MyMathLab / MyStatLab Best Practices and Tips

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1 Course Management 1. Click Forgot your username or password? for Login Name and Password Assistance. 2. Bookmark the instructor help system and student help system in your browser for quick access to these pages. 3. When creating a course, enter a descriptive name so that you students can easily identify your course during enrollment. 4. Create an instructor account with Read-Only access to allow other instructors to review your course assignments, Study Plan, and Gradebook settings. 5. Create a course and designate it For Instructor Use Only. Use this course as a template and modify it to reflect changes you see needed in the courses that you are teaching with during the term. 6. Give your coordinator course a name that clearly indicates it is a template course or master course. 7. The coordinator instructor can grant different levels of access to each member instructor by editing the roster in the member course Gradebook. 8. Changes made to menu and content pages in the coordinator course are not inherited by the member courses. Therefore, you should complete all customization in these areas of the coordinator course before you create the member courses. 9. Copying a coordinator course greatly reduces the time and effort needed to prepare to teach it again, while preserving the dates and assignments in the original course group. It is good practice to create a new coordinator course for each term or academic year. 10. You can collapse the course menu by clicking the icon at the top right of the menu. Click to expand the course menu. You can also display the content page in fullscreen mode by clicking the icon at the top left of the content page. Click to toggle out of full-screen mode.

2 Announcements 1. Students can download the standalone mobile Dashboard to log in and review information from the Dashboard of their MyMathLab courses. This free app is available for Android and ios mobile devices by searching for "My Dashboard" on the app store for their device. 2. The Publisher Announcement lists important information for students at the beginning of the term, with convenient links to the browser check, Pearson Tutor Services, and so on. Hide the Publisher Announcement after the term has begun to provide more space in the Announcements panel for your class announcements. 3. To hide the dashboard target line, set the percentage to either 0% or 100%. 4. You can copy and paste messages from another source such as a Word document or website.

3 Assignments 1. Use media assignments to require students to work on the learning resources before they begin their homework assignments. For example, you could assign an animation and a video for students to review before a test. Or you could assign a video and make viewing the video a prerequisite to a homework assignment. 2. Group media files and questions to give students practice after viewing the media resources. 3. When creating personalized homework assignments, add additional questions from objectives covered on the companion test to give students more practice on the objectives. You can also add questions from objectives not covered in the companion test to ensure that all students must work at least one question in the homework assignment. 4. Create two or more personalized homework assignments for a companion test to have homework assignments covering fewer objectives. 5. You have to manually grade each student's work, so be judicious in the number of questions that require students to show work. A best practice is to limit the number of Show Work questions to 20% of the total number of questions in the assignment. 6. Here are several scoring scenarios for Show Work questions: a. 100% automatic scoring for question, 0% automatic score for Show Work Use this in conjunction with requiring work for every question in the assignment. If a student does not answer a question correctly, you can manually check the student's work and award partial credit. If a student answers a question correctly, there is no need for you to review the student's work. b. 0% automatic scoring for question, manual scoring for Show Work Use this to manually score each question by reviewing the answer and the student's work. 7. Since the questions on your quiz or test are also algorithmically generated, pooling greatly reduces the chances of two students seeing the same question with the same values. 8. Pool questions with the same objective and difficulty level to increase the number of variations for your quiz. 9. Setting a late submission penalty provides a motivation for students to complete the assignment on time. You can also set a late submission penalty per day as a further motivation for students to complete the assignment as soon as possible. 10. To avoid decimal partial credit, you can change the question point value to equal to the total number of answer parts in the question. In the example above, changing the point value to 4 would result in partial credit of 3 out of 4 points. 11. Use prerequisites to ensure mastery of prerequisite concepts. A best practice is to specify 80% mastery on homework assignments and 70% mastery on quizzes or tests.

4 12. Limit the number of attempts per question to discourage students from "gaming" the system by generating multiple versions of a question in an effort to get the correct answer without doing any mathematical work. 13. Use a password when the quiz is taken in a proctored setting to ensure that students cannot open the quiz outside of the proctored setting, or if you want to control access to an un-proctored quiz. 14. Use prerequisites for quiz attempts to require students to review and remediate in between attempts. In addition, limit the number of quiz attempts to motivate students to prepare adequately before attempting the quiz. 15. Use Restricted Access or Blocked Access if you want to control student access to an interrupted quiz. 16. Change the Learning Aids display to show all learning aids and check the Show in Review mode only box. When students are taking the quiz, they will not have access to any of the learning aids. After they submit the quiz, they can access the learning aids as they review the quiz in their Gradebook. 17. Hide the question results for high-stakes assessments or assessments with static questions so that students can see their score on the assessment but are not able to view the questions or their answers. 18. When creating multiple assignments from scratch, save time by not entering the available and due dates for the individual assignment. Finish creating all of the assignments and then enter all of the assignment dates on the Change Due Dates & Assign Status page. 19. When creating multiple assignments from scratch, save time by not customizing the settings on Step 3 for the individual assignments. Finish creating all of the assignments and then customize all of the assignment settings at once on the Change Settings for Multiple Assignments page. 20. If you want to create your assignments ahead of time but not have the assignments show up on your students' assignment list, save the assignments but do not assign them. When you are ready to make the assignments available to students, go to the Change Dates & Assign Status page to quickly change the assignment status to Assigned. 21. Use Individual Student Settings to change the settings for one assignment for several students or for several assignments for one student. For example, if you have students who require test accommodations, you could remove or change the time limit on their quizzes or tests, or you may need to extend the deadline for several assignments for one student 22. You can use the Individual Student Settings page to make an assignment available to a subset of students in the class. Create your assignment and save it but do not assign it to the class. On the Individual Student Settings page, select the students and change the assignment status to Assigned for these students. 23. Set prerequisites for separate quiz or test attempts to ensure that students remediate in between quiz/test attempts. 24. Sort the assignments in the order students are to complete them.

