EdTech provides consulting, training, outreach and educational services
for faculty, instructors and staff using educational technologies.
EdTech provides consulting, training, outreach and educational services
for faculty, instructors and staff using educational technologies.
Many instructors begin a new semester with a copy of a previous Illinois Compass course site. This can save a great deal of time, but there are a number of updates that must take place for that old course web site to become a new online course. And, more importantly, the revision process is the right time to consider changing and improving teaching and grading strategies, or adding tools and features to your Illinois Compass course. The tips below are assembled from our training and consulting staff and provide a good overview of some of the things you'll want to consider while designing and revising your Illinois Compass course site:
The primary tool for checking on the appearance and behavior of any Compass course is the Student View tab, which provides instructors and designers with a view of the course associated with the "demo" student listed in each Compass course site grade book. This view is the last word on whether or not your real students will be able to see your course content, whether quizzes are available, whether grades are posted and visible. The Student View is invaluable for instructors who should understand and appreciate the actual steps, tasks, and procedures students must complete to submit assignments, complete surveys, and so forth.
If you are working on your course web site after students have access to the site, then you may want to hide old or draft content from students without losing track of it. With Compass a teacher can hide content from students but still keep it visible from within the course designer tab. Invisible content will be grayed out with "(hidden)" associated with the link in both the Build and Teach view, while students will not be able to see this content at all. To hide content from students, go to Build > Basic View > Selective Release Map and then toggle any piece of content from "Yes" to "No" under the "Available" header. When you are done with your content just be sure and use the Student View to check that your students can see what you want them to see.
Most Compass teachers and designers build on the fly from Build > Basic View, adding and editing and deleting content from their web site home page and organizer pages. Beyond the Basic View, however, is the Power View, and the "power" in Power View refers to the ability to view and edit and rearrange one's entire Compass course site from one web page. Thus, any time you are reviewing, reconsidering, and modifying old content, you ought to spend some minutes in Build > Power View getting a birds-eye-view of your course.
If you're going to require students to use your Compass site, you should include an assignment for the first week requiring them to do something on the site, to make sure Compass is working for them and they can all access the site. It's even better if this first assignment prepares the students for the primary tools and methods you will be employing throughout the semester. This assignment, of course, should be low pressure and low stakes; it should be no credit or extra credit. One could even include a simple online or in-class survey asking students how the assignment worked and if they had any technical problems. Assessing and fixing student technical problems and issues early will mitigate problems later that can grow due to deadline pressures and grade stress. Early in the course you could even encourage students to use online buddies if they have questions or need help. The "All Systems are go" assignment could be as simple as responding to a discussion topic or taking a one-answer quiz; that one-answer quiz could require students to access and review online content files, thus providing another test of your overall plan for distributing content to students. Common topics for All Systems are Go assignments are interesting current events questions or requests that students post short biographical entries to help build class camaraderie.
There are several ways documents may be updated in a new Compass course. Let's say, for example, you upload a file to your course that contains the class syllabus. You could edit that file on your PC and save it. It is reasonable to expect that you'll save it with a new name. If however you upload the syllabus into the Compass File Manager with exactly the same name the old link to the syllabus will work with the new file!
With a new semester all the old dates you set for quizzes and assignments will need to be reset. The best way to see and edit all assessments and assignments is to go to Teach > Tool View > Assessment Manager > Settings or choose Assignments > Settings from the same area. From this area you will be able to see all the quizzes or assignments in your course and will be able to click the small blue "settings" icon for each item, providing access to the "Dates Available" settings. The actual deadlines you choose for quizzes and assignments can impact how successful your students will be in completing their work. Since most students complete their homework during the evening hours, our servers experience the highest loads between 6:00 P.M. & 2:00 A.M. Heavier traffic begins in the afternoon. We recommend setting due times between 5:00 A.M. & 11:00 A.M.
Any Word, PDF, or html documents you have that include dates should be revised. Whether you use the built-in Compass calendar or upload your own, you'll obviously need to revise that too.
Web addresses and links are always changing, being moved, archived or shut down. You should certainly review all the links to external web resources. The most thorough approach (but perhaps tedious when dealing with many links) would be to use the Student View and click through all the web links in the entire course. A more systematic approach for those that used the URL tool to add web links to a Compass course would be to visit Build > Content Inventory > URL and to click on the preview icon for all the links listed in this area. Similarly, you can visit Build > Power View and review web links from this area.
Any new course copy will, of course, remove old students and old grades, but the assignments and columns in the grade book as well as the formulas should all still be there. One thing that might happen in the course copy process is that the order of your columns may change. And, too, you might simply need to add or remove columns or change the order of columns, either to help with adding grades or help students in the viewing of grades. To change the order of columns in the grade book go to Teach > Grade Book > Reorder Columns. Lastly, to see how grades look to your students you'll need to give them access to grades by adding the My Grades button to the course toolbar; next, give the demo student in the grade book phony grades and then use Student View to check the appearance of grades.
Illinois Compass provides an easy way of getting feedback from students. With the assessments tool you can create a survey and solicit input from students specifically about their online experience in your course. You can use the information when re-designing or re-purposing the site for a future semester. To make sure your students can successfully use Compass, please alert them to click the CHECK BROWSER link in the upper-right corner of the IL Compass window at the start of every semester. They can find out if their system is up to par or not. The Check Browser window also directs IL Compass users how to help update anything that may be out of date. You could include this basic information in a "Getting Started With Compass" announcement or content file on linked on your course home page.
There is nothing like painting or adding pictures to a wall to set a new mood for a home. Likewise, the easiest way to get a new new look for your Illinois Compass course site is to go to Build > Basic View > Course Customization to change your course colors, icons, or page layouts. Most of the controls here are easy and self- explanatory; however, if you would like to change a particular icon for a single file or link in your course, that is a bit more tricky, and isn't found in the "Icon Sets" area, which refers to your course-wide selection of icons, your default icons. To change a single icon for a single link or file you'll need to go to Page Layouts > click the icon link on the page and choose Replace Icon. You can create your own icons with an image editor. To match the size of the default Compass icons you should make yours 60 pixels wide by 60 pixels tall.
CITES EdTech offers training sessions specifically for those revising or expanding their Compass course sites ("Illinois Compass Course Makeovers: Taking it to the Next Level"). Additionally, our advanced Compass training courses can help you get started with some of the more challenging online functions such as assessments and assignments. Or, perhaps you want to just deepen and expand your use of a familiar online activity such as online course discussions. Visit our online training calendar to find useful sessions and reserve a spot.
If you just want to chat with someone one-on-one about your course then we suggest meeting with one of our consultants. Our CITES EdTech consultants have years, even decades, of experience supporting educational technology. Because we work with hundreds and thousands of faculty from across campus our consultants are ready to work with any discipline, any size of class, and in any learning context. Our consultants join with faculty, Teaching Assistants, and other relevant campus resources to form a team that. . .
Like so many things, beginning early with your course redesign is the single most important thing you can do to ensure success and lack of frustrations. Over the years, the biggest problems and frustrations we see occur when instructors are trying to play catch up and revise a course web site after the course is in progress. Many instructors choose to revise during the semester, but keep a week or two ahead, and this strategy can work well: one doesn't need to have an entire course completed on the first day of class. However, if your course site isn't ready for the first day of class, or each week you are behind, then any number of problems may materialize and be compounded when real students and real deadlines and teaching goals arrive and your course site isn't ready to facilitate and encourage success.
If you have further questions, please contact EdTech by calling 244-7000 or emailing edtech@illinois.edu.
Our office hours are Monday-Friday, 8:30 A.M. to 5:00 P.M.
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