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.

Content

The Content section of the course site is where you can post 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. It is highly recommended that you take the time to create a well-structured content section to make finding resources easier for students to navigate and for you to manage. It’s important to note that any content you post on Avenue is subject to copyright. You can find out more about use of copyrighted material for educational purposes on McMaster’s Office of Legal Services Copyright website.

Classlist

The Classlist details all the students who are enrolled in your course, their student numbers, and MacIDs. You can 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. While Avenue mail is available in Avenue, it is distinct from institutional (McMaster) email and the two do not sync. It is highly recommended that instructors stick to using McMaster email for communicating with students.

Discussions

The Discussions tool is an online discussion forum where students can be engaged in discussions about course content. They can respond to one another 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 students’ work within the system and offer them feedback.

Grades

From Grades, instructors can 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. A point to note is that some characters are sorted differently in Avenue than they are in Excel. To avoid issues with this, it is recommended that you sort grade lists by student number whenever possible. Grades can also be imported into Mosaic directly from Avenue.

Quizzes

The Quiz 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.