Course via Video Conferencing

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 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 online and remote 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 a remote or 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.

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.

TIPS: Sample 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

Below is a sample weekly announcement.

Hello all! And welcome to week 3!

This week we are learning about groups. Most people have a sense of what it means to be part of some kind of a group, whether it is a social movement, sports team, school club, or family. Groups connect us to others through commonalities of geography, interests, race, religion, and activities. But for the groups of people who, say, participate in protests, it is harder to define. What unites these people? Groups are prevalent in our social lives and provide a significant way to understand and define ourselves—both through groups we feel a connection to and those we do not. Groups also play an important role in society. As enduring social units, they help foster shared value systems and are key to the structure of society as we know it. As you move through this week, be aware of thinking on the groups that you yourself are involved in. Think on why you are a part of that, and what led you to be involved. Self-reflection is an important but also fun component of Sociology!

Please feel free to reach out to me. Prof L

(by Naomi Latini Wolfe, UNG)

This section is extremely important. FERPA requires that a student’s information is protected at all times. Faculty have two options: Use the D2L Brightspace Gradebook in your LMS or keep grades on a personal gradebook or spreadsheet on your computer and communicate grades to students via telephone. It is important when communicating academic performance or grades with student via phone that you are verifying identification with that student prior. We recommend having the student verify their institutional student ID, as using DOB or SSN may be information that is readily available to the students’ parents. Faculty cannot communicate grades via email. Email is an unsecure channel and transmitting grades via email is a FERPA violation.

Urge your students to sign up for text or email notifications of grades (link to notifications video here) or to download the D2L Brightspace Pulse mobile app (available on the App Store or Google Play) to easily view grades. If students are unable to access their grades in the LMS, you can email or text them your feedback and communicate their grades over the phone (again, verifying their identity first).

FERPA Information: While FERPA does not specifically prohibit a school from disclosing personally identifiable information from a student’s education records over the telephone, it does require that the school use reasonable methods to identify and authenticate the identity of parents, students, school officials, and any other parties to whom the school discloses personally identifiable information from education records. 34 CFR § 99.31(c).