Tasks

Make the Most of Your Reading Assignments

Adding a New Task

Edit Published Tasks

Tasks Submitted by Students

Task Statistics

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Make the Most of Your Reading Assignments

Prepare your students

Talk to them about intentional reading, guide them on how to scan the text to find passages relevant to the questions.

Ask the right number of questions

One is too little, five might be a lot, try to stay somewhere in the middle to keep your students focused and engaged.

Ask the right kind of questions

produce questions anchored in the text, which means students can find relevant passages when reading it.

Keep the reading material focused

Try to avoid uploading entire books or lengthy readings, an average journal paper or short chapter should produce the best results on weekly assignments.

Use Alethea to elevate class discussions

Ask about elements, concepts, issues, and arguments you would like to discuss in the next class.

Give your students a sense of success

Try to ask a question to which the ‘answer’ appears at the beginning of the text; this will help students get a hold of the process.

Adding a New Task

Click 'Tasks' on the top navigation bar
Click on 'Add new task' button
You will be redirected to the 3-step task creation flow

Step 1: Readings

Choose the text relevant to the task: You can either start typing or click the arrow to open the dropdown containing all the texts associated with your class.
Once done, click the blue 'next' arrow at the bottom

Step 2: Questions

In this step you will create the actual task. Each task can include multiple questions.

Task Title, Type, and Description

Enter the task title
Choose the task Type
Optional: add task description

Once you’re done, you can continue to input the questions

Task title, type and description

Open-Ended Question

Students will submit essays or answer in their own words. You can choose whether their answers must include citations.

Type your question
Optional: set a word limit
Optional: determine points for the question

Open ended question

Optional Advanced Settings

Select citation: Prompt students to choose a supporting citation. Highlight the passage you would like students to identify. Alethea will compare the student's highlights to yours.
Key concepts: Define key concepts or terms you would expect to see in the student's answer.
***Defining key concepts will facilitate automatic scoring of open-ended questions, and the concepts will appear on your reports

Optional: select relevant citations and define key concepts

Find in Text Question

This type of question requires the student to highlight relevant passages within the text. You will be asked to highlight the relevant passage in the text, and Alethea will compare the student's highlights to yours.

Type your question
Choose relevant passages from the text and click 'Done'
Optional: determine points for the question

Find in text - mark relevant passages to compare with student answers

Multiple Choice Question

This type of question requires students to choose the correct answer from a number of possible answers.

Type your question
Type possible answers
Mark the correct answer
Optional: prompt students to choose a supporting citation. Highlight the relevant passage and click 'Done'

Multiple choice question

Deleting and Duplicating Questions

You can delete questions by clicking on the trash icon at the bottom right corner of the question form
You have an option to duplicate a question to serve as a starting point for the next question. Clicking the copy icon at the bottom right corner of the question form will create a duplicate.

*** Note that the task must include at least one question. You will not be able to delete a question if it is the only one remaining in the task.

Deleting and duplicating question

Saving a Task Draft

At any point during your work on the task, you may use the "Save Draft" button to save the task’s current state and exit the task creation flow.

The task will be labeled as 'Draft' in the list of tasks for this class.

Save a draft

Step 3: Publish

To publish the task, you must set a deadline. Once done, click on the "Publish task" button.

Publish task

Edit Published Tasks

You can edit a task even after it was published, and change its title, questions, instructions etc.

Go to 'Tasks' page.
Click on the 'View task form' icon at the right side of the task you wish to edit.
Click on the 'Edit task' button at the top right corner of the page.
Confirm you want to edit, edit and save the changes by clicking on the 'Save task' button on the top right corner.

Tasks Submitted by Students

Task status

Navigate to the task manager by clicking on 'Tasks' in the top navigation bar. You will see the tasks you have created, each can be expanded to view the students' submission status.

Pending – the task wasn't submitted yet.
Submitted – the task was submitted prior to deadline.
Late submission – submitted in orange color means the task was submitted past the deadline.
Missed – The task was not submitted and it's past the deadline.

Once a student has turned in a task, you will receive a notification. You will be able to click on a submitted task to view the students’ work.

Task status on the task manager

Marking tasks and sending feedback

Click on a submitted task to add your feedback.

Question feedback

Navigate between the questions using the left side panel and review the student's work. You can add feedback to every question, but you don't have to. That's up to you.

Overall evaluation

Once you finish reviewing the questions, you will be asked to provide overall evaluation about the student's work. This evaluation will be presented to students upon opening the task

Task Statistics

Click on the statistics icon next to a task title to get some info regarding the task.
Click on the statistics icon next to a student name to see info regarding this student.

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