Provide opportunity for students to practice using the OIS components
prior to giving them required assignments!!
Calendar
• Links should take the students to a page with all of the
assignments listed on it instead of having each assignment only in the small
pop up window in Calendar (In the pop up window, put a link to the
assignment’s webpage)
• Put only beginning and ending dates for each event; don’t post the event
every day it is available.
Forum
• Might want to consider turning off the email addresses in Forum so students
don’t have immediate access to others’ emails
• When you delete messages, run the recalculate counters in the Forum
Properties/Advanced window
• Set up your Forum with the grading structure in mind
• Familiar yourself with the three levels of organization within Forum
before you set up your Forum
• If the text of the assignment is lengthy, make it available as a web page
and link it from the Forum message.
• Disable student editing of posts after due dates (or before grading posts)
UTest
• If you want to minimize the printing or copying of your tests by students,
require the use of the secure browser
• Do not provide immediate feedback besides the student’s grade when the
test is being used for assessment
• Publish feedback after the test has been closed
• Use question banks for multiple choice/TF/matching/fill in the blank when
possible
• Review publisher’s test bank questions before putting them into UTest
• Test banks should contain at least three times the number of
questions on the test
• Randomize the questions on the test
• Randomize the answers on the multiple choice questions
• If you randomize the answers, then don’t use “all of the above”/etc. as a
choice in the list of possible answers
• Instructors should tell students to save their tests frequently; to
enforce this action, consider using the feature in UTest which will only put
part of the test on each page
• If the student has a problem and has saved the test previously, then the
instructor just has to add time for that particular student to finish the
test
• Tests should be available for a minimum of 24 hours
• Make sure the test time length is appropriate (multiple choice questions
need approximately 1 minute, etc.)
• Take the test using your fake student id and your faculty id before making
it available to your students
• To increase your objectivity when grading text answers, click on the
checkbox that allows you to grade anonymously
GradeA
• Update the gradebook as frequently as possible
• Use GradeA as the only mechanism for delivering grades to students.
• Use descriptive titles for gradebook entries
• Make sure the server area has only the information that the instructor
wants shown to the students
Drop Box
• Familiarize yourself with the three levels or organization
• Use a different category for each grading scheme
• Set the number of files to one if you only want one file per student
• If you want to give inline feedback, then edit the file itself
• Make sure you limit the allowed file types to only the file formats you
can read
• Instead of putting the assignment in the text of the DropBox, make the
assignment available as a separate web page or as a downloadable file.
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