5 Gradebook 1. Click the navigation buttons above or below the spreadsheet to move through the list of assignments. Use the Go to button to quickly jump to an assignment. 2. Use Item Analysis for homework assignments to check your students' understanding of the questions and objectives. Use this information to focus your homework review with the class. 3. When you open the Item Analysis page for an assignment, click Export student details. This report shows you the score for each question for each student in the class. For homework assignments, you can also see how many attempts each student did on each question; this is useful for identifying which students are attempting to game the system. 4. You can also a student regarding a specific assignment by selecting Student from the Actions dropdown list for that assignment. 5. Use the Search/ by Criteria wizard for early intervention, such as identifying students who have not submitted any assignments within a certain period, or identifying students with low overall scores at midterm. 6. Hide assignments that you create for student practice only or that are used as templates for other assignments to minimize the number of assignments displayed in the Gradebook and to enable quicker access to relevant student results. 7. If you teach more than one section of a course and each section has identical assignments and settings, you can create one MyMathLab course and have students from each section enroll in the same course. Enter the section number (or any unique ID) as the Student ID for students in that section. For example, you could enter "1" as the Student ID for students in the first section, and enter "2" as the Student ID for students in the second section. This allows you to quickly sort your Gradebook by section. 8. Change a student's status to Inactive when the student withdraws from the class. 9. If you are not recording all grades in the Gradebook, the overall score displayed will not reflect the students' course average. You may wish to hide the overall score from your students' results pages to avoid misunderstandings about their course average. In the Gradebook, select Set Scoring Options from the More Gradebook Tools

6 dropdown list. On the Set Scoring Options page, check the Hide Overall Score from students box, and click Update. 10. Use Cumulative performance with Assignment Weighting Only to set up a "points earned" model for course grades. Students start with 0 points at the beginning of the course and accumulate points as they progress through the course. 11. Delete results to revert an assignment to an unopened state so that you can edit the assignment. This is useful prior to the beginning of the term when you are designing your course. You can test the course as a student and then delete results to allow further editing of the assignments. 12. Submit zero scores for all past due assignments to give students a more realistic course average. 13. When dropping lowest scores, you can reverse the process and include dropped scores back into the Gradebook by dropping 0 lowest scores for the category. 14. In the Advanced Gradebook Export window, use the Item Analysis report to check student understanding of specific objectives in an assignment. 15. In the Advanced Gradebook Export window, use the Student Performance by Chapter report to track student learning by objective. 16. At the end of the term, export all assignment data for record-keeping purposes. Be sure to allow extra time at the end of a term for processing. 17. If a student enrolls in another section, make the student inactive in the original section but do not remove the student from the source course to ensure that you have a record of their submitted work.

7 Course Design 1. Add content pages to house course handouts like your syllabus, projects, or supplemental materials. 2. Move frequently-used course tools to the top of the menu for convenient access. For example, you could move the Homework/Test Manager and instructor Gradebook to the top part of the menu. Since these items are hidden to the student, they will not appear in the student view. 3. Restore the Assignments button if you want students to see all assignments (homework, quizzes, and tests) on the same list. To do this, modify the course menu, go to the Restore tab, and restore the Assignments menu item. 4. Remove items from your course menu to keep the menu uncluttered with extraneous items. 5. Create a new content page as the course entry point and post course announcements on this page. This will give you control over the formatting of your announcements and allow you to display announcements on the full page. 6. Convert handouts to PDF files to preserve formatting and to ensure that students will be able to open the file if they do not have the source program installed on their computer. 7. You can add additional discussions anywhere in the course menu. This gives you the flexibility of organizing your threaded discussions separately for each component of your course. 8. Add discussion threads to focus the discussion at strategic points in your course. 9. Add separate chatrooms for different purposes. For example, you can add a chatroom for the Midterm Exam and a separate chatroom for the Final Exam. 10. Use ClassLive sessions for online office hours, review sessions, or one-on-one tutoring sessions with your students. For example, you can place or draw objects on the whiteboard, send and receive graphed or plotted equations, participate in synchronous chat sessions with your students, and work through complex mathematical problems one step at a time 11. Use Document Sharing as a repository for resources used in the course. Your students can also upload documents and share them with you or with the entire class.