Why make your courses secret?
The possibility to choose whether you want to make your courses private or public provides extra flexibility on the way you share your course materials. This can help you meet different teaching objectives:
- By choosing to make your courses public, you will be able to share your expertise with people all over the world and monetize them. The users of the platform will see your courses in the BitDegree marketplace and be able to enroll freely.
- If you pick the secret option, your courses will only be accessible to the people you provide the link to the course to. You can also choose to invite learners by email personally. If you pick one of these options for your course, it will not be visible publicly in the marketplace or search results.
How to create training materials that are only visible to the chosen ones? Simply define the visibility of your courses by choosing Public, Secret, or By invitation only when you upload the lectures of your course to the Instructor Studio. You will find the section right next to those of the category, language, and skill level above the description field.
Using secret courses is often the preference of educators looking for options on how to create training materials that can be easily shared with their students: inviting them by email guarantees easy access to the study curriculum. More importantly, no random people will be able to join. It is also very convenient for HR specialists who organize training for new employees – you can create the introductory course once and use it for years to come. Additionally, you will see who reviewed the course materials and who didn’t, and the employees will be able to refer to the information at any later time, should a need arise.
Tasks for practice and assessment
When you think about how to create training materials online, you can encounter one simple problem. The theory is fine and dandy – but what about practice? How can you make sure students can actually put their knowledge into practice, test it, and see their weaknesses? Luckily, BitDegree offers a few convenient options for that as well.
Quizzes: easy creation and no sweat over grading
For the most functionality, choose quizzes – they are easy to create, customize, and use, and the familiar format will not intimidate the user. You can include both single-choice or multiple-choice questions – just don’t forget to mark the correct ones as you’re building the quiz. Knowing the right answers, the system will automatically evaluate the quiz and provide a result in the system.
If you want to use a quiz as a graded assessment, you can choose the option of adding the results to a total score. In such a case, the student will not see any immediate feedback – only the final score at the end of the test. They will not see the grades of other students, either. If you don’t choose the grading option, the quiz will just be a nice opportunity for your students to practice and see what course materials they still need to revise.
There are a few tricks you have up your sleeve when building a quiz on BitDegree. They will allow you to minimize the chance of cheating and diversify the assessment:
- With question groups, you can form multiple different sets of questions. As the student starts taking the quiz, one option will be chosen and displayed at random.
- By defining a required number of questions, you can choose to only show a part of the questions you have prepared for the quiz. For example, you can have 20 questions available, but only display 12 randomly selected ones. This way, each student is presented with a different question set.
- Randomizing answers lets you mix up the answer sequence. However, if you choose this option, you will have to remember not to include answers like ‘All of the above’ or ‘B and C’, as there’s no way to know what will come above what and which of the possible answers will happen to be the B.
As an instructor, you will also be able to include an explanation or some content (e.g., a relevant fragment of course materials) to your question. This is especially handy when you’re providing quizzes for practice and learning reinforcement, so consider this as you’re planning how to create training materials that are actually useful for both instructors and students.
You can also specify the weight of the question: the one with a higher weight will affect the final grade more. For example, if you feel like one of out a few topics discussed in the course materials is more crucial for the learners to master, you can make the related questions accordingly more impactful.
When a quiz doesn’t cut it
As you can see, quizzes are a really flexible and useful way to include some practical assignments. However, different categories and topics might require different tasks, as well. Merely choosing one or more answers from a displayed lot does not always suffice – for example, when planning how to create training materials for a copywriting course, you need to provide your students with a chance to actually write something.
In cases like these, you can choose one of two other options BitDegree offers: open-ended input questions or solution upload. For the former, you would simply specify the question, and the student will type their answer in the input field below. The latter option requires them to upload a file as their submission – depending on the specific task and instructions you provide, it can be slides, a text document, a sheet of calculations, etc. This can be a great way to submit a final project at the end of the course.
However, unlike quizzes, these tasks cannot be graded automatically: you will have to review them and decide on the final score yourself. As soon as you submit the grade on the platform, the student will be notified by email. You will also get a chance to provide feedback and comment on the stronger and weaker parts, thus helping your student improve!
