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Review the pedagogical and technical information below to inform your progress in Week Eight. Have questions about what you learned here or ideas for future tips? Join Coffee & Answers (open support Zoom sessions with the Academic Technology Team) or email the Office of Teaching and Learning.
Pedagogical
How can I leverage midterm grades for timely student intervention and effective advising?
Midterm grades serve as a crucial formative assessment tool, offering a "snapshot" of student progress before finals to enable timely intervention, foster metacognition, and adjust learning strategies. Pedagogically, they function as diagnostic feedback by identifying learning gaps, encouraging growth mindsets, and prompting "course corrections" for both students and instructors. Please remember to submit midterm grades by October 14.
October and November are busy advising months, and students will be contacting you to schedule meetings to discuss midterm grades and/or spring registration. Consider using Starfish or Google Calendar Appointments as a convenient way for students to book appointments with you.
Students will receive this email explaining the importance of midterm grades, how to review them in the Nest, and where to find help, if needed.
The Advisee Grade Summary in the Nest is a tool you can use to review grades for all of your advisees. To access:
- Log into the Nest
- Click on the Faculty tab
- Click on the Advisee Grade Summary in the Advising Resources block.
- Select the appropriate term.
Conversations about midterm grades focus on progress in courses, but they may also generate questions about major exploration, Spring registration, mental health and well-being, etc. The Advisor Toolkit features a comprehensive list of resources to which you can refer your advisees.
-Maria Beazley
Director, Undergraduate Advising Support
Technical
What options do I have to encourage or increase academic integrity?
The University supports two tools that can be used directly from your Canvas site for encouraging academic honesty. The OTL also offers some tips to use these tools effectively to increase academic integrity in courses!
Turnitin
Turnitin can be used with Canvas assignment submissions to help students understand proper citation practices and the importance of original work. The report searches for similarly phrased wording or exact matches, and allows instructors and students to identify potential issues with paraphrasing, quotation, or source attribution. This can be used to support learning while deterring plagiarism.
Respondus LockDown Browser
Respondus LockDown Browser maintains the integrity of online exams by limiting access to other applications, websites, and system functions during an assessment. By creating a secure testing environment, Respondus reduces opportunities for unauthorized resources and supports fair and consistent testing conditions for all students. This can be used for any quiz, test, or knowledge check built in Canvas.
Before using Respondus LockDown Browser for the first time in your class, we highly recommend setting up a practice quiz. This could be a simple 1-question, 0-point quiz, that serves as a test-run for your students. A practice quiz will provide your students with an understanding of what the LockDown experience feels like and will help to expose any device-related issues before taking a higher-stakes exam.
If you have copied your Canvas course with a Respondus LockDown Browser Quiz, you will need to double-check the Quiz settings within the LockDown Browser course navigation before launching your Quiz.
Are these tips helpful? Do you have a topic we should include in future weeks? Please let us know by emailing otl@sju.edu!
Additional Resources