Carmen Tour

You will find Carmen easy to use. Its intuitive interface is easy to navigate and to tailor to your preferences. Every screen includes tips on what to do with the tools there. The Help system is extensive and searchable.

Instructors can build a class website and include their lecture notes, pose discussion questions, post news announcements, chat with students, email or page class members, link discussion questions to specific course materials, and create web pages with Carmen's built-in HTML editor.

Students can use Carmen to keep track of their course material, drop off assignments in the dropbox, work in groups, and check their grades.

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Destinations

My Homepage: When you log in to Carmen, you'll be taken to your home page. This page can have news postings on it - that's what you'll see front and center. In the left column, you can change your settings. The Updates and Events boxes in the left column will show items on your calendar. On the right side, instructors can manage their course feedback and schedule student access to their courses. Perhaps the path you'll take most often, however, is to click on your course name in the lower center of the screen in the My Courses box. When you click on the course name, you enter the course and see the course homepage.

Course Homepage: The Course Homepage is packed with features: instructors can post News items for their students and even link the news to items, within a course. So an instructor can remind students to take a quiz in the news box and have a link directly to the quiz. On this left, the Events and Updates boxes will tell you the status of the course - whether there are new discussion postings since you have last visited the course, whether there are upcoming deadlines on your calendar and so forth. The Role switch below is only available to instructors. It allows them to see the course the way a student or TA in their course sees it. The Pager, located in the upper right, allows all members of a class to page each other if they're online, very much the way instant messaging works. One of the most important links on this page is the help button. Clicking this will bring up an extensive, searchable help system. It is organized in an intuitive, simple system.

Navigation Bars: There are four navigation areas for the course home page. For more information about these tools, choose the tool name from the navigation bar on the left side of this page.

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Tools

Articles: The articles tool can be used in place of the news tool when instructors want to post lengthy articles or news to course participants. This tool provides space to include longer articles and the ability to define how multiple articles will be laid out for viewers.

Calendar: The Calendar can be used to display course related events. Course participants will be able to view course events on the course home page and keep track of project due dates, virtual office hours, and exam information.

Chat/Canvas: The Chat and Canvas tool is an interactive area where Carmen users can chat online in real-time discussions. The canvas can be used to illustrate discussion points. For example, an instructor could use a Chat session to help a group of students organize their class project and presentation.

Checklist: Creating a checklist is a good way to highlight the important aspects of a course. Instructors can construct a checklist to show class participants what they'll need to accomplish in the course and can even make new material available conditional on the completion of items in the checklist.

Content: Clicking on Content on your navigation bar will bring users to the meat of any course: its content. Students will see a neat outline of course materials organized into Modules and topics Instructors can create material right on the screen with Carmen's built-in html editor or upload files from their own computers.

Discussion: The discussion tool allows users to post messages and reply to messages that others have posted. The discussion tool is organized into forums and topics. The discussion tool has a spell check feature, in addition to the HTML editor and users can attach files to their discussion postings.

Dropbox: The Dropbox is an area where class participants can electronically submit assignments. They upload their assignments into a folder in the Dropbox. Instructors can then pick up the assignments and leave feedback for the students and have grades recorded in the gradebook.

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Edit course: The Edit Course button brings you behind the scenes of your course website. From here, you can schedule student access to the course, manage which tools appear on your navigation bars, access the content manager, and so forth.

Email:  Through email, instructors and class participants can communicate just as they do with their university accounts. Emails sent from Carmen will go into the university system. Instructors might suggest that students put the course number in the subject line, which will make sorting simpler.

Glossary: Use this tool to create a glossary for your course. Only instructors may modify the glossary.

Grades: Carmen allows instructors to customize how grades are set up and manage their grades for their courses. With many options, including grade schemes and calculation methods. The grades tool is very flexible. Instructors can download and upload grade books to or from an Excel file. Class participants can view their grades merely by clicking on the Grades link on the navigation bar.

Help: The Help tool leads to a well-organized set of instructions that pop-up on a separate window. The Help topics are organized into a few broad areas geared towards what users will expect to do in Carmen: communicate, present course material, manage students, evaluate, and grade. For example, information about setting up a new checklist can be found under the heading Communicate.

Links: The links tool allows instructors to add links to external sources from within Carmen. Links can open in the same window or in a new window.

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News: The news tool is the quickest and most effective method of communicating with class participants. It is the first page users will see when they enter their course. It is a great way to update information such as course requirements, room changes, and new data.

Pager: Carmen users can instant message each other using the Pager. Because they can see who is online, users can pose questions of classmates and instructors. The pager is automatically turned off when a student takes a quiz.

Quizzes: The quiz tool is versatile, allowing efficient creation of quizzes, exams, and tests using a variety of question types, including short answer, arithmetic, multiple choice, true-false, and matching. The built-in equation editor is useful for many types of questions. Instructors can store questions in the question library and draw on that data bank to create their quizzes.

Surveys: Instructors can create surveys to gather information from class participants. The Quiz and the Survey tools are very similar in operation. Each tool has its own question library for storing questions, and both offer similar question types. While a quiz is used to assess class participants' understanding of course material, the survey can be used to evaluate the course and gather general feedback.

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Features

Conditional Release: Using the Release Conditions too, instructors can construct specific learning paths for their students. For example, students might be required to complete certain items on a checklist before being able to see a certain piece of content students might be required to be enrolled in a selected group before being able to participate in a discussion forum, or students might be required to score above a certain percentage before being able to take the next quiz.

HTML editor: Carmen has a built-in HTML editor. This feature is available in most areas that require inputting text. You can toggle between a design view and an HTML editor view so that you can see your changes as you make them. In the Design view, you can quickly create and format content without any knowledge of HTML.

Learning Object Repository: Carmen has a built in Learning Object Repository that makes learning resources more accessible to educators and learners through the creation and availability of shared information resources. The repository holds topics, modules, and/or assets that have descriptive metadata. Instructors can reuse content and allow others to use it; when content in the repository is updated it will be updated across all of the places that content is used.

Locker: All users of Carmen can use their locker to upload and store personal files. These are confidential and private unless you choose to make them public, in which case they can be viewed by other class participants.

QuickLink: Instructors, when adding content or making entries to News or the Calendar, may link their current area to another area of the course. For example, you could link a content topic directly to the discussion forum on that topic.

System Check: All users of Carmen can have the program check their system's compatibility with Carmen. The software will check the browser, the screen resolution, JavaScript, and the status of cookies. It may be a simple matter to correct a problem and have Carmen fully operational on your computer!

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