At a Glance
Institution:
Douglas College
Instructor:
Fanny Boulesteix
Course Name:
Basic French I & II
Course Material in Use:
Terrell, Deux Mondes, 8ce
Resource in Use:
Connect
Course Type:
Face-to-face, online
Integration:
Sakai
Course Enrollment:
310
Before implementing Connect in her Basic French courses, Professor Fanny Boulesteix found that students often came to class unprepared, causing valuable class time to be spent reviewing assigned material rather than teaching new content. She also found that assigned homework took a lot of time to manually mark and that because of this time constraint, she had limited time to track student progress as often as she would have liked. Connect offered an effective solution to both of these challenges.
“One of the main reasons I selected Connect was because of its ability to track and analyze student practice and performance outside of class time.”
When Professor Boulesteix first began to consider incorporating Connect into her courses, she was concerned about the learning curve involved. However, once she began the implementation process, she found it easy with plenty of guidance from the Connect team along the way. The implementation team helped her narrow down what pedagogy would be included in her course and showed her how to set up different exercises and assignments. Throughout the process, if any difficulty or issues arose, she could count on timely and personalized follow-up to help her solve her problems.
Professor Boulesteix began using Connect in 2020 and assigns a total of 60% of students’ grades to Connect assignments including both formative and summative assignments. Formative assignments provide students with unlimited attempts and include pre-class readings, listening homework, and written homework. Summative assignments include a time-constrained listening exam and vocabulary-grammar exam.
“For exams, I love the fact that I am able to create question pools which are more conducive to academic integrity.”
Compared to other platforms that Professor Boulesteix has tried in her course, she finds that Connect is easier to integrate into her institution’s LMS and this made the platform very convenient for students to access their course resources directly on the course site. She enjoys the variety of exercises available in Connect and the convenience of filtering content and copying exercises from one semester to another. Connect was also more customizable for her needs.
“Connect allows a lot of flexibility and offers a lot of resources compared to other platforms.”
Since adopting Connect in her course, Professor Boulesteix finds that students are more motivated to complete assignments regularly and thus come to class better prepared for and engaged in discussion and exams since they have more exercises available to help them prepare. Students performed better on exams and are acquiring the necessary learning outcomes since the regular practice in Connect provided them with the chance to test their skills before being evaluated on it. Before adopting Connect in Fall 2019, 54% of students had a letter grade A-/A/A+ while in Fall 2022 after implementing Connect, 57% of students had an A grade.
“Students feel very motivated by the fact they can have unlimited attempts which allow them to practice as many times as needed to have a great mark.”
Assignments being automatically graded has also freed up her time so that she can track students' progress easier, and students receive feedback quicker. She can focus less on explaining grammar and vocabulary, instead using this free time to practice more in class. Connect has allowed her to change her courses’ pedagogical approach to a flipped classroom style where students read the material before class and with class time being mostly dedicated to oral practice of the content.
“My students tell me they love the fact that they can have immediate feedback after completing an exercise. They feel Connect is a good complement of the class.”
Professor Boulesteix has taught French at Douglas College since 2009. Before joining the college, she taught on three different continents.
Her interests in the field of language pedagogy include French Language and Culture, Second Language Acquisition, French Linguistics and Francophone Literature. She is also involved in assessment and certification, especially with the CEFR and the DELF exam. She received her BA in Modern Languages from Tours University and my Master in Linguistics and Educative Cooperation from Aix-en-Provence University.
Professor Boulesteix shares some recommendations to other instructors considering adopting Connect for their own courses:
“I would advise connecting with the wonderful team at McGraw Hill. The team will be able to let them know about different options and best practices. They can also help with setting up Connect.”
“The single biggest reason that Professor Boulesteix recommends using Connect is to “save time for a more efficient and systematic wat to track student work and progress.”