A Forum Workbook can be formatted as Pre-Class Work, for the participant to complete and bring to the start of the session.

Authoring in Coursebuilder

To create a workbook that can be used for pre-class work, select the “Resources” tab within the Lesson Plan editor. From the “Create a New Resource” dropdown, select either “Forum Workbook” or “Forum Code Workbook”.

Then, in the “Edit LP” tab, select “Basic Class Information” and scroll down to “Pre-Class Work”. Within the “Add a Pre-Class Work Resource, select the workbook that you created in the step above.

Before Class in Forum

Participants will see the Workbook in the Pre-Class Work section of the class page. They enter answers directly on the page, and can go back and edit their work at any time. All answers are immediately saved as they type.

Instructors see a read-only version of the Workbook on the class page, to confirm what students are seeing.

At the scheduled class start time, student Pre-Class Workbooks become locked, disabling further editing. Students can not edit Pre-Class Workbooks during or after the class.

Pre-Class Work Summary View

At any point before or after class, an instructor can go to the “Pre-Class Work” tab on the session page in Forum and see a summary of students progress and answers on their Pre-Class Workbooks. Instructors can also “pin” certain student answers so they can quickly pull them up in class later.

Re-publishing

If the Pre-Class Workbook is changed after publishing, re-publishing the Lesson Plan will replace the Pre-Class Workbook for students. Student progress is archived in this case. A warning is displayed in Course-Builder to prevent accidental re-publishing with changes, and includes an option to email students.

During Class on Forum

In the classroom, lesson plans with attached Pre-Class Workbooks have a "Pre-Class Work" section in the Resource sidebar. Clicking the title of the Pre-Class Workbook displays the workbook summary view to the class.

Assessment After Class

The class session review page shows student workbooks under the “Workbooks” tab, where instructors can assess the Workbooks. Students are only be able to see assessments on their own Pre-Cass Workbook, and only after grades for the entire session have been released. Students are still be able to see their Workbook on the session overview page, but their assessments only show up in the session review page.

If students get assessed on their Pre-Class Workbooks, a notification is shown on the Forum main page in the “Recently Assessed” panel.

Section Switching

If a participant switches between sections of a course, any Pre-Class Work attached to a class that has already run will remain accessible to the participant on the previous section's class page. However, the participant will lose access to any Pre-Class Work attached to a class session that has not yet taken place. Participants should therefore be advised to make manual copies of any Pre-Class Work in progress before section switching occurs.

Current limitations:

Forum Workbooks and Forum Code Workbooks have an “Explore” tab that becomes visible after the workbook has been submitted for grading at the start of class and the original submission made read-only. While the original submission is still read-only, the “Explore” tab allows the student or instructor to edit the workbook further and in the case of a Code Workbook, run the code.

See example screenshots of the original submission tab (in read-only mode) and the Explore tab.

Any edits made in the “Explore” tab will not affect the original submission. If an instructor makes edits in an “Explore” tab, these edits will not be visible to the student and similarly if the student makes edits in the “Explore” tab these will not be visible to the instructor.

This feature is particularly useful for Forum Code Workbooks, as it can assist instructors in grading the workbook. It also allows students to experiment with improving their original submission after it is due and run those changes directly in the workbook.

In a Code Workbook in the Explore tab, if you edit a code cell or run the code, an option will appear to “Reset to Original Submission” (see screenshot below), which reverts that code cell and code outputs back to what the student originally submitted. This reset functionality is intended for instructors who may need to modify a student’s code for grading purposes, but need to easily revert the code and output back the student’s original submission.

This “Explore” functionality is not currently available for Forum Docs or Forum Code Docs.