Save Time Organizing Students with Signup Sheets
Many classes have activities where students need to self-select into groups to work on a project or assignments. Many classes have end-of-term summative activities like presentations where students need to present their work over a series of days. Some classes offer office hours so that students can get one-on-one assistance from faculty and TAs.
Organizing all of these activities can be a headache. Some faculty resort to using a shared Word document, or a Google doc, or a wiki in their CoursePlus site. Some faculty and TAs manage shared email inboxes, where they have to sort through 20 or 50 different email messages to put student requests in order.
The Signup Sheets tool in CoursePlus is specifically designed to drastically simplify the burden of this kind of work. With Signup Sheets, you can:
- Create topics and have students sign up for that topic for a group, paper, project, or activity
- List days on which final presentations will occur and students can sign up on a day that works for them
- Set up office hours and students can sign up to attend
- Guage student interest in specific topics or activities to cover in the course
- Convert student signups in to CoursePlus course groups for additional work
The Signup Sheets tool makes quick work of all of the above. In addition to creating sheets for students to sign up on, the tool also has the ability to:
- Set an open and close dates for signing up
- Limit students to signing up on one of a set of available sheets
- Allow group signups when groups are defined in the CoursePlus course groups tool
- Send reminders to students who haven't signed up
- Export all signup information to Excel
In the case of office hours, you can give the Signup Sheets tool a block of time and say "I can see up to five (or six, or eight) students during this time," and the tool will make five (or six, or eight) equal slots during the time you've specified.
There is a full set of documentation on how to use the Signup Sheets tool in the CoursePlus guide for faculty. As always, CTL Help is also available to answer your questions.
The Signup Sheets tool has a surprising number of different possible uses. We encourage you to take a look, and see how the tool can save you time in the administration of your classes!