| Term | Definition/Description |
|---|---|
| Course Activities | The Course Activities tool displays the Course Home pages for the selected course. Teachers can use this to view what their students see. |
| Activity Stream | The Activity Stream appears on the Landing page as well as on Course Home pages for students; it shows their activity history, starting from the most recent. Users can select each entry to open the activity, badge, or announcement listed. |
| Activity Types |
Course Authors can add, edit, and adjust items to be gradable among the following activity types in the Editor: |
| Announcements | Announcements are messages that can be sent by teachers and admins to all students in one or more courses. They appear on the home and course home pages above the To Do List and in the Communication tool. |
| Assignment | Students complete Assignment activities in their own time and are expected to indicate completion according to conditions set by the course author (e.g., attach a file to a Dropbox, enter findings in a text box, etc.,). Course Authors create Assignments using a rich text editor. |
| Automatic Badges | Automatic Badges are configured to be automatically awarded to students when they meet pre-specified criteria. |
| Badges |
Pearson Connexus offers two types of badges to recognize and encourage students: ● Automatic badges configured to be awarded to students when they complete an activity, unit, or course. These can be configured in the Editor. |
| Blog | Course Blogs are assigned writing exercises that can be seen by the authoring student, the teacher, and all members of the course. |
| Calendar | The Calendar displays due date notifications color-coded by course. Assignments only appear on student calendars after due dates are assigned by the teacher in a Traditional course. Continuous course assignments are automatically scheduled by the platform and will appear on student calendars. |
| Clipboard | Teachers can use the Clipboard found in the Header and Main Menu to quickly provide personalized attention to individuals and groups of students. Teachers can assign activities, award badges, assign tasks, and message students quickly from the Clipboard. |
| Comma-separated values (CSV) files | CSV files are editable by spreadsheet applications like KSpread, OpenOffice Calc and Microsoft Excel. Reports are generated as CSV files. You must also use CSV or tab-delimited values text (.txt) files when importing course, user, and enrollments data into Connexus EMS. |
| Contextual help | Pearson Connexus reports are generated as CSV files, which are editable by spreadsheet applications like KSpread, OpenOffice Calc, and Microsoft Excel. You must also use CSV or tab-delimited values text (.txt) files when importing course, user, and enrollments data into Pearson Connexus. Pearson Connexus provides contextual help. When you select the help button, you are directed to information based on the page you are on. |
| Continuous Enrollment |
Continuous enrollment refers to self-paced courses in which a student completes certain activities rather than completion being determined by the end of a semester or other timeframe. When Administrators or Teacher-Authors set up a continuous enrollment course, Pearson Connexus automatically schedules due dates for all gradable activities based on the sequence of activities in the Editor, the number of nongradable activities in between, the weight of each activity, any blackout dates that have been specified, and the number of days and date range assigned to the course. |
| Course Cards |
Course Cards appear on teacher and student home pages and are made up of a course's assigned color and the course image (or the first two letters of the course name if no image is assigned). For students, Course Cards can display progress in the course and their current grade. |
| Course Home | Course home pages display course announcements, the To do List, course activities, course links, and, for students, their current score and Activity Stream. |
| Course Links | Course Links are provided by course authors using the Editor tool. These links are significant to students' understanding and performance in a course, and students can access them by opening the Course Links drop-down menu in the Header Menu on course home pages. Course Links must be assigned to the course before the drop-down menu will appear for students. |
| Curriculum Map | Course authors use the Curriculum Map to build activities and structure the course. |
| Curve |
Pearson Connexus allows teachers to apply a grading curve to any gradable activity by specifying a maximum score that is lower than the default. This scales student grades to that value and improves scores for all students. For example, If an activity's original maximum score is 100
|
| Derivative Child Course | Pearson Connexus allows courses to be created as linked copies of a Master course. The linked copy is known as the Derivative Child Course. Any changes made in the Master Course are reflected in the Derivative Child Course. If course authors make changes to a Derivative Child Course, the changed components are unlinked from the Master and will not be overridden by changes to the Master Course. Course authors can relink those components by changing them to match the Master Course again. |
| Derivative Sibling Course | This is an exact copy of an altered Derivative Child Course that continues to inherit changes to all unaltered elements of the Master. This option works best when you want to make a copy of an active course in which students are enrolled because, after making a Derivative Sibling Copy, you can still access the student enrollment information in the Master Course. |
| Digital Library | Course authors can access content from a variety of resources in the Digital Library, which is populated by an Administrator. These resources can include other courses within their district or organization as well as open sources like Gooru, EdGate, and Khan Academy. |
