It’s critically important to refresh our classes each semester. Course designs can get stale over time, and students often become familiar with the way we’ve structured things in the past. To keep the learning experience dynamic, I make it a point to rework my courses regularly. One of the ways I do this is by leveraging SIMnet® in multiple ways each semester to ensure I’m using the platform to its fullest potential to engage students and support their success.

One practice I use at the end of each semester is reviewing the reporting to measure how effective my assessments have been. I rely on both exams and projects, and the reporting helps me determine whether my grading mechanisms are too easy, which leads to grade inflation, or too complex, which could hinder student performance.

The built-in reports make this process efficient, allowing me to check key indicators like average completion times and average grades in just a few minutes. I also compare outcomes between work completed in class and work done as homework to better understand how context influences student success. Looking at the outcomes at the end of the semester gives me ideas about what to change in the next semester.

The great thing about SIMnet is that small adjustments can create big impacts. In just a few minutes, I can refine the structure of an assignment or assessment in ways that meaningfully improve the student experience. The best part is that these changes usually take no more than five minutes to implement, yet they can significantly shape the quality and effectiveness of my assessments.

One great example happened a few years ago during a conversation with a fellow faculty member. They shared that they disagreed with awarding the highest grade across multiple project submissions. That insight pushed me to rethink my own approach.

By changing the grading scale in SIMnet from “highest submission” to the “average” of all submissions, I instantly made the assessments more rigorous. Students now had to make a legitimate attempt on their first try, or risk hurting their grade by treating the early attempt as a throwaway. This setting took only one minute to change, but it completely altered the way my class works.

Other examples of simple changes I’ve made that had large effects included changing the time on quizzes, the number of attempts per question on exams, and the type of feedback given to students when getting something wrong. One minor change actually enabled me to flip my class. By modifying the Let Me Try from a non-graded assignment to a graded assignment placed prior to the first class date, I now teach the class in a flipped manner by focusing on projects during class time. 

It is important to continually re-think your courses each term. Each of the changes mentioned here made it easy to do that. SIMnet is full of settings that enable easy changes that can increase or decrease the rigor of a class without changing the general design for the course. This means you can regularly update and revise your course. This is important because students need to be challenged in ever-continuing ways. SIMnet allows you to do that by simply changing the parameters of an assessment.