Course Management

The Mentor Course Management System (CMS) has all the tools your faculty need to manage work outside of class or teach fully online courses. Plus, Mentor offers assessment tools and curriculum management tools that provide program administrators and assessment committees the tools they need to assure that students are learning.

  • Communication – The Mentor CMS has all the communication features you will need to work with students, from a full discussion board (with grading options for individual threads) with support for group threads, to live chat, with a handy queue feature that allows the instructor to moderate and call on students so that the chat is not overwhelmed with responses. The Mentor messaging system archives all messages sent for both recipient and sender.
  • Course Home Pages – Mentor has a fully configurable course home page that is based on the course schedule. Each successive day of the schedule serves as the course home page so your students see immediately upon entry into your Mentor course what is expected of them for each scheduled date. Mentor provides an easy point and click interface to embed links to any Mentor course resources on the schedule page, such as links to online tests, assignments, and documents.
  • Document Management – The Mentor course document management system provides an easy interface for faculty to share files with their students. Faculty can create any set of folders as well as link courses to common folders that hold documents that are shared between course sections or across semesters. Faculty can also delegate permissions to students to upload files to specific document folders making it easy for students to share files with the class.
  • Testing and Surveys – Mentor supports a full suite of online testing and surveys, including test banks and randomized tests. Tests can be timed or left open for students to return to and edit their answers until the test closes. Test questions are easily linked to learning outcomes (either program outcomes or instructor defined outcomes, or both) and Mentor provides an immediate outcomes based summary for each test. Test grades are automatically integrated into the Mentor grade book.
  • Assignments – Faculty can post all manner of assignments. Assignments in Mentor communicate to students the work that is expected, due dates, and submission of student work. Each assignment can be configured to accept one or many drafts from each student. Each assignment has a grade sheet and assignment grades are automatically integrated with the Mentor grade book. Mentor also has a handy assignment grouping feature, that allows the instructor to average grades from groups of assignments, rather than having to calculate out the weighting of each of an indeterminate number of assignments.
  • Learning Outcomes and Rubrics – Assignments also integrate with both program defined and instructor defined learning outcomes. Faculty can map their assignments to program outcomes and even use rubrics defined at the program level. Faculty can define their course outcomes and their own rubrics and even mix program and instructor rubric traits into the same grading rubric. Grading rubrics permit weighting of rubric traits and there are no limits on the number of traits or the scales used on each trait of a rubric. Mentor automatically calculates a grade from the rubric trait scores but Mentor also provides an instant course level assessment summary when rubrics are used. Mentor also keeps track of application of rubrics to successive drafts of student work, thus allowing the instructor to demonstrate improvement and track student difficulties.
  • Portfolios – Mentor has a full portfolio system and instructors can make use of this by assigning portfolios from within a Mentor course. Faculty can then create specific prompts – topics for portfolio entries, making the portfolio an ideal place for student journal writing. Course assigned portfolios remain a part of the Mentor course and this means that the instructor always has access to student portfolios.
  • Project Management – The Mentor Project Manager is the ideal solution for faculty who want to be involved in and monitor student group projects. The instructor can define projects for specific groups of students, define tasks or let the students define tasks, and monitor time on task and the communications and products of the group work.
  • Grade Book – The Mentor Grade Book incorporates the grading from attendance, tests, assignments, projects, portfolios and discussion board into an easy to use summary. Instructors can create weighted mid-term estimates of grades, and review all grades for any student as well as rankings of student grades across the class. And Mentor always provides a method for instructors to edit calculated grades to make adjustments.
  • Import and Course Replication – Mentor provides easy methods to grab content from other courses. Mentor supports full course replication from one course to another, as well as importing specific assignments, tests or documents from other courses.

Administrative Features of the Mentor CMS:

  • Standardizing Curriculum – Mentor provides methods for program administrators to push content into any set of courses. This includes assignments, tests and discussion threats, as well as learning outcomes and rubrics.
  • Curriculum Mapping – Mentor also provides a sophisticated curriculum mapping function, that allows a program to link course outcomes to program outcomes. Course outcomes defined by the program automatically appear in their respective courses, including any rubric traits attached to those course outcomes. This makes it possible to aggregate rubric data at the program level when faculty use these rubric traits in their grading.

    Mentor also has a curriculum map that is generated from the links of assignments to program outcomes. This allows the program to see which courses (and assignments) are addressing which outcomes and how often.

  • Integration with Program Assessment – Mentor assignments that are linked to program outcomes are also available to the program assessment committee for sampling of student files across any set of assignments and courses. More on this feature in our section on assessment.
  • Syllabi Archive – Syllabi loaded into Mentor courses are automatically available to program chairs and deans. Mentor thus provides an instant archive of course syllabi. These can be made available to all students as well.
  • Library Pages – Finally, Mentor has a special set of Library pages. Authorized librarians can create library pages that appear in each Mentor course based on course subject and/or subject+course number. Library pages can even be constructed for specific course sections.