Pearson Lunch and Learn
Presented by Rebecca Leidy and Dorothy Laymon
Part 1
My name is David and I am the district manager of math and science for Pearson in
South Carolina, I will be working with and supporting Rebecca, as many of you may
know. Today what we have is a broad presentation addressing all of our……..across
the spectrum. We also have Shelly Suttles with professional and career she handles
the business part and stuff like that. Then we also have Christina, Christina is the
primary contact for anything in the humanities and foreign languages, and English,
thank you, thank you. I just came from one of the other publishing companies to
McGraw-Hill and one of the reasons I made the big switch was I was very much
impressed with the scope of content, specifically technology content, the ability and
freedom really create something really great for your……a lot of what you do is out
of the box……we are going to talk more about how we do that today. If you have any
questions just let us know, we will have time afterwards, it is just very casual. So
Rebecca.
Rebecca:
What I’m going to be talking to y’all about is our Pearson solution and how they can
be integrated into Blackboard, so I will just jump right in. An integration solution is a
technology solution that allows for LMS, a lot of you are already there, to connect
with Pearson products in a much more streamline fashion. Different integration
solutions offer different features but more on that later. When Blackboard is the
LMS the integration solutions are called Building Blocks, which many of you are
familiar with because you work with Pearson, Mastering Building Blocks, McGrawHill, ….. are very similar to the Blackboard course. Direct Integration is when we
leverage BLTITPI technology, to have our Pearson products work more seamlessly
within the customer’s LMS. Then MyLabs Plus is basically a departmental wide
solution where we leverage features available within the learning studio and
integrate them within MyLab, Shelly will be talking more indepth about Plus.
Here are a couple of what we call the Building Block Benefits:
1. Single point of entry for your students
2. Grade data transfer available for January 2014
3. It is quick and you can decide at the last minute
4. It will work for any size class – 5 students to 500 students
First time instructors when they are mapping their Blackboard account to their
Pearson account will click in the Pearson tool, in the content or tools area. Then we
prompt them to enter their Pearson account information. For instance, your
Mastering Physics or My Math Lab credentials. Then Pearson will map your
Blackboard Learn and Pearson account, you won’t be prompted again to enter your
Pearson username or password once you are inside that platform.
When you are looking inside the building blocks, they have McGraw-Hill listed and
then they have MyLab/Mastering, it is already installed right now so you can find it
with new courses.
When did this become available?
We’ve already this past year we’ve had this new design, Mastering
integration but we really ramped it up. For 2014 we have a lot more features and
Amy Pope in the physics department, she is going to UGA, so she will have more ease
of grade transfer. Typically if you are using Mastering products, you may be familiar
where you have to copy & paste the create a TSB file, copy onto your Blackboard.
You won’t have to do that anymore and I will show you a little bit more about that
later.
Once you match your course then all you need to do is enter your Pearson account
information and create a course. This is practically step by step creating a Mastering
account or a MyLabs account without a Blackboard, they look very similar. You will
be asked to choose your content, the textbook with or without, you will be asked to
enter your course dates. After account linking you will be able to search by course
materials as well. You will see those results in the MyLabMastering catalogue that
pops up. You can select the course materials to create the course and then you go to
this cross list to create the Mastering course in Blackboard, it is the same exact
process.
This is where the instructor would have an existing Pearson account, just enter the
login for that account, you can link that through Blackboard. That’s when we talk
about linking the accounts then basically do a computerized handshake. If you enter
through Blackboard and access your MyLabs or Mastering account, then you will
have this access versus going to the universal portal. Go to the link and then like I
was saying choose materials for your course. This is where I would like to talk about
adding some links to your Blackboard course. You will be able to link directly from
your Blackboard course to key areas within your Mastering design course. You can
start here in the course build tool and click on the Pearson MyLabMastering. You
can see the list of links we already have for you and you can choose where these
links go. You have the ability to place links in any content area on your Blackboard
course. You have the capability to pick and choose where the links go.
