Setting Up and Customizing Your LaunchPad Course

LaunchPad for Practical Argument is designed to work in tandem with your textbook to help students sharpen their critical thinking, reading, and writing skills and promote the development of digital literacy. We want you and your students to have an excellent experience. The resources below will help you get started, and the pages that follow will familiarize you with some of the resources and assignment types available in LaunchPad for Practical Argument.

To activate your course so students can enroll, please consult these resources:

• Reference the Course Activation advice from the Knowledge Base.
• After you click on the “Activate your course” link at the top of the screen, check your e-mail for the course activation information to share with students.
• Request Training
• Contact Technical Support with any issues, and refer students to Tech Support if they have problems joining your course.

You can locate relevant materials by

• Viewing a LaunchPad unit.
• Taking a visual tour.
• Selecting the Resources panel to search or browse contents.

Creating your course assignments before students enroll is one of the keys to success with LaunchPad, and assigning is incredibly easy. You can assign a full unit or assign resources independently. Please be aware that some quizzes appear in the Resources panel and will only be available to students if you assign them (see the page in this Welcome unit titled “Types of Assessment in LaunchPad for Practical Argument” for more information). Students can access LearningCurve without it being assigned.

To assign, please review these instructions:

• Assigning a unit.
• Assigning items within a unit.
• Assigning items to groups or individuals.
• Explore advanced assignment settings.

Try adding instructions and discussions to the page with top notes. Develop a closer relationship between your instruction and the e-book by adding top notes to pages when you want students to pay particular attention to concepts or when you want to facilitate discussion that you don’t need to track via your gradebook.

LaunchPad for Practical Argument can tell you a lot about students’ mastery of course content. By talking with students about the trends you see in their results, you’ll affirm their online practice and have a better sense of their strengths and weaknesses.

To debrief with students, these instructions can help you talk about their results:

• Diagnostic Reports
• LearningCurve reports
• LaunchPad Gradebook tutorial
• Explaining Difficulty and Discrimination