McGraw Hill Transcript
This will take you through everything you need to get started with connect, so how to get your students started, it has tutorials in there, it has videos, it has PowerPoints, it has pdfs. Question: How do you get to that screen? I will send you a link to this screen. When you are actually in connect you will see the owl at the top, when you are actually in Connect you see the owl at the top, you will see the owl in various places or a question mark and you can click and go straight to this digital success academy. Lets say you are in the area where you are creating an assignment, it will take you straight to that particular section, so instead of having to scroll through.
You can browse by topic, which is a good section to go to, so sequentially if you are starting out how to prepare to use it, how to create your courses, we have a lot of first day of class tools, so that your students, you’re not answering all of these questions of how do I get into connect, how do I do my assignments, we have PowerPoints and pdfs and tools that you can upload to blackboard so that they can see how to access. There is a student side to this success academy as well so how do I as a student do this, how do I do that, so this is the instructor side. It starts with how do I get started, how do I get my students started, how do I manage my assignments, how do I create them, all the way down to grading and then pairing with Blackboard. I’m going to show you how to pair with Blackboard, so any of you that already have a connect account or connect course I will show you how quickly and easy it is to just pair your course so that everything connects with your Blackboard course. I just wanted to let you know that this is here. Please stop me at any point to ask any questions.
Ok so, Connect; if you are going to think of anything while you are watching connect I want you to remember these three things:
(1) Connect is proven effective, we have a huge array of case studies that explain how professors have a lot of success with Connect, case studies that show student improvement on using Connect, better attention, better pass rate, it is a proven effective program.
(2) It is tailored to you, there are a lot of different options on how you can use Connect, you’ve got Learn smart, which I show you, you have the test bank, some professors are using it for quizzes, some are using it for homework, there’s a lot of flexibility on how you assign and what you assign in Connect. So it will tailor to how you work as a professor.
(3) And it is very easy to use. We’ll look at the interfacive connect, but just know that because it pairs with Blackboard you’re not having to figure out how to make it accessible and easy to use for your students, so it is a very easy to use program, so just remember those things, that would be great.
So as Joni was saying, every Connect course and textbook are going to have different types of resources in it but the interface and type of resource are going to be similar, so if you are teaching a couple of courses and they all have Connect then they’ll all look the same as to how you access the program. I have a lot of books in here. The owl at the top, so you will see the owl at various places that at the very beginning of the Connect when you want to go in and create my own course, that owl will take me to a tutorial that will relate to where I am right now, so how do I manage my courses or create a new section. So that owl will come to refer you to the part that you are in, in Connect.
Alright so this is the Connect interface, it’s very user friendly, this is the professor side of things. At any point you can switch over to the student side at the top right under report, it says switch to student home view. So you can register as a student in your own course if you wanted to, but you can always switch to the student view to see what they are seeing in Connect. If you look at the right hand side, it just gives you section information, you can put as much or little information in here as you want. This is your Connect site, you can put a picture of yourself, your office hours, your email address, your Connect course, if you are using Connect Plus it will have access to the full ebook, and that is an interactive ebook. So both you and your students will have access to this ebook book and this is an ebook where you can highlight, where you can do post it notes, where you can actually assign readings, you can actually assign to them if they need to read a certain section of the book. You as a professor have the ability to share your highlights and notes with your students, so it’s like that instructor edition on your desk that everyone wants to get their hands on because you have highlighted all of the important things that will be on the test. If you wanted to you could share all of your highlights and your post it notes and your bookmarks with your students who are using Connect. This is word for word from the textbook it also has all of the images from the textbook.
We will go back to the homepage, so on the right hand side we have the section information, we’ve got the ebook, learn smart, we’re going to go over in a minute it’s that adaptive learning tool I told you about that students can use as a self-study tool or you can assign it in your class. So as a self-study tool, they can access it straight from the homepage. Section performance, say a student comes into your class and wants to know how they did on an assignment in Connect, you don’t want to pull up all of your gradebooks, so you can put their name in there and you can go straight to their scores, their grade when you pair it with Blackboard will be here but it will also be in Blackboard. Question: How do you coordinate the name of the student? Answer: No I’ll show you, when you pair the course, it’s going to match up and sync all of the grades to Blackboard, so you don’t have to do anything. Students will register the first time when they go in. As I said about the support there’s a customer experience group, just so you know, your students shouldn’t be bombarding you with questions about getting onto Connect there is a support number and email address for them. That’s why the pairing with blackboard is such a good thing, it helps eliminate a lot of the issues of getting into the wrong course, or getting to the website or remembering another user name and password because it’s all integrated into Blackboard. If you wanted to there are bookmarks and news feeds so lets’ say you want to bookmark certain websites that you want students to have access to or if you want them to have access to different newsfeeds, different websites, you can set that up in Connect.