On the student side things look very similar, still goes through the process of
creating an account. They will have an access account and the ability to buy one with
PayPal or with a credit card. For students that have financial aid issues we
recommend that they purchase the package that has the access code with it at the
bookstore because they are going to be asked to pay outright online for the instant
access. You can see that the course experience is exactly the same, everything that
you have in your Mastering new design course is right here in Blackboard. You have
the exact same interactive tutorial learning, you have all the functionality that you
would have in MyLabsMastering.
What we have basically done (I’m backtracking), we really just changed the front
door of the house, that’s how I like to think of it. We have changed how students
enter into a MyLab or Mastering course and in this Blackboard integration, they are
entering through Blackboard, that being said they can also login through the
nationwide Mastering website, that kind of defeats the purpose but they can if they
decide to try to access it through the national portal.
Within Blackboard you now have the option to upload results from your Mastering
or MyLabs grade book. This is something we didn’t have previously, this is kind of a
big deal. Instead of having to cut and paste and create a new spreadsheet, now all
you have to do is click the dropdown menu, upload Pearson MyLabMastering
Results, right there for you. This is available 100% in the fall, it is just being rolled
out and all that I am talking about will be available in the fall. You will have full
control to customize your score transfer. You can upload MyLab or Mastering course
to Blackboard, assignments are recognized and matched to the appropriate column
within your Blackboard grade center and the students are recognized immediately.
I don’t know if any of you experienced this but there were some issues where the g
in the Clemson email was throwing things off. I would say yes, ideally you would
want them to use their school id and email but I cannot with 100% finality say that
we have resolved that issue. I believe it has been because it started when everyone
was registering at the beginning of the semester but then it tapered off and I have
not experienced any of that now.
We will come into your class on the first day of your class and present to your
students and let them know exactly the materials they are expected to have and
where they can go to purchase them, every conceivable combination of digital, print,
all digital, I can help them through registration, and I can stress that there is only
need for one Pearson id. The only thing that changes is when they open up their
textbook and they register for a different MyLabMastering with different access
code, that is all.
Back to the flexible score import, the new import I was showing you. Like I said, that
is supposedly live December 30, 2013 so I don’t have any live screen shots on that. I
would say if you already have a building block installed go ahead and see, play
around with it.
We talked about the full control of customize your score transfer, which is a huge
deal and now I just want to touch on direct integration. This is where I get a little
hung up because it is a little technical but I’m sure some of you will get exactly what
I am talking about. This is when we use BLTITPI technology so that our Pearson
products work seamlessly with your power Mac scanner, Blackboard scanner. If you
are interested in this deeper integration just let me know and we can set up a time
to talk further about this and talk about how you would like to implement a course
with the Blackboard integration. We can bring in a solution specialist to go over this
option. Blackboard is the only point of entry, the can’t actually go in through the
national portal like I had mentioned earlier. You then have the ability to create
unique links and you can customize it much more in depth. Like I said this first
integration Blackboard I was talking about is kind of dipping your toe in the water,
you can do it in seconds, create it in your Blackboard account, teachers can access it
through their Blackboard accounts. This has a little bit more of a build time and it is
a little more stricter as to how you choose to access it. If you are interested in
further customizing it just let one of us know and we will be able to talk to you about
that more. That is direct integration in a nutshell.
.
There is no roll out date for MySearch lab because it is working with different
engines, but I’m sure we are working on all of our products.
If you are thinking of using Blackboard with this kind of integration I would say try
out the building blocks.
Shelly:
I’m Shelly and I’m the professional and career rep. so Rebecca, Christina, and I all
work on this campus in all the different areas. Full disclosure, we were suppose to
have Dorothy Layman here, she is actually our integration specialist, she reached
out and coordinated all of this with Yahong. If we seem a little off it is because this is
her expertise area, we are just delivering her presentation to you guys. If you have
any questions and we don’t know the answer, we would be more than happy to get
you in touch with Dorothy.
This is just an overview, I am going to talk about MyLabs Plus. What I’m going to talk
about is just a little bit different, it is also an integration product. There are a couple
of different things this product can do for you, a couple of key benefits that are
available from this product. Just so you know the engineering team on the back row,
they are using this product so if you have really deep questions we can definitely get
them involved. This is called MyLabs Plus, you can get to MyLabs Plus through
Blackboard or through a specific website, for Clemson it is Clemson.mylabsplus.com.
There are two points of entry for MyLabs Plus, the key differences in any sort of
integration and MyLabs Plus is going to be batch enrollment for students and
instructors and enterprise reporting for programs or for departments. We will dig
into both of those in a little bit and like I said it is already set up here for
engineering. The reason that is important is because once you have a MyLabs Plus
campus set up, it is really easy to add in economics or accounting or whatever else
you want to add in. If a student has a couple of courses in MyLabs Plus, lets say
chemistry, engineering and math all decided to be in MyLabs Plus, the student
would just login to MyLabs Plus and all of their courses would be right there. It is
very similar to MyLabs, they use the same username and password, all of your
courses in one spot.
The way that MyLabs Plus works because people always have questions about the
batch enrollment and security and we don’t want to release our students’
information, we totally understand that. The way that it works is that the MyLabs
Plus administrator in your department would send the information from the student
information system, which at this school I understand is Banners. They would have
the information for Banner sent over to a spreadsheet and then loaded from a
secure STP site into MyLabs Plus. The point of all of that is that we don’t have your
information, we aren’t going through your files and looking at your students’
information. It is completely secure. The key to batch enrollment is that you guys
can select the username and password for the student. This can be really
advantageous because you may have gotten a call before about a student and I don’t
know what their password is, they can’t get in, this way you can set up the student
username as the Blackboard id and the password could be their birthday or
something very structured and standard. If you are getting lots of calls then this
might be the way to go.
Since this Pearson system is talking directly Banner, directly through this STP site,
the add and drop process becomes totally fluid. There is nothing that you have to do
so if the student is dropped from Banner or if they changed to a different section
that happens automatically.
The one benefit I talked about with batch enrollment with your students, the other
thing is Enterprise recording, this is the really cool thing. They are both cool but the
way this works, you are able to pull reports over all of your sections. If you have 50
sections of engineering you can pull reports and see on a particular assignment or
particular problem, how students are doing. Versus in MyLab where you would only
be able to pull from your individual section. A lot of times it is used to determine the
efficacy of your program so after a year or two you can start pooling this data.
People get really into this, these are the only reports I have but let’s start looking at
the report.
The pricing for MyLabs Plus is exactly the same, at least in my area across the board,
in our area it doesn’t cost anything but it is an ISB so if you are interested get with
your rep. Students can get their access code in the bookstore or purchase online
using their credit card. There is temporary access available, those of you that have
used MyLabs have seen this, the student can get in day one without paying for 17
days for the regular MyLabs and for 21 days with MyLabs Plus. That is good for
students if they are on financial aid and something happens or they don’t get paid
until Friday and it is Tuesday, that way they can and not get behind in their course
work. Finally we do have the option of direct bill meaning access codes will
completely go away, there will be no course id, no access codes. We work directly
with you, we bill the department and in return you are billing your students for
some sort of fee.
Part 2
We offered, all of our new books are within the Pearson MyLabs. We have audio
available for the text so they could do it for each chapter and we also have an eText
available. I’m going to bring it up, if you have an iPad, Android tablet, Kindle Fire, or
a Nook, there is a free Pearson eText app you can download. Once you download it
you just enter in your MyLab username and password and you can access text on
your tablet. It is still page for page like the printed text. Within our eText we have
embedded links, this way students can go right to the links. All of our videos also
have closed captioning. With the eBook there is a lot of flexibility but the one nice
thing is that when you assign within Pearson MyLabs, the majority of it is
automatically graded. Once you assign it in the assignment calendar, it will
automatically flow into your grade book. This is the eText, you can have it single
page view, you can zoom in, you can zoom out. You can also highlight just as if it
were a regular book. You can take notes, this is the little note feature so if I want to
bookmark this page I can save it. Actually as an instructor I have the ability to take
notes and push it out to my students’ eText so if I want them to make sure they
review something or if I want to elaborate on something I can make notes in my
eText and send it out to all of my students. There should be a button that says share
with students. Any notes that you make if you go under the bookmark page, I can
click on it and it will bring me straight to where I made that little note. Students
can’t send notes to their instructor, I can send notes to my students’ books but my
students can’t send me notes. We also have a whiteboard feature so if you are ever
doing office hours online and if you are doing math for example and you really have
to break it down you can use a whiteboard to draw.
