Catherine Rice

So true, Shelly! They also don't want to waste their time trying to figure out how to navigate the system. I am amazed how many students don't know how to access instructor feedback in the gradebook. A brief tutorial on how to retrieve this information can also improve their grades.

I have used Jing for some of my courses to capture images or videos from my screen in order to share them with my students. It's a very user friendly technology that allows you to take screenshots and mark them up with arrows, pictures captions, or textboxes. Or, you can create videos up to five minutes in length; I make them when I want to record what I see on my screen as I navigate websites or documents, which works great if I want to create a narrated tutorial. Check it out at http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html

Maybe the students could be given a brief survey at the end of the first week of each course to assess how well they are navigating various components of the course. The instructional designers can use their feedback to make changes in the courses or create specific learning platform navigation tutorials.