If you haven’t yet reviewed the previous chapter on best practices for your online learning environment, we highly recommend you review that prior to delving into the Avenue functionality you and your students will use.

Avenue 101: Setting up Grades, Assignments, Quizzes, and Discussions

We recommend that one of the first things you do once the DeGroote template is added to your Avenue shell is to set up your Gradebook. By setting up your gradebook first, you can subsequently link any assignments or quizzes to grade items so that students’ grades are weighted appropriately and compiled in a single location. This simplifies the process for you and your TAs, while also easily communicating with students how they are progressing in the course. This video below will walk you through completing this process. For more detailed information, we highly recommend reviewing the Avenue Support Documentation on the Grades tools.

Once your gradebook is set up, you’re ready to set up Assignments. Below, we have included a list of some of the most important tips for setting up assignment dropboxes.

After assignments have been submitted, you can grade submissions and provide feedback within the Avenue to Learn interface. Keeping these tasks within Avenue has the benefit of allowing different TAs to grade different submissions, all contained in one place so it’s easy for you as the instructor to maintain oversight. Here is an overview on how to provide feedback on assignments in Avenue:

Again, for more details, we recommend that you visit the Avenue Support Documentation on Assignments, which includes references to the vendor documentation, how-to videos, and detailed instructions. We also highly recommend that you review this playlist of videos on Grading in Avenue to Learn, curated by the Faculty of Social Sciences.

The Avenue Quiz tool allows you to set up online quizzes, tests, or exams for students to complete. You can set start dates, end dates, and time limits on quizzes to control these assessments in a similar manner to how you would in a classroom. We won’t get into too much detail about quizzing here because there are extensive resources available for setting up quizzes on Avenue, including the Avenue support documentation available here and this extensive playlist dedicated to Quizzes in Avenue to Learn curated by the Faculty of Social Sciences.

Discussions are a valuable tool for students to connect with each other, share their learnings, crowdsource answers to questions, and communicate with you and your TAs. There are many ways that you can use discussion boards, and you will have to figure out what works best for your course. See the box to the right for a few questions you should be able to answer prior to setting up your discussion boards.

The Avenue discussion boards consist of Forums and Topics. Forums help to organize your discussions into cohesive themes. You may have a forum for all mandatory discussion questions and then have a topic for each week’s question. Students can then post or reply within the given week’s topic. We recommend keeping this organization as streamlined as possible. It is best to generate all the Forums and Topics that you will need for the semester before the term begins to ensure that your organization system doesn’t need to change part way through the term. Note: You can hide forums or lock them until a certain date so that students can’t access them until the appropriate time if you set them up before the semester begins.

For instructions on how to create Forums, Topics, and Posts, please visit this detailed Avenue to Learn support page.

Taking your Avenue course to the next level: Learning Groups, Release Conditions, Customizations, and Intelligent Agents

The features described in the previous section should allow you to run your course smoothly and replicate many of the tasks you might have facilitated in person. However, Avenue to Learn has much more to offer that can make the learning experience for your students more effective, efficient, and satisfying – all with the benefit of saving you time in the long-run!

The first and perhaps easiest way to save you time over the semester is to use the Groups feature. Creating groups allows you to release content, assignment folders, discussions, or quizzes to specific groups of students. The most common use of this feature is to set up an assignment as a group assignment, which will create a joint dropbox for all members of the same group so that only one needs to submit their assignment on behalf of the group. When you then grade the assignment, feedback and grades for that single submission are automatically shared with all the members of that group.

You can also share specific content with groups, which may be useful if different groups are focusing on different topics for an assignment – you can share the relevant readings, data, or guidelines with specific groups so it doesn’t create confusion for other students who do not need that content. Similarly, you can create discussion forums that are only viewable by certain groups (e.g., each tutorial section could have their own forum to post questions or comments).

For more details on how to set up Groups on Avenue to Learn, check out this video:

Release Conditions are used to limit the available of certain items on Avenue to Learn until a student meets specific criteria. For example, you may want to “hide” a discussion item from students until they have watched the related content video or lock a quiz to students until they have  first submitted an attempt on a practice quiz. Release conditions enforce a structure on students to ensure they are engaging in the learning journey as you have intended, while not getting distracted or overwhelmed by content items that are not yet relevant.

There are many ways that you can customize your Avenue course shell, but it’s important to invest in customizations that make the learning experience more accessible and streamlined for your students. We are going to walk through a couple high impact examples, but we highly encourage you to check out the many resources on the Avenue support page.

The first way that we recommend customizing your Avenue course is to personalize your homepage. We recommend using the DeGroote template, but once this has been added to your Avenue shell, we encourage you to add widgets or information that you want to be easily accessible for your students. Some of the pre-populated or custom widgets you might consider include:

• Microsoft Teams meeting access widget
• A widget with the standing link to your Zoom classes
• McMaster Campus Store textbook purchase widget
• Course syllabus widget

For more details on customizing your homepage and widgets, check out this resource from the Avenue support team.

Another way to customize your Avenue page is to remove unnecessary items from the dropdown menus. The defaults can be overwhelming to students, so we recommend removing any items you won’t be using in your course. Here’s an example of what that might look like:

Before and After:

To remove the tools you won’t be using from these menus, follow these steps:

1. Click the Course Admin tab from the menus along the top.
2. Scroll down to the Administration section and select Tools.
3. Under the Status column, uncheck any items from the menus that you will not be using in your course.
   NOTE: Keep all items that are not listed in the menus. These tools may be performing important functions in the background are not cluttering your course shell for students. You should also be aware that unchecking the Rubrics or Competencies tools can affect any gradings rubrics you have built in to Avenue for your assignments, so uncheck these with caution.

The final Avenue tool that we will be outlining here is the Intelligent Agent. Intelligent Agents identify an activity that matches predetermined criteria you have set, and then automatically triggers an action. For example, you can set up an intelligent agent that will email any students who have not accessed your course in a week or have missed an assignment submission due date. You can set templates for these emails so that they appear to be coming directly from you, despite being automated. You may want to consider using intelligent agents to:

• Create more accountability among your students
• Develop a supportive connection with students by opening the door for them to reach out for help
• Save time following up with students who may have missed a deadline

To set up an intelligent agent, we recommend following along with this video tutorial:

A Note on Accessibility

Avenue to Learn allows you to provide specific students with special access to content, quizzes, or assignments. This feature facilitates extended deadlines, altered timing for quizzes, or additional content resources for accommodation purposes. Avenue also allows you to provide alternate text for graphics that you embed, so that screen readers can accurately represent this media. It is critical that the online learning environment is accessible to all students. It is good practice to include descriptions for content modules and individual content items. Anything that makes your online learning environment more navigable for students is worth your investment in time. We highly recommend you review the previous chapter for more details on these best practices.