Courses

Courses

What are Course Playlists?

A course playlist is a set of targets (aka standards, competencies) that are expected to be mastered during a given reporting period. For example, "Algebra 2 - 1st Semester" may cover 6 learning targets. Empower Administrators define the targets in each course using Empower Playlist's Big Idea.

Course Playlists, in their simplest form, serve 2 purposes:
  1. To inform Empower of the sets of targets in each course for reporting purposes. 
  2. To indicate by their assignment which students are "enrolled" in which courses. 
This article discusses these purposes along with instructions and tips for creating, assigning, and reporting on Course Playlists.

This video discusses courses in-depth:



Course Playlists vs Instructional Playlists

A course playlist may actually contain nothing but a Big Idea with standards in it. In fact, that is often best practice. 

Empower doesn't care WHERE learning happens. Any score a student receives is THEIR score and will be honored everywhere we consider their progress. 

Remember, Course Playlists in their simplest form serve 2 purposes:
  1. To inform Empower of the sets of targets in each course for reporting purposes. 
  2. To indicate by their assignment which students are "enrolled" in which courses. 
By assigning the Course Playlist to a class or group a student is in, Empower knows that the student is enrolled in that course. That's all that's needed for it to show up on a course-based report for them. After that, the teacher may not interact with the Course Playlist itself at all, they may do all of their instruction in a different playlist or not in Empower at all.

It is very likely that a single class will want to have a course playlist AND an instructional playlist.


Instructional Playlist
Course Playlist
A lesson plan or unit filled with resources.
A set of targets defining the scope of the course. Often it is only a Big Idea with no instructional pieces at all.
Assigned to a class for students to interact with
Assigned to a class to designate that the students are enrolled in that “course”
Created by Teachers
Created at the District Level
Can be copied and changed by teachers
Copies become instructional playlists. No longer the official course
The method of delivering instruction to students
The foundation for course pace, course reporting, and transcripts


Why are Course Playlists Important?

Creating your course catalog in Empower is an important step in your site setup and enables other powerful and convenient tools. 

  1. Teachers will be able to easily see what content is supposed to be addressed in any course through the Target Browser filters.
  2. Courses form the foundation of the My Graduation Tab - a real-time view of a student's progress toward graduation. 
  3. Real-time course pacing is the primary health meter for students, classes, schools, and districts.
  4. Course-based progress reports and transcripts.

Q: What about for primary schools and schools that don't have Courses?
A: Courses aren't a strict requirement in Empower, some schools don't leverage these tools, BUT... We always recommend making courses and our support literature is geared in that direction. We encourage primary schools to make grade level courses. For example, "2nd Grade Math" would contain all 2nd grade math targets. Again, this opens up the doors to some reports and metrics, discussed below, which can be valuable. 

Pace

Pacing is a vital metric for communicating to students and guardians, supply students with pressure to achieve, and diagnosing and supporting learning needs. Pace is best driven by courses. 

The image above zooms in on how Course Pace is displayed on the Guardian and Student portals. In this example, the course covers 5 Targets. That is, a student is expected to achieve mastery in those 5 targets by the end of the course. 

Because Empower knows the content being covered and the amount of time it is expected to be covered in, it can easily compare that information against student progress and the current date to give us an indication of more or less where a student should be today in order to complete this content on schedule. 

Not all targets take the same amount of time to master, so for even more accuracy, a district may want to weight the target. This lets Empower know how long each target should take relative to one another. Read more about that lower down in this article under the section entitled Designing Your Courses. 

For more information on Pace, how it is calculated and how it can be adjusted, see our Pacing Article. 

Scores

Having your standards structured as courses allows schools to calculate course scores in the traditional sense while maintaining standards-based scoring and instructional practices in the classroom. 

When calculating course scores, Empower looks at the targets contained in a given course and the student's summative score on each target.  Empower uses weighted averages these scores together to determine the course score. For more on this process, see the section at the end of this article about Final Scores. 


"Average" can feel like a four-letter word in CBE, because it doesn't take into account learning over time. This is wise when looking at evidence of learning to determine summative scores, but in the case of course scores, we are not looking for learning trends, we are asking a question about a single point in time. "What scores did this student receive on these targets?" Therefore, it is appropriate to average. 

This chart shows the relationship between some of the structures in Empower, including Course Scores, and how they roll into one another. 





Reports

Some of Empower's printable reports are structured around Courses and designed to communicate students' scores, pace and credit based on course groupings. See example below. Without courses set up, these reports simply won't print.
 



Designing your courses

Mastery

Sometimes a course is designed to cover a single term, but a target within that course may have been written to take an entire year to master. What happens in such a case is that a student may be at partial mastery (say, score 2.0) at the end of the "course." When score calculations are run, this won't reflect favorably on them, even though the student may not even have yet been given opportunity to achieve mastery (score 3.0). 

To avoid this, best practice is to make sure targets within a course cover the same period of time as the course. It may be advisable to split a target into 2 targets so that mastery can be achieved in a single term. 

Weighting standards for a course

If some targets are expected to take longer than others, Empower's pacing metrics can take that into account when you weight those targets. 
  1. Go to the tools menu
  2. Standards (Target) Editor
  3. Select a content area
  4. Click the edit button on the target you want to weight
  5. Enter a weight into the Weight field
  6. Save
The weights are relative and the default is 1.00. So to set the expectation that a target will take twice as long, set it at 2.00. 

