This past January saw the start of a new year, a new semester, and a new version of Pulse! For faculty, there are some very nice enhancements in the new version - copying content between courses, loading test and survey questions, and improvements in the online grade book. (More on each of these below.) For everyone else, Pulse provides even more customization of your homepage - My Pulse. There are additional news information providers, like the NY times, dictionary and thesaurus modules, and a better-performing weather module (too bad it couldn't also improve the real weather conditions, this January has been much too cold!)
Copying Content
Instructors teaching multiple course sections, or using the same content in different courses, may now easily copy that information between courses. (Previously, it had to be entered twice.) Suppose you teach two different Pathology courses but use the same online reserved reading areas for each. Instead of loading an article into both courses you can now easily click on the "copy" button, select your other course and the section or folder you want the article to appear in, and you're done.
Importing Questions
The Assessment control panel has been revised and there are now separate sections for Test Manager and Survey Manager. One very welcome change is the ability to import questions rather than typing them in manually or having to copy/paste each part of the question. This is rather easy to work with using Microsoft Excel. For details, see the following:
Unfortunately, no improvement ever seems to come without some cost. Actually deploying a test or survey is now a multi-step process. Click here for specific instructions.
Editing Tests
Another big improvement is the ability to edit a live exam without having to make it unavailable (and thus lose the test data on anyone who's already taken it). Say you catch a misspelling; you can go back to the control panel for the content section you put the test in, select Modify (the item) then select Modify the Test. The system will warn you against making changes that alter the number of choices, or that would create some disadvantage to those already done with it, but you can continue and change spelling or make other minor updates.
Gradebook Improvements
The Gradebook section now has more features and is easier to use. You can upload grades for assignments (such as a book reports) that didn't go through Pulse. You can set up the different weights items might have related to the overall course grade, and you can sort the items in different ways.
If you have any problems formatting questions, uploading files, or deploying tests, please contact Chris Braster (Chris.Braster@jefferson.edu) or Tony Frisby (Tony.Frisby@jefferson.edu) for help.
Related Links:
