Putting Your Course
in the LMS

Import/Export/Copy Components

D2L Videos: Import/Export/Copy Components

Add a Module, Create a File and Insert Materials

A Module is a place where you can hold your course materials together in a category. Below are some suggestions for you to organize and build course content.

• Create a plan for each module. Modules are helpful ways for organizing the course material across time. If there are too few modules, each module becomes a challenge for students to navigate, and finding information can be overwhelming. Too many modules create similar issues. A full course often has 5-16 modules, with 5-8 being most common. Usually, each module has the following content in this order:

  • Introduction or Overview

  • List of activities and work to be graded

  • Lecture material and assigned readings (videos and printed materials)

  • Opportunities to discuss the material asynchronously (Discussion tool)

  • Opportunities for synchronous meetings (Existing Activities/External Learning tools/Blackboard Collaborate Ultra)

  • Quizzes or exams (Quizzes tool)

  • Assignment descriptions and submission folder (Assignment tool)

• Keep your course simple at first. Start out with the basic necessities and add other materials as you have time.

D2L Videos:

Add a Module

Create a File and Insert Course Materials

Create an Announcement

An announcement is a great way to communicate and remind your students of important learning activities. It is highly recommended that instructors:

• Stay in weekly contact with your students.

• Remind them of upcoming due dates, invite questions, and encourage them to complete the work in a timely manner.

D2L Videos:

Create an Announcement

TIPS: Weekly Announcement

A weekly announcement can be captivating to the students by including these features:

• A real world event that relates to the weekly materials

• A list of concepts that students will learn in that week

• A question that makes students curious

• Links to assignments and learning activities

• Due dates if available

D2L Videos:

Create an Assignment

Create an Assignment and Enable TurnItIn®

TIPS: Using TILT to Design Transparent Assignments

Amanda Campbell, University of West Georgia

• Purpose of assignment: What skills will students gain? How will they serve them? What content knowledge does the assignment help them learn? How does the assignment align with the course objectives? How does it align with the module objectives?

• Task: What are the specific instructions that outline what the students will do? This might include a section on how students should approach the assignment (steps to follow as well as potential missteps to avoid). Don’t forget to include your expectations for how the document should be formatted (style guide; spacing; font type and size; PDF or .docx). This can be tedious, but it will save you time in the long run. Instead of answering questions regarding aspects of the assignment that don’t necessarily relate to the content, you can focus on helping students develop content knowledge and other skills. Also, include instructions about how the assignment should be submitted.

• Criteria for success: Include a checklist or a rubric in the assignment. Rottman & Rabidoux (2017) explain, “rubrics posted with each assignment also foster open communication and clear expectations. Students easily can read the assignment narrative and still not comprehend what is expected; rubrics provide additional clarity. Students are more successful in assignments when they know exactly what will be expected for assignment grading.”

• Another way instructors can help students understand what they need to do to be successful is to provide annotated examples of what excellence looks like. Instructors often fear that students will merely imitate the example. However, showing students what a final product could look like builds their confidence and they often will take a more unique and creative approach to the work.

D2L Videos:

Create a Forum

Create a Discussion Topic

TIPS: Facilitating Online Discussions

Online Discussions are a great way to support the development of community in your remotely taught course, and instructor participation during the discussion period increases students' level of critical thinking in their posts (Acolatse, 2016; Garrison & Arbaugh, 2007; Hall, 2015; Lambert & Fisher, 2013). You don’t want to be the center of attention, but you want to participate in order to:

• Establish a connection with your students

• Encourage students (save evaluations of students’ posts for the Gradebook)

• Model higher-order thinking and the use of quotes and references in your post

• Bring new life to the online discussion and keep it from becoming repetitive by:

  • Guiding students to fruitful areas of exploration

  • Asking questions to broaden or deepen the discussion

  • Asking scaffolding questions to probe students’ assumptions, viewpoints, and reasoning

  • Sharing teaching stories (just-in-time-teaching) and your passion for the topic

D2L Videos:

Create a New Quiz with New Questions

Create a New Quiz with Imported Questions

Create a New Quiz with A Randomized Set of Questions

TIPS: Reducing Academic Dishonesty

Randomizing the choices and randomizing the questions helps to decrease opportunities for academic dishonesty, especially if you can create a bank of questions that is larger than the number of questions on the assessment. Another way to reduce academic dishonesty is to limit the time students have to take the assessment. However, be careful about limiting the duration of the quiz: some students' work schedules preclude them from taking assessments during normal hours (some students may have to work double shifts and crawl home exhausted, for example).

At a minimum, you need to create a grade item for each assignment that you give your students.

• If you only have 30 minutes and you only need to use the Gradebook in D2L, please watch video 1: Create a Grade Item.

• If you would like to use quiz, assignment, and discussion tools inside D2L, it is recommended that you watch video 3: Associate an Activity with a Grade Item, along with video 1.

• As you feel more comfortable with the Gradebook in D2L, you may want to learn how to organize your Gradebook into Categories, and give each category a specific weight.

D2L Videos:

Create a Grade Item

Enter Grades

Associate an Activity with a Grade Item

Create a Gradebook Category

Release Final Grades

TIPS: Giving Quality Feedback

Amanda Campbell, University of West Georgia

Taking time to carefully assess assignments and articulate a substantive response to student work is an important part of remote and online teaching. When students do not receive substantive feedback, they might assume that the instructor has not even read their work. This can be discouraging to students who have exerted great effort to complete an assignment. Rabidoux and Rottman (2017) say, “Meaningful feedback on assignments enhances critical thinking, reflective practice, and develops instructor-student relationships which is important in an online environment. While feedback fosters reflection, correction and performance extension, it also increases student motivation as they feel the instructor is interested in their success” (para. 1). Feedback can also help students develop a growth mindset.

Fillable rubrics can save time and are good for helping students understand both the overall expectations of the assignment and how well they met those expectations. Using rubrics not only helps students understand how their work meets a certain criterion but also it helps the instructor maintain consistency and fairness in grading. Rubrics that are built in your Learning Management System (LMS) or Turnitin are easy to use: The instructor merely selects the appropriate level for each criterion, and the rubric calculates the final grade.

While a rubric is certainly helpful, a personalized message to the student helps strengthen the student-instructor rapport. When constructing feedback, consider creating a template based on the assignment that can be tailored for individual students.

This information will help you establish initial communication with your students. Please note that a companion course provides communication information for your students.

D2L Videos:

Contact Learners: Email

Make Regular Announcements

Manage Notifications - Instructor

Teaching Element: Instructor-to-Student Interaction in Online Courses

There are a number of resources available on your campus such as the Chancellor's Learning Scholars, your local Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) faculty and staff, and your online support people. The CTL office should be able to connect you with the Learning Scholars and other help. Find your CTL Director here. There are also other resources below.

Please note that the Keep Teaching USG site has the following wealth of information:

• USG Guides for Faculty

• Institution Guides for Faculty

• Faculty Privacy Reminders

• USG Cybersecurity Guide

• Course Material Guides

• Vendor and External Guides

• Important Resources for Students

• USG Learning Everywhere