Soft Skills

While soft skills may be covered or evidence gathered for them during a course, do you want those summative scores to appear in the final reporting of that course? Or to be calculated into the final scores? If not, do not include them in a course. 

Evidence for soft skills can still be gathered by any teacher, but if the targets are included officially in the course playlist Big Idea, all of the scores will be considered and this would make the Algebra course score, for instance, take into consideration elements which are not strictly algebra. 

Naming the Courses

It is wise to use a naming convention for your courses in Empower so that users can easily know and find official courses. 



Loading/ Creating Courses

There are a few ways to associate your targets into Courses in Empower. The relationships can be uploaded via spreadsheet or built in the interface by someone with Admin rights. 


Loading Courses via Spreadsheet

Targets can be associated into courses via spreadsheet. 

The spreadsheet can be found attached to this article. Be sure to remove the examples. 

Once the sheet is complete, upload it in a ticket to our helpdesk and the team can load it into your Empower instance for you. 

This video explains the process and the sheet. 


Manually Making a Playlist into a Course

NOTE: This is an ADMIN ONLY feature. 




  1. Go to the Instruction Tab
  2. Select Create Playlist
  3. Give it a Title
  4. Click on the Big Idea
  5. Click on the + Button
  6. Select the standards which are to be included in this Course
  7. Exit the Target Browser. 
  8. Change Big Idea Type from Instructional Playlist to Course Playlist
  9. Enter any of the other fields that appear which are appropriate to your case. Most commonly the Course Number and Course Credit.
  10. Don't forget to SHARE the playlist so others can use it.   

Q: Can one course playlist be aligned to two different course numbers?
A: Yes. In the Big Idea where you enter the course numbers, you can put multiple numbers separated by a comma with no spaces.


Assigning Course Playlists

By assigning the Course Playlist to a class or group a student is in, Empower knows that student is enrolled in that course. That's all that's needed for it to show up on a course-based report for them. After that, the teacher may not interact with the Course Playlist itself at all, they may do all of their instruction in a different playlist or not in Empower at all. The assignment of the Course Playlist to a Class or Group with the right students is vital as this is how Empower knows which students are enrolled in which courses. 

Assigning via SIS

If the Course Number in the Big Idea matches the course number associated with the class being imported from your SIS, Empower will automatically assign the playlist to those classes during the data sync.
If a Course is assigned automatically via the SIS and then is also assigned manually, it will appear twice on the student's report card.

Q: Is there any way that the course #’s that are being pulled from our SIS could be renamed? They are a set of numbers and not reflective of the hour. Example “Science MS17760” It would be great to be 1st hour, 2nd hour, etc.

A: Technically this not impossible for our tech team to do as a special request. However, Empower takes its cues from the SIS, so the simplest way to resolve this is to rename the courses there and let Empower sync. Any changes you might make to them yourself in Empower, will only be overwritten on the next sync. 

Assigning Manually

Course Playlists behave just like Instructional Playlists in this regard. Teachers can search and assign official course playlists to their own classes or groups. 

Sharing

First, the creator must share the course playlist, making it searchable for other users. 
  1. Pull up the Playlist as the creator
  2. Click the blue SHARE button in the upper right hand corner of the screen
  3. Set Who can access? to All Teachers



Searching

Teachers can now use the magnifying glass to search for the official course playlist

They can search based on keywords, Quick Access ID or based on the learning to which the content is aligned.



Quick Access ID

A number in blue like this is a quick access ID. When users are searching, they have an option to search using this number. This will take them straight to the specific resource so there's no confusion.



Assigning

Once the desired playlist is found, users can hit assign and will be taken to this screen:

For course playlist, users should Assign Original. Otherwise the instance they create is not the official playlist, but a clone. 
Here you see a list of all of your classes and groups. Simply click on any of them and this will be assigned to that class/group with the assign and due dates you have selected.

To unassign it from any of them, click the x next to their name.



Course Pacing

For more information on Course Pacing, please see our Pacing Article. 





Honors Courses & Credit

Separate Courses

When honors courses are scheduled separately from non-honors courses, it is possible to award weighted credit fairly easily. Setting these honors courses up with their own Course Playlists, and their own set of standards, will allow any course scores that are given to automatically be weighted for GPA calculations.

Normally, this is the set up that is chosen when providing stand along honors courses, AP, and IB courses which carry a weighted GPA.

Weighting Courses can be done in that Course Playlist's Big Idea

Integrated Courses

If a school wishes to have honors courses run concurrently with non-honors courses, there will be a little extra work required. Schools will need to identify whether additional targets will trigger an honors status when completed, or they can specify a particular score that must be achieved to trigger the honors designation.

This would be the set up that is chosen when schools wish to have non-honors type classes that are converted to honors credit when additional standards are achieve. For example a Biology course might have 10 standards that need to be completed for general credit. If an additional 5 "honor" standards are also completed, Empower triggers a weighted score for the course. This set up would allow all students to access honors content and credit, no matter which course section they are enrolled in.




Calculating Final Course Scores

For a full discussion on Final Course Scores, please read the Article on Final Scores.

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