Design Your Online Business Statistics Course with Connect® Based on the Quality in Online Learning Certification
We interviewed Bowling Green State Assistant Professor, Kyle Moninger, about best practices for planning your Applied Statistics course with Connect and your Quality in Online Learning Certification.
How would you recommend a new faculty member get started?
"Develop a plan to be organized. The Quality in Online Learning certificate encouraged instructors to focus on the chapter level Learning Objectives and build your course from there. Although this may feel too granular to start with, these Learning Objectives are the foundation to designing meaningful content and assignments. Any textbook in the MHE franchise details the Learning Objectives covered in each chapter. If you don’t have a hardcopy of the textbook, you can easily view the Learning Objectives online through SmartBook or the eBook version of the text in McGraw Hill Connect®.
Once your Learning Objectives are selected, you can begin building the schedule of content delivery and assignments. Assignments are designed around the framework of Formative and Summative assignments (more details on those below)."
What are some of the standards you need to keep in mind? Are there any tools in Connect you recommend using to maintain these standards?
"Formative assessments are low-stakes assessments that are meant to monitor student learning and provide feedback to students to help identify their strengths and weaknesses. They can use this information to target areas and learning objectives that need work before a higher-stakes assignment is introduced.
Formative assessments should also be used by instructors to help identify where students are struggling and address problems immediately.
In Connect, SmartBook assignments are the perfect fit for a formative assignment. These can be low point values and allow students to explore the Learning Objectives of the chapter while quizzing themselves over the content. SmartBook offers immediate feedback to the student so they can identify their strengths and weaknesses in the chapter. Detailed reporting information is also readily available to the instructors, so that they can identify which Learning Objectives are most challenging to students.
Another option for designing Formative assessments is to create homework assignments and allow multiple attempts per problem. This still offers the student a low-stakes environment to practice what they’ve learned from the chapter.
Summative assessments are high-stakes assessments that are meant to evaluate student learning at the end of a chapter by comparing it against some standard.
In Connect, quizzes or exams serve as Summative assignments. Instructors can select problems from the test bank and filter by Learning Objective, to ensure they are selecting questions that have been covered in previous formative assignments. To create robust and dynamic Summative assignments, consider pooling several questions by Learning Objective, to ensure alternate versions of the assignment for each student."
What tool in Connect are you most excited about?
An exciting new tool available to Business Statistics Connect users are the BStat Interactives. These formative-style assignments are interactive problems that allow students to delve into a topic in a more hands on way. Students will be asked to simulate different scenarios within the interface and answer questions about the results. These problems are a unique approach to help students internalize different learning objectives.