Instructor Activities During the Semester

After the seventh day of a regular (16-week) session in fall/spring and the fourth day of a summer or eight-week session, online instructors are required to report students who have never attended any class sessions or participated in an academically related activity in their online course(s). This process is completed by the instructor in Starfish.

Documenting that a student has logged into an online course is not sufficient to demonstrate academic attendance by the student. Students must have participated in an academically related activity, such participating in an online discussion about academic matters or initiating contact with faculty to ask a question about the academic subject studies in the course.

If such absence is reported by the instructor, the Registrar’s Office will administratively drop or withdraw the student. As a result, a "W" will be recorded on the student’s official transcript and the course(s) will be subject to published refund policies. The Registrar’s Office will send a letter to the student notifying him/her of the changes in his/her enrollment status. If the student would like to re-enroll in the course(s), he/she must obtain approval of the instructor and the chair overseeing the course with a department/division stamp provided by the department/division offices.

All faculty members are required to submit midterm grading reports using Campus Connection. This is accomplished by entering your faculty center in the MSU Campus Connection and selecting the Grade Roster icon. Enter the student grades and change the approval status to Ready for Review and click the Save button.

Students receiving midterm deficiencies (Ds, Fs, and Us) will receive a letter from the Registrar’s Office. Academic Advisors will also be notified of their advisees receiving deficiencies. Midterm deficiencies are not a part of the student’s official record and will not appear on the transcript.

Electronic course evaluations will be sent using Class Climate software for all course sections with course components that have been selected to be evaluated. For more information, visit the Electronic Course Evaluations web page on the Institutional Research web site.

Course evaluations will be sent to students’ campus email account and made available on their Institution Page in Blackboard approximately two weeks prior to the last day of finals in a Regular Session course. Course evaluations close the day before finals start. Faculty can also add a Class Climate dashboard within their Blackboard shell.

At the end of each term, instructors are required to post (report) student grades in Connect Connection prior to close of business the Monday following the end of finals. The option of Incomplete (I) is no longer available. A course completion agreement (between the student and instructor) must be completed and provided to the Registrar by noon on Monday.

When reporting a failing grade for a student, faculty are also required to use FN/UN and FNN/UNN grades. FN/UN are for students who are failing due to no longer attending and the last date of attendance/participation in the course must be submitted.

Have you ever had a grade challenge in one of your face to face courses? Challenges of this nature also occur online and unless you backup your course on DVD or thumb drive, you will have no material to support the decisions you made.

You may wonder why a backup is necessary; after all you can open the shell and look at the course? Due to the size of courses we can only maintain the most recent course shells and student data on the Blackboard server. OIT follows the NDUS Bb SaaS Clean-up policy which removes courses 4 terms from their go-live date. MSU Online instructors must archive their online courses within 24 hours of posting grades.