It’s back-to-school season! For most areas around the world, the first day of school is just around the corner (if it hasn't started already) and soon-to-be students are savoring their final days of summer freedom.
Teachers, on the other hand, have been back in their classrooms for weeks: arranging fresh seating arrangements, hanging new posters, preparing updated attendance sheets, and practicing innovative teaching methods they can't wait to try with their incoming students.
Here at MemberPress, we want our online teachers to feel that same excitement and preparedness as they set up an engaging and effective virtual learning environment for their students.
That’s why we’re thrilled to introduce our NEW MemberPress Courses tools: Assignments and Gradebook:
- Assignments: Your students can now complete and submit a variety of projects directly within the course. From writing essays and designing web pages to creating digital portfolios and multimedia content, these assignments help them build analytical, technical, and communication skills, giving you a clear view of their understanding.
- Gradebook: Grading is now more streamlined, allowing you to manage all student grades in one organized place. It simplifies the process of tracking individual progress, making it easier for you to monitor performance and provide timely feedback. Students can also easily view their grades, helping them stay informed and motivated to keep on track with their learning goals.
We designed these tools to make your virtual classroom more interactive, better organized, and ready for a great learning experience for you and your students.
Let’s take a closer look!
MemberPress Courses: The #1 LMS Tool for Online Educators
Since its launch in 2022, our MemberPress Courses add-on has made waves in how educators build and manage their online courses using WordPress.
This robust tool was crafted to elevate your online teaching experience, allowing you to focus on what you love most – educating and sharing your expertise.
- Visual Course Builder: Our user-friendly interface simplifies course creation, making it easy and enjoyable to build your curriculum.
- MemberPress Quizzes: Engage your students with interactive quizzes that test their knowledge and keep them involved.
- Completion Certificates: Automatically issue certificates to students upon course completion, adding value and recognition to their efforts.
- Customization: Tailor the look and feel of your courses to fit your brand perfectly with extensive customization options, ensuring a completely built-by-you learning experience.
- Multiple Payment Gateways: Enjoy seamless transactions with various payment gateways, making course enrollment and fee collection hassle-free.
- Course Content Protection: Control who accesses your content with customizable access rules, ensuring a secure and exclusive learning environment.
- Comprehensive Support: Access detailed guides, tutorials, and personalized support to help you set up and optimize your courses efficiently.
Our dedication to excellence sets MemberPress Courses apart from the rest and establishes us as a leader in the LMS market.
Yes, it takes extra effort to excel in both fields, but for us, it’s a no-brainer because our users deserve the best!
That commitment drives us to continuously explore new market trends, adopt best practices, and enhance our tools to meet and exceed your expectations.
And it's this commitment that has led to the development of our latest features: Assignments and Gradebook.
These tools are designed to keep your students on track and make your online educator role as simple and effective as possible.
Unleash Creativity in Coursework with NEW MemberPress Assignments
While there's always room for classic essay writing, mixing things up can really liven up the learning process. And that’s exactly what our new Assignments add-on is aimed to do!
By incorporating different types of assignments, you not only create a more engaging learning environment for your students but also broaden your teaching techniques.
Here’s how you can diversify your course content with several assignment options:
- Essays and Written Reports: Encourage students to get their ideas flowing by writing traditional essays or require serious detective work for investigative reports.
- Digital Projects: Spark creativity by having students build web pages or craft digital portfolios. Ideal for subjects that thrive on visual flair, such as web design, digital marketing, or graphic design.
- Media Submissions: Allow students to showcase their skills through videos, graphics, or other multimedia formats. This is great for courses that need a little action, like public speaking or software tutorials.
- Comprehensive Projects: Challenge students to combine it all – text, graphics, and media – to create all-encompassing projects that demonstrate their thorough understanding of the material and meet the assignment requirements.
Each assignment type can be submitted right within the course interface, letting students demonstrate their knowledge in formats that meet your educational objectives.
3 Reasons Why You’ll Love Adding Memberpress Assignments to Your Online Courses:
1. Encourages Diverse Skills
The Assignments add-on broadens learning beyond typical writing tasks. It's designed to help students develop a rich mix of skills they’ll actually use in everyday situations.
- Writing and Analytical Skills: Drafting essays or research papers isn't solely about putting words on paper. Students delve into complex analytical thinking. They learn to build strong arguments, back up their ideas with solid evidence, and communicate with clarity and precision.
- Technical and Design Skills: When students get into assignments like designing web pages or creating digital portfolios, they're applying real technical skills; from coding to graphic design. These tasks also help them grasp key design principles and user experience, which are crucial for careers in digital marketing and web development.
- Media Production Skills: Working on video or multimedia projects teaches more than the basics of cutting and editing. Students explore narrative structure, learn the nuances of audiovisual storytelling, and get a handle on the technical details of media production.
- Presentation and Communication Skills: Whether it’s showcasing a digital portfolio, recording a video, or writing a report, presenting work in various formats sharpens students' ability to express their ideas clearly and persuasively – critical skills for any career path.
These diverse assignments not only enhance learning but also help students feel more prepared for the challenges ahead, making your course an experience that’s both engaging and useful.
2. Increases Interaction
Each unique assignment type is crafted to encourage students to go deeper into their learning experience and stay actively involved throughout the course.
- Experiment with Learning Styles: With a range of assignments, students have the freedom to explore and discover what works best for them. Whether they excel in analytical thinking, technical tasks, creative projects, or storytelling, you can allow them to experiment with different approaches and identify their strengths.
- Stay Engaged and Curious: The variety of assignments keeps the learning process dynamic and exciting. By regularly introducing new challenges and formats, students remain intellectually curious and emotionally invested in the coursework.
