Whether you’re designing online activities for your face-to-face students or developing a fully online course, you not only need to think about WHAT you’re asking learners to do, but HOW you’re telling them to do it.

The words and sentence structures you choose really do make a difference to the way that your students interact with your content and activities. You may find this blog post by Kim George helpful: Top Ten Tips for How to Write an e-Learning Course in Plan English 

What does it do?

The Grades tool is used to track student participation and grades over time. You can also use the Grades tool to provide students with a summary of their overall Grade grades. This snapshot of the Standard View of the Grades tool points out some of the key features of the tool.

Useful terminology

Grade Item
A column of the Grades tool dedicated to tracking the grades associated with a particular task. It may be associated with a MyLO assessment tool like a Dropbox or Quiz, or it could be a standalone item used to track classroom participation or presentations.

Standalone Grade Item
A Grade Item that is not linked to any type of MyLO activity. Generally used to track attendance and participation, or the scores associated with an in-class performance (like a presentation).

Category
Used to organise Grade Items into clusters. It can convert the sum total of all the Grade Items in the Category in accordance with specified weightings. The outcome of this calculation is seen as a Subtotal. Categories can also be set up to drop a specified number of items with the lowest or highest grades, or to drop ungraded items.

Settings
Used to control elements of the Grades tool, such as whether a points or weightings system is used, the way students see their Grades (by default) and the way you see Grades.

Release Conditions
Control student access to Grade objects, based on date, or on Group membership (including whether students are enrolled in Internal or External study modes).

Helpful resources and instructions

• How to set up your Grades tool
  This comprehensive guide contains all you need to know to set up your Grades tool to suit the structure of your unit assessment, and your preferred method of viewing Grades.
• How to hide or un-hide Grade Items for students
• How to create a Standalone Grade Item
  This is a useful method of tracking Grades for items that will not be completed in, or submitted to, MyLO, for example, participation or in class presentations.
• How to associate a Grade Item with a Dropbox, Discussion or Quiz
• How to release internal grades to students
  This post explains how you can use the Final Calculated Grade tool to release an internal grade to students, prior to them sitting a final examination.
• Publish final assessment marks to the Grades tool without releasing the marks and feedback to students
• Export Grades to an Excel Spreadsheet
• Quickly grade unsubmitted work as 0
  The Grades tool will ‘drop’ Grade Items from a Category subtotal or the Final Calculated Grade if no numerical score is recorded. If you don’t want a student’s grade for an item to be dropped, you will need to record a score. 0 should be recorded to represent non-submission/no-show.

What does it do?

The Groups tool allows you to create and manage groups of students. You can then set up Release Conditions to release items in MyLO to students in a particular groups or groups.

Useful terminology

Groups are organised into Categories. A group must be assigned to a Category.

By default, MyLO already provides you with some groups, including:

• Mode Groups
  • Default Group Study Mode External – A group of students enrolled as Distance students
  • Default Group Study Mode Internal – A group of students enrolled as Face to Face students
• Campus Groups
  • Default Group Campus Hobart – Includes students enrolled to study on the Hobart campus AND all distance (External) students
  • Default Group Campus Launceston – Includes students enrolled to study face to face on the Launceston campus
  • Default Group Campus Cradle Coast – Includes students enrolled to study face to face on the Cradle Coast (Burnie) campus

Helpful resources and instructions

• An introduction to the Groups tool.
• Send an email to the members of a Group.
• Create groups with randomly allocated members.
  NOTE: MyLO cannot create groups from groups. For example, you can’t create groups with randomly allocated members from the Default Group Study Mode External group.  If you only want to create groups for one cohort of students, you will need to create empty groups for manual enrolment.
• Create self-enrolment groups.
  Great for tutorial or workshop sign up! Once created, students can enrol themselves in these groups. You can set a maximum capacity, so only a certain number of students can enrol. You may also wish to edit the group names to match tutorial dates and times. NOTE: You can not restrict access to these group sign-up based on membership of another group.
• Create empty groups for manual enrolment.
  Ideal for the creation of groups within a specific cohort, or groups that you have created based on skill sets, personality matches and so forth.
• Editing group names and enrolling/removing students from groups.
• Advanced search options in the Groups tool.

Each year, the University of Tasmania recognises excellence in teaching with Teaching Merit Certificates.  In early 2014,  11 TSBE staff were awarded Teaching Merit Certificates. Teaching @ TSBE is presenting a series of interviews with Certificate recipients.

In this interview we asked Launceston-based Dr Gemma Lewis about teaching large classes of first year face-to-face and distance students enrolled in BMA116, Communication for Business Professionals.

Press play to hear Gemma describe her unit, BMA116

Press play to hear Gemma explain how she adapts her teaching to cater to first-year students, many of whom will study BMA116 as their first university unit

Press play to hear Gemma explain how she manages a large class

Press play to hear Gemma describe the strategies she uses to deal with the volume of emails coming from students

Press play to hear Gemma explain how she adapts her unit to cater to face to face and distance students, especially when it comes to activities like workshops

Press play to hear Gemma reflect on the reasons why she was nominated for a Teaching Merit Certificate

Press play to hear Gemma describe recent changes she has made to her unit, and the kind of changes she’d like to make in future

Do you monitor or assess student participation in tutorials, workshops or online classes? Tracking participation in tutorials can be quite difficult and time-consuming, especially when multiple staff are involved.

Using the MyLO Grades tool

Dr Gemma Lewis coordinates a large first-year undergraduate unit with over 450 students. Tutorials are included in the unit, and a range of tutors are responsible for collecting data on student participation. In the past, tutors completed a form for each tutorial and returned it to Gemma. Gemma would manually enter the data from the forms into an Excel spreadsheet. However, this was time consuming and forms were nor always delivered to her in a reasonable timeframe.

Gemma decided to use MyLO to remove the need for double-handling of participation data. She created 12 Grade Items in her unit’s MyLO Grades tool, one for each week. She developed a marking schema for tutors to use: 0 for no-show; 1 for attended with minimal participation; 2 for attended and contributed; 3 for attended and made contributions supported by theory. A similar set-up is explained here.

Tutors received training in how to filter the Grades tool for their convenience, as well as how to enter marks. Though some continued to make paper notes during class, all recorded marks into the  relevant Grade Item rather than sending through a handwritten note or spreadsheet. All the Grade Items were organised under a Category, which automatically calculated a cumulative overall result for the each student.

Using participation cards

Dr Gail Ridley (Tasmanian School of Business and Economics) uses this process in her classes.

1. Gail prints participation cards on coloured card as per the image below. The same cards are used every week.

   

2. Each card has room for a student’s name, student number and tutorial day and time.
3. In the first tutorial for the semester, Gail hands one participation card to each student.
4. The students are asked to complete the card with their details and to place their card on the edge of their desk.
5. When a student shows a level of participation that satisfies Gail, she picks up the card from their desk (or asks them to hand it to her).
6. Gail records a student’s participation mark in the MyLO Grades tool after the tutorial, then hands them back their card at the start of the next tutorial.
7. Gail keeps the cards in an envelope between tutorials. In case some of the cards are not collected, Gail always keeps a few temporary cards on hand.

This method has an added benefit – the collection of the participation card is recognition of a student’s effort. In turn, quiet or shy students now have a role model that they can watch and listen to for ideas about how they might participate in future.

In addition, the participation card method allows the lecturer or tutor to focus on teaching, rather than distracting administrative tasks, during a tutorial.