What I’m going to do is take you, on the, I’m giving more of an overview of what it is and what it does, I will show you why she chose it and how she integrates it into her course. We can go over the specifics of how you do certain things, if you have a question about that. Then I’m going to show you some of the types of content you have available in here. I’m going to switch over to a student view. So I’m a student, as a professor I went in and made a couple of assignments to show you some interactive questions, what a quiz would look like as a student. I went in and took an assignment that a professor had set up, that had some interactives, I just want to show some types that are available. This is from a management textbook so it will have drag and drops or sequencing or compositions, it will have a lot of interactive and engaging assignments that you wouldn’t normally be able to create through Blackboard but again, linked all through Blackboard, this particular one, Is it Right to Use Child Labor? Concept review, if you look on the bottom it has the step-by-step process. First one is the introduction, then start the assignment, then case analysis is on left hand side and then there are questions to answer. So they are really using critical thinking they’re not just going in and doing multiple choice, they have to go in and do the case analysis and answer the questions, it won’t let me move on until I answer all of the questions. Next I submit, under concept review, I find out how I did, and then I start my activity, this is my concept check and this is my summary. So this is an example of a case analysis. A lot of the interactive questions have several parts to them. So often we see the professors use the test bank as the quiz then using the homework having 1-5, I know Patricia, she can share that when she comes up, I know they will find these in a weekly homework. Here is another one, this is a drag and click, So it has the case, talking about the paper then students have to drag and drop. If it is an ethical issue or a legal issue. Question: Can you set it up so there is a different version for each student? Answer: Yes, it depends on the book, a lot of textbooks have it where you have a case and three different versions, you can set it up as a pool, so that you can say I want to assign these three versions, and each student will get one from each pool, so essentially it will pull from that pool of questions. I want 25 of these questions and I want to pull from each pool of questions. So this is the drag and drop, content check and summary. Depending on the book there are a lot of video cases, let me see if this is a video case. This is the drag and click. These little circles on the bottom, as the student watches the video, instead of watching the whole video then answering questions, these questions will stop periodically throughout the video and ask questions to make sure they are paying attention.
I’m going to jump back to the instructor view. That was a student view of some of the assignments, I’m going to quickly show you how to create an assignment. We are looking at a management book but we can look at any textbook you would like. On the instructor homepage, if your course is paired to Blackboard, I will show you that process later, you can create it from here or Blackboard. Make an assignment, again here is the owl with some success tips on how to make an assignment, make new from question bank, it depends on the textbook. We have chapter by chapter, and by each chapter we have some type of interactive question that you can assign, a bank of interactive questions, drag and drop, but you also have a test bank and a premade quiz. You don’t want to make a quiz, the premade quiz is already in there with all of the questions. So if I wanted to pick from those interactives I would click select, then just looking at chapter 3, but you can pull from several different chapters into one, and now there will be a list with all of the questions available for this chapter for the interactives. For this particular case analysis there is a 3a, 3b and 3c so 3 different versions of this case. A couple of things to point out; on the left hand side you can filter down by question types, by drag and drops or case analysis, I can go in and scroll down, you can go in by learning objective or the ones you don’t cover in the chapter and you want to make sure they aren’t covered, topic, difficulty level, textonomy, you want to make sure these are just analyzed, you click the box and you click update results, it will show you these are the only ones analyzed by textonomy. Comment. Ok so now you have looked at all of the problems and you want to decide what is in there, you scroll down to the topics or taxonomy, you pick which questions you want, you check the box next to it. You click right here where it says add checked questions, you have the option to add them as individual questions, so every student will get those or add them as a pool. So if I had page 5 questions and I wanted to add as a pool and so out of these 5 questions I want to draw 2 questions for every student. So now I have created an assignment out of the question that I want, it lets me know with the pluses that these are the questions in my assignment, now I just need to set my policies. So again there is the owl, there are a lot of tips on how you should set policies, addresses how many attempts, do you want to time it, do you want them to get feedback after their first attempt. So there is a lot of flexibility, this is what I was talking about with the tailors to you, there is flexibility in how you want to assign it, this is where you can say I want it now, I want it later, the due date, set it up so it is submitted when it is dues, so the student that says I did it but didn’t get enough time to submit it, you can eliminate that problem, because it just automatically submits the work that they have done at the due date and due time. You can set it up so that they get deductions for turning it in late. Here is where you set your policies, we have homework, and these are the templates, once you have your template set up how you want it, you save it and you apply it every time, so lets say you are just going to do homework once a week, you want to have the same settings, the same amount of feedback, the same attempts, you just set a group template, you apply the changes and you use the same template every time. This is where it is tailored to how you teach your course. Do you want it timed, do you want them to have unlimited attempts, 2 attempts, do you want them to have to start fresh with each assignment or can they build on previous work that they have done when they go in there, what kind of resources, do you want them to have access to that ebook, do you want them to be able to get feedback, if so when do they get that feedback, after they have attempted a few times, or do you want them to get their score and not the right answer until they have gone through all of their attempts. Here is where you have some flexibility in how you assign it. Click review, double check that you have your questions the way you want to and everything else the way you want and click assign.
