Courses is a new feature available on all paid education plans that comes as a replacement for Projects to bring a better teaching & learning experience. For now, Projects are still available via the menu in the top-right corner.
The article contains a walkthrough on how to create courses and tasks within them, invite students & grade their work:
- What are Courses?
- How to create a new course
- How to create a new assignment and manage it
- Student - how to join a course
- Student - how to open an assignment and turn in your work
- How to provide feedback on student's work
- What's coming for Courses in the future
What are Courses
Courses aim to provide an LMS-like experience for teachers and students by allowing teachers to bundle multiple assignments or learning topics into a single Course. Each assignment may contain additional materials, due date, and a score. Students can turn in an interactive media (image, 360° image or video) to show the results of their studies. Once the assignment is turned in, teachers can evaluate it and provide feedback via a chat system - all within ThingLink.
Setting up a new Course
To set up a new course, click the 'Courses' text in the top navigation bar. This will bring up the page with all your current courses and the number of students in each course.
Next, click the 'Add course' button on the right side and put in the course title along with a brief description. This will create a blank course with 0 students and no assignments:
After a course is created, it will generate a special corresponding group named 'Participants of <course title>'. There are multiple ways to add students to your course. First, you can simply copy the course invite code displayed next to the course title and ask your students to enter it on their Courses page. Alternatively, you can create new student accounts & automatically add them to this course by clicking the + button next to the 'Add assignment button, then selecting either 'Import from Excel' or 'Manual Creation' options. If you are familiar with ThingLink, this works exactly like adding students to your Groups. You can read more about these methods here.
Creating & managing assignments
Each course can contain multiple assignments for your students. These can include visual learning materials, tasks to create interactive content, introductory classroom tours and anything else you can create on ThingLink.
To create an assignment, go to the course's page and click the 'Add Assignment' button. Note that you can always edit the assignment, including the due date and the attachments, after it's been created.
Please explore the image below to see the next steps.
Once you save the assignment, it will appear on the course page and become available for all participants of said course. You can access the assignment by clicking on it on the course page. From here, you can edit the assignment, see who's already turned in their work and assess the results by clicking the 'Grade work' button.
[Student] Joining a course using an invite code
Click the 'My courses' text in the top navigation bar. From here, you can access any of your ongoing courses and assignments. If your teacher has sent you an invite code, you can join a Course by clicking the blue 'Join course' button and entering the invite code:
[Student] Turning in an assignment
After you open the course page, you'll be able to see all assignments and their current status: 'Not turned in', 'Turned in' and 'Graded':
To turn in an assignment, simply click on it, then click the blue 'Turn in' button and select a ThingLink media you want to turn in. You can also chat with your teacher after the assignment has been turned in by clicking the 'View work' text.
Tip: If your teacher has attached any ThingLink content to your assignment, you can click on it and clone it. This will allow you to edit a copy of the attachment.
Assessing students' work
You can check and assess individual submission by opening the assignment's page and clicking either the blue 'Grade work' button or selecting specific submission at the bottom of the page. You can grade the student's work as well as provide feedback through the chat system.
What's coming for Courses in the future?
To be announced. Leave a comment below or contact us at support@thinglink.com if you'd like to see some other features!
Comments
3 comments
I'd love for students in my course to be able to turn on a setting so their work is viewable by the whole class! Then students could see each other's work and provide feedback and responses. This would be like blending Flipgrid with Padlet with Thinglink. Collaboration during distance learning!
Thank you
Ryane Ortiz that's a great idea! I thought they would be able to do that. Can't they? Also, syncing with Google Classroom would be useful so that I can create it here and it automatically posts to my classroom - also it would automatically import my students from my class there - see typing.com for how they do it.
Ryane Ortiz thank you for the feedback! We'll bring this up with the rest of the team.
AMANDA FISHER-O'DELL Students can access each other's work but we don't display it inside Courses. As for syncing with Google Classroom - that's a great idea! I've added it to our list of feature requests, too.
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