Strategy | Details |
| Have a plan necessary for grading and getting assignments for some period. | Students require some time to receive feedback concerning assignments, especially in the cases when one assignment can cause another. Define time soon after grading assignments and giving them back to students. One week or less is recommended to provide students with feedback. |
| Have a schedule for reaction to discussions in myWPI. | • Define weekly time for reading and reacting to discussion questions. There is no necessity to react to all postings, but if the instructor comment some times a week, students will be sure that the instructor is interested in their progress and discussions. Some postings two to three times a week is quite recommended for this purpose.
• The instructor’s involving in the online discussions provides students with an idea that they think right.
• Let individuals know about good postings to encourage their participation in the course’s discussion.
• If the discussion is in the wrong direction, lead students to a different direction. Pay attention to various ways of looking at the topic or asking follow-up questions to direct thinking in another direction.
• If you do not know how to organize discussions properly, pay attention how discussion boards are applied. |
| Have grading criteria for the course and for individual assignments. | The instructor should provide students with grading criteria on assignments to give them a possibility to compare their assignments with grades and with the instructor’s comments. Thus, assignment criteria are applied as feedback. |
| Set office hours or live class discussions. | Set time for interaction with students via phone or such electronic communications as instant messaging.
Be sure that your office hours are known to anyone in the class who is eager to attend. Such action is necessary, because students can answer questions of other students and ask them something. Apply such activities as messaging programs (such as AOL Messenger), the virtual classroom or lightweight text chat in myWPI, or Interwise. |
| Apply the PDF Scanner to give students assignments with your written comments. | You can apply the PDF scanner to write written comments on print copies of assignments for students in your campus-based and distant learning classes. The purpose of PDF scanner is to scan the print copies and turn them into PDF documents and e-mail them to students. The instructor can print out student assignments, write comments on them and visit the ATC in Fuller Labs B24 to send them to students through the PDF scanner or with ATC coordinator and the ATC staff will send them back to students via the PDF scanner. |
| Apply the Assignment Manager in myWPI to define grades and provide with comments on assignments. | The Assignment Manager in myWPI gives a possibility for an instructor to enter a grade and type comments for students’ onservation via myWPI. The grades are available in a gradebook to make grades easy. |
| Apply Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat to put electronic comments into assignments, then return them to students. | Microsoft Word provides you with a possibility to insert comments into assignments. To insert a comment, you should highlight the text you are commenting on, go to the Insert menu and choose Comment. Save the file and return it to the student through e-mail.
The full version of Adobe Acrobat (not Acrobat Reader) can also be used for having comments. For this purpose, you should highlight text in PDF documents and type comments. The students submit their assignments as PDF files or the instructor turns them to PDF files via Adobe Acrobat. Then save the files and give them back to students for reading your comments via Acrobat Reader. |
| Apply the Test Manager in myWPI to have tests and quizzes. | Tests and quizzes established via the Test Manager can be automatically graded and have prompt feedback to students as soon as they are done by students.
Test and quiz scores are kept in the gradebook, so it is easy to pay attention to student grades. |
| Apply the Gradebook in myWPI. | The Gradebook collects all students' grades for all assignments in the class. Students can see all of their grades, successes and their place in the class.
The Assignment Manager and Test Manager possess grading mechanisms for automatical inserting grades into the gradebook.
Update your gradebook once a week, because students should be aware of their development and place in the class. |
| Make assignments in such a way, so students have feedback to each other | Divide students up in pairs and let them make comments concerning each other’s work. Students can work in groups and present their successes to the whole class, which gives comments on their work.
This technique helps students to encourage using various assignments or when there are multiple parts to an assignment divided into stages. |