| Discussion | Course Discussions are focused conversation threads. All course members can add to the thread. |
| Domain | A domain houses courses, users, enrollments, and their associated data. Users with Administrator permissions manage this data and configure the domain settings, such as user options for avatars and badges. |
| Enrollments | An enrollment is a user's association with a course. A student, teacher, or teacher-author must be enrolled in a course to see its content and data. |
| For Me | The For Me tab displays all activities a student has created or chosen, as well as activities the teacher has created specifically for the student. |
| Formative Assessment | Formative Assessments evaluate ongoing student performance with relationship to specific objectives. In Prescriptive courses, if students perform well enough to demonstrate mastery of certain objectives, Pearson Connexus allows them to skip activities meant to teach those objectives. |
| Grade Weights | Teachers assign a value to every gradable activity representing its weight in the gradebook. This value defines how much impact each activity’s grade has on the final grade relative to other activities in the category and/or course. When using Multi-Outcome Scoring, you can also assign weight to outcomes to determine how much impact each outcome has on the grade. |
| Gradebook | The Gradebook tool enables teachers and students to track student progress for course completion, scores, and individualized activities. |
| Gradebook Reports | Teachers and administrators can run Gradebook Reports that provide student performance data on activities. They can be filtered by individual activities or activity categories and time periods. |
| Gradebook Settings | Teacher-Authors can complete the fields in Gradebook Settings to specify due dates and scoring details when editing an activity. |
| Grading Schemes | Grading schemes are criteria-based models for measuring performance. When creating a grading scheme, course authors define things like which activities are graded and which aren't, how much they are worth, how much their worth is weighted compared to other activities and activity types, what constitutes a passing grade, and in what way grades are communicated (e.g., letter grades, percentages, GPAs, etc.,). Teachers and course authors create a default grading scheme when they build a course, and they can create alternative class-wide grading schemes using the Final Grades screen. |
| Group Prefix | A Group Prefix is the common identifier applied to all groups in a Group Set to show they're part of the same Group Set. |
| Group Set | A teacher can group the same class in various ways; each different grouping is a Group Set. |
| Home | Home is the Pearson Connexus landing page and starting point for navigating the application. It displays current announcements for all courses, the To Do list for all courses, and Course Cards. |
| Homework | Homework activities are question-based assignments that students complete in their own time. Students can complete and submit each, or a group of questions to facilitate incremental progress and revision. |
| Journal | Course Journals are assigned writing exercises that only the authoring student, the teacher, and the student's parent or other observer can access. |
| Lesson | A Lesson is a group of activities that, when graded, are combined to create a single, graded item in the Gradebook. Pearson Connexus calculates the Lesson score from its gradable activity scores. |
| Links | The Links tool lists resources that are important to the course. |
| Main Menu | The Main Menu is the far left toolbar. With it, users can navigate between Pearson Connexus tools. |
| Master Course | Pearson Connexus allows courses to be created as linked copies of another course. The course that is copied is known as the Master Course, and any changes made in that course are reflected in the linked copy, or Derivative Course. When content authors make changes to a component of a Derivative Course, that component becomes unlinked from the Master Course and won't be overridden by changes made there. |
| Mastery | Teachers can review the Mastery list in the Gradebook tool. There, each objective that is linked to one or more course activity is listed along with an indication of how well the class, as a whole, seems to be mastering it. |
| Metadata | Teacher-Authors can complete metadata fields to provide additional information when editing an activity. Metadata is added on the Data tab of the activity editor. |
| Objective Map | An Objective Map is a group of defined correlations between two Objectives. This is helpful in showing how two Objectives from separate Objective Sets address the same or similar Standards. |
| Objective Mastery | Students can access the Objective Mastery screen from the Gradebook tool to see course objectives, which activities the objectives are aligned to, and the student's progress in mastering each objective (in percentages). |
| Objective Mastery Threshold | The objective mastery threshold is the percentage of points a student has to earn on an objective-aligned activity to show mastery of that objective. If an objective is aligned with multiple activities, Pearson Connexus uses the average. |
| Objective Set | A grouped collection of related Objectives. Objective Sets are defined at the Domain level by the Administrator. |
| Objectives | Course authors create objectives by creating activities based on educational standards and showing/describing how the activities meet those standards |
| Override Complete | The Override Complete button is available to teachers when grading. If a teacher has designed an activity to require students to successfully complete it before they can continue to other activities, the teacher can use Override Complete to remove the requirement, allowing the student to move on. |
