instead!  You can get live training on Achieve or you can watch a recorded training.  Once you know a little about Achieve, you can use this help article to get you the information you need to set up your course.  We look forward to helping you Achieve More this fall!  ... View more

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

Last year we had a campaign entitled, “Surround your e-book in luxury with  Achieve.” But recently, we had someone suggest that we should start by talking about the benefits of using your e-book in Achieve--even if you aren’t going to use all the other assets that might come with your digital platform.  Why use the e-book in Achieve? Students get longer access to e-books in Achieve When your students purchase one term access to Achieve, they can download the e-book for offline use for four years!  That downloadable e-book comes with all the features of the standalone e-book purchase: highlighting, notetaking, flashcards, search, and more. (When students purchase a standalone e-book, they most frequently purchase the one with the shortest time span of access as it’s the lowest cost, so using Achieve provides the best value and gives students access to the e-book for longer than they likely would have had it if they just bought the book alone.)  e-Books have added features in Achieve The e-book in Achieve is enhanced as compared to the e-book in VitalSource. In Achieve, we offer books with embedded multimedia (such as videos to explain concepts) as well as quizzes (where you students can see the question and get immediate feedback on their answer). This additional functionality allows students to use the e-book even more to further their conceptual understanding of key concepts in the course.  You can assign reading, quizzes and more in Achieve In Achieve, you can assign the e-book for your students to read. This means you can make suggestions about pacing (Chapter 1 should be done by this date) and reinforce the importance of the e-book so students come to class prepared for discussion. You can assign each part of the reading for points, if you’d like, or no points; that approach is up to you and how you want to structure your course.  You can even tag the e-book as something you’d like completed as Pre-Class or Post-Class, again, depending on what works for you and your course.  Beyond assigning the e-book to simply read, some of the assessments in Achieve incorporate the e-book to further encourage student reading. For instance, our adaptive quizzing tool allows students to work through the formative quiz  with the e-book open--encouraging students to read to find the answer with no penalty as an introduction to the topic.  In sum, there are a few reasons why students would benefit from using the e-book in Achieve--beyond all the additional luxurious items that are available in Achieve for you and your students. Check it out today!   ... View more