Getting Started: Customizing for Your Class or Department

MyMathLab courses provide a complete online solution for students upon adoption by the instructor.

Built in CourseCompass™ using Blackboard™ technology, MyMathLab provides a variety of course-management and customization tools. Instructors can easily add and modify content, create and assign online homework and tests, monitor their students' progress, and use communication tools to create an interactive online community. As soon as you have created a MyMathLab course and given your students the Course ID, students can enroll in the course and use MyMathLab on their own to practice and improve their skills. But MyMathLab is also easy to customize, giving instructors the flexibility to modify their online course as much or as little as they choose.

Here are just a few of the ways you can customize a MyMathLab course to fit your individual needs or the needs of your department:

• Adding, modifying, and removing course materials: With the click of a button, you can move, modify, or remove book-specific content provided by Pearson Education. You can also easily integrate your own course materials, such as syllabi, announcements, lecture notes, PowerPoint® slides, digital images, and links to other websites.
• Creating online homework and tests: You can use MyMathLab's Homework and Test Managers to create online assignments for your students. MyMathLab provides a database of free-response online exercises -- correlated to the section exercises in your textbook -- that you can choose from to create homework and tests for specific chapters or sections.
• Creating your own exercises: You can use the MathXL Exercise Builder (MEB) to create static and algorithmic exercises for your online assignments. A library of sample exercises provides an easy starting point for creating questions, and you can also create questions from scratch. Exercises can include number lines, graphs, and pie charts, and you can create custom feedback that appears when students enter answers.
• Setting test options: MyMathLab's Test Manager offers a wide range of options for creating and assigning online tests. Instructors can:
  • determine how long a test will be available to students
  • decide how many times students can take a test
  • set a time limit for a test
  • create a password for a proctored test
  • decide whether and when students are allowed to review a test
  • select options that determine whether students can re-take an incomplete test
• Managing grades: MyMathLab automatically tracks and stores all student results. The MyMathLab Gradebook gives you tremendous flexibility in managing your students' scores on homework, tests, and tutorials. Options include:
  • weighting individual assignments
  • setting relative weights for homework, tests, and tutorials in calculating overall scores
  • selecting which test attempts to include in calculating average scores
  • omitting or deleting results for individual assignments
• Copying your course: If you have spent time customizing your MyMathLab course and wish to use the same course next semester, you can copy your existing course. The new copy preserves all your customizations while giving you a clean gradebook for the new semester.
• Sharing your course and managing course groups: You can let other instructors copy your course; you can also let other people help you manage your course by assigning them a "teaching assistant" role. To coordinate across multiple sections of the same course, you can set up a course group, where assignments in the "coordinator" course automatically appear in the affiliated "member" courses. This option is ideal for departments that want to maintain a standardized syllabus across multiple sections taught by different instructors.