Moderate your course

Moderators can navigate their course and use Learn and Teach modes to take the course and guide other learners.

Laurie Garcia avatar
Written by Laurie Garcia
Updated over a week ago

As a Moderator, you'll guide your cohort members through a learning Path to complete a course. In this article, we'll guide you through basic navigation and tasks that you can complete to encourage and monitor their progress. 

The Course Path

A Path leads learners step-by-step through everything they should learn in a lesson or course or an entire program. A Path is made up of two core parts.

Steps

Steps are a single learning action a learner should take: a video to watch, something to read, a quiz or test, a guided discussion — you name it. Steps help learners understand, practice, apply, and articulate each concept or skill they're learning in a bite-size way.

Lessons

Lessons are a sequence of multiple steps that usually cover one concept. Some concepts are simple enough to teach in only one Lesson while others take multiple Lessons.

Path      

Now back to the Path. A Path is simply the full sequence of Lessons which contain all the Steps your learners will complete.

As learners work their way through their Paths, they'll have everything they need to learn, when they need to learn it, with plenty of opportunity for feedback and discussion along the way. Let's keep exploring!


Home 

Your Home screen organizes everything you’re learning and teaching in one place. As a moderator, your Home screen includes your Learn tab and Teach tab. 

Your Home screen is the first screen you'll see when you sign in; you can also get back to it anytime by selecting "Home" on the main menu. 

Your Teach tab is where you’ll find any courses that you are moderating.

If you're taking any courses as a learner, you'll find them under your Learn tab. 

When you click into a course, you'll be taken to the Path screen. We'll take a closer look at that next. 

You’ll notice the course is organized into three tabs:

  • About: Includes the course description, author bio, and other information.

  • Path: Includes every Lesson each member needs to complete to finish the course. This is the most important tab and where you’ll spend most of your time.

  • Community: Shows all the discussions happening throughout the course in one place.


Using Learn mode and Teach mode

As a moderator, most of the tools you'll use are located on the Path, which can be viewed in two modes: Learn and Teach

In Learn mode, you see exactly what other learners see. Here, you experience the Path as a learner. This provides a helpful lens for understanding any questions or concerns that come up and allows you to take the course along with the members in your group and track your own progress through the course. Alternate between Learn & Teach modes with the toggle in the left corner.

In Teach mode, you’ll see extra information which will display exactly where learners are and how they’re doing. This view also includes some special tools that will help you in increasing learner progress. Your progress is not tracked when you move around in Teach mode. 

This is a Path in Teach view. Notice the icons in the upper right corner of the Path and of the Lesson and on the top navigation bar. We'll go over these various teaching tools in more detail below.


Schedule

Moderators who schedule due dates have much more success keeping everyone on track to complete a course than those who don’t schedule dates at all. Completion rates for cohorts with due dates are often 60% higher than cohorts who just move at their own pace.

Use Teach mode to set due dates. To set a due date, hover over the Lesson or Step you want to schedule and click the Schedule icon.

You'll see options to set start and end dates, optionally lock content until the start date is reached, and to schedule customizable reminders to your learners relative to those dates.


Share with learners

To invite someone to join your group as a learner, open to the Path and select the Share button to copy a shareable link, add an existing member or members directly to the cohort, or send a personal invite email.


Add additional moderators

Besides sharing the cohort with your learners, you can also share it with additional moderators who can help you teach the course. They will have the same permissions as you have. Use the Share button to add or invite moderators and be sure to select the moderator role.

 


Manage your members

You can manage everyone in your cohort and access learner data by opening the View Learner Progress screen, either from the menu or by clicking/tapping on the learner avatars in the top right corner of the Path.


View overall performance

"View Learner Progress" shows you everyone in your cohort and how they're performing at a glance.


View individual performance

To see a detailed performance report for a learner, simply tap the learner's name. Each learner's performance report shows...

  • a solid checkmark next to steps they've completed, a dotted checkmark next to steps that are completed but still pending your review, or an arrow next to skipped steps

  • how many points they've earned on each step (if points are assigned)

  • an indicator if they were late on an assignment (if you've set due dates)


Download reports

You can download all learner data as a CSV file. CSV files can be opened in Excel and most other spreadsheet tools. At the top of the View Learner Progress screen, select the download arrow button and then select the report you'd like to download.


Edit an enrollment   

Open the "additional actions" under the vertical ellipses to the right of anyone's name to...

  1. View their email address.

  2. Change that learner's role. 

  3. Set an expiration date on their access to your group. 

  4. Remove that person from the course entirely (deletes all progress). 


Engage in discussion

Discussion questions are a great way to engage with the members of your cohort. As a moderator, you can post discussion prompts or personal questions at the very bottom of any step while in Teach mode (unless your administrator has disabled discussions). 

Select the "Post a discussion question" button to add a question that appears as part of the course content. 

If you would like the question to appear as coming from you personally and not as part of the course content, you can post your discussion as a personal question. 

Start typing in the discussion area beneath the step to start a personal discussion. Personal questions show your name and profile picture and appear as a question from you personally to this class. 

You can edit your discussion questions or posts anytime. 


Notifications

Many courses come with a few discussion prompts built in. Notifications are an easy way to keep up with all the discussion. You'll be notified when anyone in your group...

  1. asks a new question

  2. answers a discussion prompt

  3. replies to you

You’ll receive the notification as email and an in-app notification. Just tap on the notification bell in the top right hand corner to reveal the most recent discussion activity. Select a notification to jump right to the discussion.


Giving Feedback

If you’re leading a cohort that has steps that are configured to be reviewed, you'll find the Review feature very useful. Whenever there's something for you to review, you’ll see a red notification dot next to the Review icon.

Tap Review and you’ll see a list of everything that's been submitted that requires your review.

You can tap the Review icon in different places to see everything you need to review under one Step, a whole Lesson, or for the entire Path. See everything that needs review in all courses you're teaching from your Inbox, located on the top navigation bar of your account.

That's everything for Teach mode! We've covered inviting learners, scheduling steps, moderating discussions, and reviewing completed work. Finally, we'll look at some troubleshooting tips. 


Helping your learners log in

If someone you’ve invited to your group has trouble signing in, this most often indicates that they’ve forgotten their password. They can get a new password by clicking on the “Forgot your password?” link on the sign-in page and entering the email address they signed up with.

They can also contact the school's support line by selecting "Need help?"

If the email address they enter into the reset password form isn’t recognized, that usually means they used a different email address or have not created an account yet. 

You can find the email address they used to sign up by opening “View Learner Progress.” Select the three dots (...) to the right of the learner's name. Then click on the email address to send an email to that learner. Right-click on the learner's email address to copy the email address.

If you find that they aren’t visible under the "View Learner Progress" screen, that indicates that they haven’t actually joined the group, in which case you’ll want to resend them the invitation link.


Resolving technical issues

If you have questions for the owner of the account where you're teaching, the best way to get help is to select the “Need help?” link. This will show the contact information for your school. 

For more help in answering learners' questions, see the Help Center articles for Learners

Find further teaching tips here: Help Center articles for Teachers and for Moderators.

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