Avenue to Learn, a rebranded version of Desire to Learn’s Brightspace, is McMaster’s institutionally supported, campus-wide learning management system (LMS). While some faculties and/or programs use their own systems, Avenue to Learn (or Avenue) is the system you’ll likely make use of in your teaching. While there is no mandate to use a course site through Avenue or otherwise, it is considered an effective and accessible practice to create and maintain a course site. You can use a course site to post lecture materials and announcements, create online discussions, post grades, or assess students via quizzes or online submissions of course work.

Requesting and Activating a Course Shell

If you plan to utilize Avenue in your teaching, you will need to request a course shell, ideally, well in advance of the start of the course. This can be done by visiting the Avenue to Learn Support page and completing the course request form. It typically takes 24-48 hours after the request has been made to create the course shell. When you create your course shell, the request form will ask you to include details on which course you are teaching so that it can automatically enroll the students on the registrar’s classlist in the shell. For more information, see the Avenue to Learn Support Site.

Commonly Used Tools

Avenue contains a number of excellent tools that you can use to support student learning. If this is your first time preparing a course site in a learning management system, we outline here a few of the most frequently used tools.

Announcements

The Announcements section of the course site is one of the first features that students see when they land on your Avenue course page. In this section, you can draw your students’ attention to any important announcements you may want to make regarding either FAQ, reminders of upcoming deadlines, the release of new content, etc. If you are announcing the release of resources or assessments, it may be helpful to link them in your announcement for easy student navigation. Creating an announcement will notify students on Avenue to learn and helps direct their attention to it. The frequency at which you post announcements is at your discretion. You can find out how to make an announcement and the different features within the editor in this tutorial.

Content

The Content section of the course site is where you can post all of the learning materials you intend to share with your students. It allows you to organize your content into folders and you can include virtually any kind of media from PowerPoint slides to documents to web resources and videos. We highly recommend taking time to create a well-structured content section to make finding resources easier for students to navigate and you to manage. It’s also important to note that any content you post on Avenue is subject to copyright. You can find out more about the use of copyrighted material for educational purposes from the Office of Legal Services website.

If your course has a scheduled assessment (e.g., a quiz, an assignment) that is evaluated through Avenue, it may be beneficial to link this in the Content section for students to see and be reminded of. The scheduled assessment will be marked as an incomplete item until the student has completed it. You can link your assessments in the Content section much like how you would upload files and links.

Classlist

The Classlist details all of the students who are enrolled in your course, their student numbers and IDs. You can send Avenue mail (which is a separate tool within Avenue that is distinct from institutional email) to students from the classlist or manually enroll or unenroll students if that is required during the course. If you plan to use Avenue to manage students’ grades, you must make sure that all of the students in your course are enrolled in the course shell or you will not be able to manage their grades in the Grades tool. The Avenue classlist should be synched to Mosaic if you are teaching a for-credit course.

Discussions

The Discussions tool is an online discussion forum where students can be engaged in discussions about course content and respond to each other or ask questions to receive help.

Assignments

The Assignments tool is a virtual folder that allows students to submit their work electronically. You can manage and grade the students’ work within the system and offer them feedback. The short tutorial below shows you how to provide feedback on your students’ work on Avenue.

You can also create and link rubrics to your assignments to show students how they will be evaluated and what criteria needs to be met. This linked video shows how to link assignments to grading rubrics and the gradebook tool.

An additional benefit of using the Assignments feature on Avenue is that you can set up group assignments. If students are registered into their groups on Avenue (see here for more details on how to do this), then group assignment dropboxes can be set up. This allows one student to submit on behalf of the entire group and for grades to be distributed to all members of that group.

Grades

From Grades, instructors are able to create gradebooks for their course and manage grades for individual students. This tool offers flexibility in the way grades are displayed and entered to make grade management as smooth as possible. Grades can be imported/exported as a spreadsheet for management outside of Avenue. If you choose record your students’ grades using Excel, it is recommended that you first set up your gradebook in Avenue using the Setup Wizard and then export the different graded components to an Excel file. This provides a blank grade sheet template that can be imported to Avenue easily. A point to note is that some characters are sorted differently in Avenue than they are in Excel. To avoid issues with this, we recommend sorting grade lists by student number whenever possible. Grades can also be imported into Mosaic directly from Avenue.

This comprehensive video shows how to navigate the Setup Wizard for your gradebook, including setting up your grading system, displaying certain grade details, and releasing grades at certain dates.

Quizzes

This tool contains powerful options for creating and administering quizzes. There are options to use quizzes as low-stakes or no-stakes assessments (ungraded) or they can be used for holding online tests for larger courses, if that is appropriate for your teaching context. Quizzes let you import questions from repositories if you maintain your own or utilize a publisher’s assets from a textbook.

When creating assessments through the Quiz section of Avenue, be mindful of students who require accommodations through the Student Accessibility Services (SAS). This may involve something like additional time to complete a quiz or test. See this link for an overview of how to set up special time restrictions.

Avenue Supports

If you are new to Avenue or Learning Management Systems in general or otherwise require support, you can find a wealth of instructor resources including tool descriptions and how-to videos on the McMaster Avenue to Learn Knowledge Base. If you require a demo or would like to speak with someone directly about Avenue support, please visit https://avenue.mcmaster.ca/support/ to submit a help request or call (905) 525-9140 ext. 23757 to speak to a member of the MacPherson Institute’s Learning Technologies Team.