How to Navigate Populi

You can get to your courses a number of ways, but three of the most convenient are…

Home

When you log in to Populi, you’ll be taken to your Populi Home page. In the right column, you’ll see your current courses listed. You can also click any course-related Alerts (in the main column) to go to that course’s Dashboard view.

My Profile

When you go to My Profile, you can find your courses in the right column of the Student view. You can also find links to your courses by looking at your transcript or degree audit.

My Courses

You can also find all of your courses in the My Courses view.

In each of your Populi courses, you’ll navigate from one part to another by clicking the views in the left sidebar. Here’s a quick look at what you’ll find in each view (keep in mind that your professor might not make use of all course features!).

• Dashboard: Here you’ll get an overview of what’s going on (and coming soon) in the course. Alerts link you to specific tasks requiring your attention. The Bulletin Board lets your class communicate with each other. And you can also see your current course status and grade at the top of the right column of the screen.
• Syllabus: This view presents the information you’ll need in order to understand how the course will be conducted and graded.
• Files: A central location that gathers all of the course’s files from assignments, lessons, and syllabus.
• Assignments: This is a list and overview of the various assignments in your course.
• Lessons: This view gives you all the available lessons for the course. Lessons are collections of course materials—content, assignments, discussions, links, and files—that cover a particular section of the course curriculum.
• Discussions: Here you’ll find the course’s discussions. 
• Conferences: Conferences are live online video meetings with the professor. If a conference is currently being conducted, you can click Join Conference; the meeting will open in a new browser window (you may need to download software to join the meeting). If the professor has recorded the conference, you can come back here and view the recording once it’s available.
• Tests: In this view you can see all available tests, including tests you can take and those you’ve alreay taken.
• Calendar: This shows all the meetings, due dates, and availability windows for the course and its assignments, lessons, discussions, tests, and conferences.
• Roster: This shows you a list (with pictures) of your classmates.
• Evaluation: If your school has made a course evaluation available, you’ll see alerts and this view at the end of the navigation column.

Tests are exams, quizzes, and suchlike that you can take in Populi. After submitting your test, it can be graded by your instructor or—depending on how your instructor has set it up—will be automatically graded by Populi.

Getting to tests

You can get to tests a number of different ways:

• When a test is available to take, you’ll see an alert on the Course > Dashboard view.
• The Course > Tests view shows you a list of all the published tests. If you’re allowed to access the test, you’ll see a Take Now link.
• You can also access a test from its associated assignment page.
• If a test is part of a lesson, you’ll be able to get to the test via the lesson. If the lesson requires you to complete previous lessons, you cannot take the test until you are allowed to access that lesson.

Here’s the information you’ll want to understand when looking at tests:

• Availability trumps the time limit. If you begin a test with no time limit ten minutes before the availability window ends, you have only ten minutes to finish the test.
• If you run out of time, unanswered questions will be marked wrong.
• If you get accidentally logged out in the middle of taking the test, you may resume the test where you left off with any unused time remaining (unless availability runs out).
• Your instructor may allow you to retake the test one or more times. Taking the test more than once is entirely optional.

Assignments are work you submit to your course instructor to be graded. There are several types of assignments in Populi courses:

• Grade-only: You don’t submit anything to your instructor (through Populi at any rate)—you simply receive a grade.
• File: You upload a file (or files). There’s also a Peer Review version, which is described below.
• Essay: You compose an essay right in Populi. This, too, has a Peer Review version.
  • Peer Review: Peer review files and essays allow you and your fellow students to grade and review one another’s assignment submissions. Your own grade for such assignments may depend, in part, on your interaction with their work.
• Test: Tests and quizzes you take online in the course’s Tests view.
• Discussion: Course discussions that grade you on your participation.
• Attendance: Your attendance in course meeting times can be factored into your course grade.

A few of the other things to notice about assignments:

• You’re probably familiar with due dates…
• “Availability” refers to the time period in which you’ll be able to submit work for the assignment.
• “Drop lowest” means that the final grade calculation will not count the lowest-graded assignments in that group. In the above example, the Tests assignment group will drop one assignment.

Assignment Page

Pictured above is a file-type assignment which the professor has graded with a rubric and annotated. Depending on the options your professor uses, your own assignments might show different details—but the layout of each assignment page remains the same.

• You’ll reach the assignment page by clicking its name. You might find it:
  • In an Alert on your Home page or the course Dashboard view
  • In the main course Assignments view
  • Via a course lesson
• On the right side of the screen you’ll see assignment info and feedback:
  • Info includes the assignment’s type and number of grade points, your grade (if any), and a link to the rubric used to grade your assignment (if any).
  • If you see , click that to see how your professor used it to grade your work.
  • The feedback section lets you share comments, questions, and files with your instructor.
• On the main part of the screen you’ll see your work—whether a file or essay, a test history, or a link to a graded discussion.

Assignment groups are different categories of assignments. They are used calculate your final course grade according to how each group is weighted. In the above example…

• Tests is worth 25%, Papers is worth 35%, and Participation & Discussion is worth 40% of the final grade.
• “Carver Essay”, although the same number of points as many of the other assignments, is itself worth 35% of the course grade. That’s because it’s the only assignment in the Papers course group.
• The three Participation… assignments show how an assignment group’s weight is distributed according to the number of points in the component assignments:
  • “Attendance” is worth 100 points; the two discussions are worth 50 points each.
  • That totals 200 points for the Participation… group. Those 200 points = 40% of the final course grade.
  • “1980’s Novels” is worth 50 points, or 1/4 of the Participation… group. That works out to 10% of the final course grade. And so on with the other assignments.

Discussions are online conversations among a course’s instructor(s) and students. To find, join, or even add a discussion, go to the Discussions view in the course. You’ll see…

• Available, future, and closed discussions
• Graded and non-graded discussions
• Discussions attached to lessons

In the image above:

• You can filter the Discussions view to Show all discussions, course discussions, or discussions attached to individual lessons.
• Blue symbols indicate there are new/unread comments in that discussion. Grey symbols mean that there are no unread comments.
• Carver and Annie Dillard and Nature are currently available. Carver is attached to the Short Stories in the 1980’s lesson.
• The two Future Discussions are not yet available.
• Writers and Maturation has been closed for comments; you may still view it but you cannot contribute more to it.
• Annie Dillard and Nature and Hype and Gold Rushes are Graded Discussions, which means that you will receive a grade based on your participation in the discussion (see below).

Graded discussions

In graded discussions, your instructor may set up grading criteria. Requirements help the instructor evaluate your participation in the discussion. You’ll see the requirements in the right column of the discussion page, together with a running tally of how you’re doing with each requirement.