OpenStax Microbiology

Hey, I was just talking to our McGraw-Hill rep and she said that you can have the students just purchase the Connect without a textbook. She indicated that the cost would be less than $100 per student (I forget the exact amount so I don't want to guess). This might help solve some of your problems. I'm planning on staying with OpenStax, but will think about adding something like this in the future. 

I've looked at that off and on. I teach part-time at a second local college as well and we've used McGraw Hill there for years now (I'm not in charge of choosing course materials at this college though). It's a great text and I'm really thankful to have access to those materials to check them out while I'm thinking about this. The biggest problem I'm facing right now is that I am drowning right now and it's too late to change my textbook selection for next semester too since registration has already started. So, McGraw Hill is definitely an option down the road, but that would be FA25 at the soonest and I absolutely have to figure something out in the meantime before I lose my mind. 

I do not use a homework or quizzes but we use Brightspace, so if I were you, I'd probably put up assignments(HW) or quizzes there (or in whatever LMS you have). It would take an initial investment of you inputting the data/questions but then quizzes would be established/auto graded (to an extent: it does matching, MC, short answer) and you could move them over each semester. 

I am in a similar place right now, teaching an overload and a course I haven't taught before. Our school just set some instructors up with access to the AI tool Teachermatic. One of its generators should let us convert existing multiple choice questions to Moodle format (our LMS). Another of its generators will write multiple choice questions around a topic of your choice (since you may not have a list of developed questions).

For mid-semester help when you're drowning, it's not bad. Of course, look through the questions and modify them to your standards - but I think this needs to be done with publisher materials, too.

I often use ai to both generate questions/answers and output everything in a format that is friendly to our LMS. You can use some of your own original materials for training and then just focus on writing quality prompts (and, of course, validating output). It has been quite helpful.

I'll have to look into that over break. I'm using OpenStax right now and that comes with an already created test bank for each chapter (when logged in as an instructor) in addition to the existing practice questions throughout and at the end of each chapter so I'm less worried about writing questions and more about getting assignments graded in a timely manner. I've been having students answer ~10 questions each week from the textbook and my plan was to grade them quickly, provide feedback, and then give students a chance to redo any incorrect answers and resubmit to improve their score. But I literally don't have time to get the grading done unless I want to lose even more sleep. 

It's probably wishful thinking to find something I can just plugin so late into the semester, but I have to figure something out so that they still get feedback in a reasonable amount of time and I don't lose my mind trying to stay on top of everything. I'm leaning towards just giving optional (but strongly recommended) written response questions and then just using quizzes for actual grades. I don't love the idea, but what I'm doing now definitely isn't working. 

I use LRNR for the online homework option.  It only costs the students $40 and has lots of options for students to interact with the material. I make it worth 10% of the student's grade.

with respect,

Scott 

scott.quinton@mcckc.edu