- Enjoy the Learning Process: Offering a mix of assignment types makes the course an enjoyable experience. Students are more likely to look forward to assignments when they know they’ll encounter something different each time, making the learning process fun and rewarding.
By providing a variety of assignments, your courses cater to different learning preferences and keep students consistently motivated and connected to the material, ultimately transforming the way they engage with and absorb your course content.
3. Customizable Settings
Every course is different, so we’ve designed our Assignments add-on with plenty of customization options. This flexibility allows you to adjust assignments to align with your course objectives and meet your students' needs.
- Specific Character Counts. Set character limits to keep students on point. This ensures they're detailed enough without rambling or being too brief, helping maintain the quality of their submissions.
- Points for Completion. Award points for completed assignments to encourage students to put in their best effort. It's a great way to keep them engaged and recognize their hard work.
- Resubmission Opportunities. Let students resubmit their work after feedback, helping them learn from their errors and improve. It’s a great way to build a mindset focused on growing and getting better.
These customizable settings enable you to tailor assignments that are a great fit for your teaching style and supportive of your students’ learning, ensuring a rewarding experience in every course.
How to Create Assignments in MemberPress Courses
Setting up assignments in MemberPress is just like adding a lesson or quiz in MemberPress Courses.
Start by incorporating the assignment into your curriculum, then jot down your instructions on the assignment page:
Before you make your assignment live, remember to add a featured image, categorize your curriculum with tags, and protect assignment access using MemberPress Rules if needed.
Stay with us to learn the steps for grading assignments through our NEW Gradebook add-on next! A detailed tutorial video awaits…
Simplify Assessment Tasks with the NEW MemberPress Gradebook
As an educator, you understand that teaching involves much more than delivering lectures. After your students have engaged with the material, completed assignments, and taken quizzes, it’s time for you to evaluate their efforts.
Our new Gradebook add-on simplifies the grading process and enhances your overall teaching experience.
Previously, checking student progress meant navigating through each quiz individually to view participants, their responses, and scores.
Now, every course on your site is equipped with its own Gradebook. As soon as students complete quizzes or assignments, their work automatically populates in the Gradebook.
The Gradebook allows you to view and grade all of your students' work from a single page. It gathers their assignments and quizzes in one place, making it easier to monitor and assess each student’s performance effectively.
3 Reasons Why You’ll Love the Memberpress Gradebook Add-On
1. Simplifies Grade Management
Our new Gradebook feature is all about making your life easier when it comes to handling grades.
It centralizes all your grading needs in your admin interface, eliminating the hassle of juggling multiple spreadsheets or sifting through pages.
With everything in one spot, you can quickly see how everyone is performing on their assignments and quizzes. This not only speeds up the grading process but also makes it simpler and significantly less stressful.
This means you can dedicate more energy to crafting engaging lessons and interacting with your students.
2. Individual Student and Collective Classroom Tracking
With the Gradebook add-on, you gain access to instant, real-time reports that show both individual student progress and overall class performance.
This dual overview helps you quickly identify trends, recognize areas where students may need additional support, and adjust your teaching strategies accordingly.
The Gradebook also features filtering and search options, making it easy to customize your view of quizzes, assignments, and student progress.
You can see each student's submitted quizzes and assignments, their grades, and their cumulative score:
Getting a handle on these patterns allows you to tailor your teaching to fit each student's needs, making sure everyone gets the right kind of support to really excel.
3. Transparent Feedback
The Gradebook simplifies how you handle grading and feedback. It provides a clear breakdown of scores for each assignment and quiz, so both you and your students can easily track progress.
This transparency helps in identifying areas where students are doing well and where they may need some more support.
You can also give bonus points for standout work, providing a quick and meaningful way to encourage and reward effort.
What’s especially useful for teachers is the personal feedback section. Here, you can leave specific comments right next to the grades:
This setup lets you leave pointed feedback that students can match up with their scores, boosting both your teaching impact and their learning focus.
An efficient Gradebook setup keeps you organized and enhances the way you guide and support each student’s learning journey, making the educational process more effective and personalized.
How to Set Up and Grade Assignments with MemberPress Gradebook
Time to retire that old-school gradebook with its tiny text and crowded columns! The MemberPress Gradebook add-on introduces a fresh, user-friendly approach to grading.
It features a clean, easy-to-navigate interface that not only improves how you view student data but also streamlines your grading process, offering a visually appealing and comprehensive overview.
Inside your Gradebook, you'll find everything neatly organized: each student's submitted quizzes and assignments, the grades you've assigned, and their overall scores – all displayed clearly in one central spot.
Plus, anything that hasn’t been graded yet is clearly marked as “ungraded,” making it easy to spot what needs your attention next.
Watch our complete video guide for step-by-step help with creating and grading assignments in MemberPress Courses:
Explore our Support Doc to see how the Gradebook seamlessly integrates with student enrollment and course management too.
Conclusion
Gear up for a standout school year with MemberPress Courses' latest and greatest: the Assignments and Gradebook add-ons.
These innovative tools are designed to streamline your course management and grading processes, freeing up more time for you to focus on delivering impactful education.
With the Assignments feature, students can easily submit their work directly on the platform, while the Gradebook provides a clear, organized way to track grades and feedback.
Haven't set up your MemberPress classroom yet? No worries! Click below to get started and join the thousands of educators who are making online learning more dynamic and engaging.
What’s the first assignment you’re going to add to your course? Share your teaching ideas with us in the comment section below!
This blog brilliantly highlights the power of integrating assignments and gradebook features into MemberPress. It’s inspiring to see how these tools can streamline online learning and empower educators to track progress effectively. A great read for anyone seeking to enhance their e-learning platform.