5 Avenue to Learn
Avenue to Learn, a rebranded version of Desire to Learn’s Brightspace, is McMaster’s institutionally supported, campus-wide learning management system (LMS). While some faculties and/or programs use their own systems, Avenue to Learn (or Avenue) is the system you’ll likely make use of in your teaching. While there is no mandate to use a course site through Avenue or otherwise, it is considered an effective and accessible practice to create and maintain a course site. You can use a course site to post lecture materials and announcements, create online discussions, post grades, or assess students via quizzes or online submissions of course work.
Requesting and Activating a Course Shell
If you plan to utilize Avenue in your teaching, you will need to request a course shell, ideally, well in advance of the start of the course. This can be done by visiting the Avenue to Learn Support page and completing the course request form. It typically takes 24-48 hours after the request has been made to create the course shell. When you create your course shell, the request form will ask you to include details on which course you are teaching so that it can automatically enroll the students on the registrar’s classlist in the shell. For more information, see the Avenue to Learn Support Site.
DeGroote’s Teaching and Learning Services (TLS) team has created a template course shell in Avenue to Learn that you can use as a starting point for your course. It has helpful resources for you and your students, a homepage design, and content folders. If you would like to use this template, please email<EMAIL_ADDRESS>and request the DSB template.
Commonly Used Tools
Avenue contains a number of excellent tools that you can use to support student learning. If this is your first time preparing a course site in a learning management system, we outline here a few of the most frequently used tools.
Announcements
The Announcements section of the course site is one of the first features that students see when they land on your Avenue course page. In this section, you can draw your students’ attention to any important announcements you may want to make regarding either FAQ, reminders of upcoming deadlines, the release of new content, etc. If you are announcing the release of resources or assessments, it may be helpful to link them in your announcement for easy student navigation. Creating an announcement will notify students on Avenue to learn and helps direct their attention to it. The frequency at which you post announcements is at your discretion. You can find out how to make an announcement and the different features within the editor in this tutorial.
Content
The Content section of the course site is where you can post all of the learning materials you intend to share with your students. It allows you to organize your content into folders and you can include virtually any kind of media from PowerPoint slides to documents to web resources and videos. We highly