Before I take you into the Blackboard side of things I just want to show you one other thing that is available in Connect for you to assign. Question. Answer: You can go in and duplicate the section or from the homepage you can do it from there or you can do it from here, you just basically just duplicate it and pull over all of the assignments into the next semester. You can also copy them, so if you are working with another professor you can share your course or copy with them so they have access to everything that you have done. Comment: It is just a drop down. So the other component of Connect is LearnSmart, I will take it from a student view. LearnSmart is our adaptive study tool, it knows that no student is the same as the next student. What it does is it creates a study plan for the student adapting on how to answer questions, what it is doing is it is covering the foundationalconcepts in your course so that when they come into your class and were prepared, and are able to take your discussions from foundation to application, you aren’t having to answer all of those what is the definition of questions, they are doing that all outside of you class, it will be an optional learning path based on what they know and don’t know.
If you assign LearnSmart, it can be used as just a study tool, if you assign LearnSmart and the student sees they have to do a LearnSmart assignment for this chapter, when they initially go in they see an overview of a pie chart of what they have done and what they have gotten wrong and what they have gotten right. When they initially go into LearnSmart they are asked a question, along with that question they are asked to rate their confidence. We all know that the best way to learn, the most efficient way to learn is to first understand what you know and what you don’t know, that way you learn a lot faster. The confidence rating is built around perception vs. reality, that student that comes into your class and says I know I knew everything on chapter 2, I know it, I’ve studied, I don’t know how I failed that test. Clearly I see heads shaking. Not being honest about when they know and don’t know, so that’s one of the big things that LearnSmart does, asking them the question, but asking them about their confidence. As it does it, it is making a profile about the learner, it is deciding what questions to give them next, and reprioritizing how difficult the question is or what version of the question is going to come at them. They have to answer the question and they have to rate their confidence. Question. Answer: It actually, if a student answers incorrectly too many times, a thing will come up that says time out and it will say perhaps you need to go back and review chapter such and such and then come back. Because essentially a student could be sitting there all day because the haven’t read the chapter because the whole point is that they go and read the chapter, then they go in and they practice, they absorb the foundational concepts and they come to your class prepared and ready for your course. So first they have to rate themselves. Again as you are doing this as a LearnSmart, first it’s asking the question at a fundamental level, they will learn everything about the learner, and then as they answer these questions and as they raise their confidence building this profile, and deciding what questions are going to come next. What kinds of versions are going to come in. So right away it will tell you whether you got it right or wrong and it’s going to tell me what the right answer is. If you notice a few things, on the right hand side it says 70 items left on this assignment. These are 70 topics or 70 probes, these are 70 topics that LearnSmart says you if you master these then you will have all of the foundational concepts that you will need to be successful in this particular chapter. But if I get it incorrect, that 70 is not going anywhere. That question, that probe is getting reshuffled in, it’s not going to come back in the same question. I answered a short answer and I got it, I was way off. So what it is going to do is it is going to say ok, maybe she knows that short answer is a little hard, you can’t really guess that, so I will bring it back later on then I will bring it back as a multiple choice or a multi card answer. So it’s not going to go anywhere and the numbers aren’t going to go down until I show that I can master that concept. When you set this up and I can show you that step, it tells you the average student, it takes them about 45 minutes to do this assignment, that is the average student who has read the chapter, and is going in and reading it, if they haven’t done that and they are just guessing, clearly I don’t know anything about this, I could be in here for another 45 minutes. This is what is helping them study more efficiently and effectively, they know if they do reading and they go in and they try they are going to get out a lot quicker. They don’t want to be studying, they want to be doing other things.