| Peer Help | When activated, peer help allows students to see which of their classmates have completed an assignment, so they can engage them for help. Students access this information by selecting a Peer Help button in the toolbar of the Activities tool; the icon only appears when the feature is enabled by the admin and an activity has been completed by at least one student. |
| People | The People tool gives teachers at-a-glance access to various student data points in one simple table. They can use it to track student progress, create and manage groups, send mail, and invite, add, or drop students within courses. |
| Navigation | Teacher-Authors can complete fields in the area of the Activity Editor to manage the visibility and completion requirements of an activity, award a Badge upon completion of an activity, and change the activity’s Folder location. |
| Project | A Project is a package of activities related to a single topic or assignment. On creation, course authors should provide a Project description and instructions, and can include Discussion, Blog, Wiki, and Journal activities. |
| Proxy | A user with the appropriate permissions can sign in to another user's account; when doing this they are considered that user's proxy. |
| Quick Add | The Quick Add activity template allows course authors to easily upload documents, YouTube videos, Google Drive documents, or links as activities using the Curriculum Map. |
| Quick Lists | Teachers can generate Quick Lists using the Clipboard to assign supplemental activities to specific groups of students. |
| Registration Code | Students use Registration Codes to join courses. Teachers can generate Registration Codes and send them to students they want to invite to join a course. |
| Reports | The Reports tool allows teachers to run Gradebook, Student, and Mastery Reports for their courses. These reports provide data on student performance and course effectiveness. |
| RSS Feed | An RSS Feed compiles and summarizes content associated with a specific subject or website. Course authors build RSS Feeds by linking to existing RSS Feeds that students can access directly in Pearson Connexus. |
| Rubric | A rubric is a scoring guide used to indicate activity expectations, possible performance outcomes, and the scores associated with them. Rubrics can be added through the Editor to assignments that are manually scored by the teacher. |
| Self Assessment | The Self-Assessment feature allows students to evaluate their personal understanding, interest, and effort in a course using a four-point scale. Teachers can access these assessments in the People Tool and use them to guide intervention and personalized attention. |
| Self-assigned tasks | When enabled by the teacher, students can assign themselves tasks; they are called "self-assigned" in the For Me section of Gradebook. Creating and completing self-assigned tasks helps students manage their time and direct their learning path. These tasks can be created using the “plus-sign” in the header toolbar of the enabled course. |
| Sidebar navigation | Course authors build courses using a vertical folder structure. This structure appears as the sidebar navigation in the Activities tool and on Course Home pages. In User Settings, users can choose to use a full-view version of it with expandable/collapsible folders or to use a simplified view that shows only the contents of the currently selected folder. |
| Standards | Educational Standards describe what students should know and be able to do at a specific stage of their education. They are managed at the district or organizational level, and teachers use them to build activities and learning objectives. |
| Student Choice Activities (i.e., Student Choice, Choice Activities) | Student choice activities enable students to review a teacher-curated selection of approved activities and choose to complete the ones that best align with their interests and goals. Teachers are able to specify:
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| Student Reports | Teachers and admins can run Student Reports. They are generated as spreadsheets that provide a high-level perspective on individual student performance. |
| Survey | Survey activities poll students to collect and analyze class data. Course authors build surveys using external tools and link them in Pearson Connexus. |
| Tab-delimited values text files | Tab-delimited values files are text files (.txt) formatted to store data in tables. When importing course, user, and enrollments data, you must tab-delimited or comma-separated values (CSV) files. |
| Tasks | Tasks are personalized, non-graded activities that teachers can quickly assign to students using the Clipboard. |
| Teacher-assigned badges | Teachers can award Badges to recognize and encourage students. Teachers choose from Badges in specific categories (e.g., leadership, scholarship, service, etc) and provide personalized comments, so students know why they're being recognized. |
| Theme | A theme is made up of a color or image users choose to display in the interface. |
| To-do List | The student To-do List displays all past-due assignments, and all assignments with due dates in the next seven calendar days (display dates can be altered by an administrator). The teacher To-do List displays student submissions in need of grading. |
| User Menu | The User Menu is on the far right of the Header Menu, from which users can manage their account and themes, learn more about Pearson Connexus, access help, and logout. |
| Visibility and Completion | Content authors encounter this section when editing an activity and can complete the fields to specify when and where students can find the activity and how to complete it. |
| WebMail | Use the WebMail feature to send and receive messages. |
| What If Calculator | The What If Calculator lets users (students, teachers, admins, and observers) project possible grade outcomes based on hypothetical scores on activities. |
| Wiki | Course Wikis are collaborative writing exercises that can be edited by the teacher and all students in a course. All members can also see a history of revisions and who made them. |