As you noticed too there are embedded links in the eText, you will see the chapter
audio by clicking here, if you press this the audio will come up. If there is a word
that would be in the glossary it will be highlighted and I will be able to click it, it will
come up and give them that definition. If you make notes in your eBook they copy
over to copy your course. All you have to do is check a box and you are enabling
saying yes I want it to carry over
Perhaps you could bring the eBook up in class and show something you have
highlighted as you are going through make notes. You can pull up what you are
talking about. Any notes that you make you can put them into a document and send
them out that way but you can’t automatically push them out into an email. If you
are trying to get students more engaged in class we have multimedia assignments,
they are referenced throughout the reading. If it appears in MyLabs there will be a
link right here so instead of going to chapter assignments or chapter resources they
can as they are going through it just click and it will bring up that assignment for
them. This is also really useful if they are doing their homework and they have a
question they don’t have to go back and forth. That is the eText in a nutshell.
Any time you are going to assign assignments you are just going to go into the
Instructor Grades & Assignments tab and you are going to go into Assign Content.
What is really nice about how you can assign things in our labs in the drag and drop
and also if you have your own materials you can upload anything you would like to
Pearson MyLab and still assign it to that assignment calendar. If I have an activity
that I’ve created and I want them to do it I will put it into my folder. I’m just going to
go into chapter one and as you can see these are all of the assignments available,
study plans and eText. I just check it then re-assign. In terms of assignments I don’t
want to get too in depth about it because it can be a lot because you have so many
options but you have the ability to restrict when students can go into the
assignments. Lets say you are going to be assigning an online or take home exam
and you want them to have access to it until a certain time of the day, you have the
ability to make those timelines by the hour. Other times you have multiple times
that they can get it in with multiple grades so you can set how many attempts they
get, if you want to give them one or three attempts or more you can change that as
well.
I just want to show you something that is really important to remember when it
comes to our courses, our integration with our eBook and with Blackboard. You are
just starting out with Econ, with whatever it is, with Biology, Engineering, you have
your book, your want your Mastering MyLabs. You have nothing yet and you say
what am I going to do? First thing, create course drop down to my courses. This is
the ease of use that Pearson is known for. You have four options: create a new
course, copy one of my courses, and copy a pre-built course (this is already done,
when homework has been embedded), and copy another instructor’s course (Also
some instructors across the country share their courses with us). What I’m going to
do is copy another instructor’s course, I have a drop down menu of all about biology,
I’m going to select the best of homework course, set it for a year. You can leave it
open ended if you want to. Typically don’t ask their students for IDs, then you can
continue, open (students can join your course immediately), available for copying
and click create course. You can get a handy print out that gives your students the
course id.
While that is creating, what Rebecca mentioned about curriculum specialists. We
have so many resources and years of expertise as well as internally to help faculty
build out. It is never the case where we just set someone free, our curriculum
specialists can help you build that out based on your syllabus. We also have faculty
advocates, these are actually users across the country that are using Mastering
Biology that are using Mastering Physics, that have years of experience. It is very
stable, it isn’t something we just created a year ago. Training and support are really
important and we know they support you guys too. We have specialists that do
webinars with IT in order to enable you to help faculty and we have specialists that
work directly with professors.
We have weekly webx trainings at certain times where you can call in if you have a
question. I’ve actually hosted a few of them when in house and found them really
helpful. Maybe someone else has a question that you never really thought about so it
is nice that you can collaborate. We can map out a course, build it based on your
syllabus as a starting point, you can always edit what we did, you can add or take
away.
Since we didn’t get to cover a lot of what is available we have quick reviews. If you
go to www.personhighered.com and click on MyLab Quick Review, this page has all
of the MyLabs that we have. It takes less than 30 minutes and takes a quick walk
demo through what is available.