Teacher Tips

1. Assign user IDs and passwords, fax list to us
When you or your school signs up for one of our courses, we respond promptly by sending a list of user IDs and passwords for those students enrolled. Please assign these to your students. If this list does not have your students’ names on it, please write their names on the list and email or fax the list back to us.

2. Browser Recommendation
We recommend that you use Firefox to work with our course web pages. Other browsers (like Explorer) are not always compatible with our course management system, Desire2Learn. You can download Firefox for free from the Mozilla website: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/

3. Login Instructions - see Video "Login"

To view the course content, please log in by going to our website: http://germanonline.okstate.edu. Click on 'Course Access' in the lower left margin.
You will be taken to a new web page. Enter your user ID and password and click on 'Login'. On the page that comes up you will see the course names in the middle of the page.
Click on the appropriate course name. This will take you to that course's homepage.
Notice the menu items across the top third of the page, under the orange bar, starting with 'Course Home'.

4. Accessing Course Material - see Video "Content"

Log into the the website, and click on the appropriate course.
Click the "Contents" tab from the course homepage. There you will find outlines, proctor passwords for the online quizzes and tests, instructions for making the German special characters, and Info Sheets, Worksheets, and their keys (for German I and German II).
Please note that the outline is based on a year-long schedule of 40-45 minutes per day for five days a week. If students are on a block schedule (that is, they are doing a course in one semester), they will have to do two days’ worth of assignments every day. For a summer course, students will need to cover 3-4 days of the outline daily.

5. Info Sheets and Worksheets (for German I and II only) - see Video "Infosheets"
You will notice on the outlines that students are supposed to have info sheets in front of them when they watch video, animation, or sound clips. There are also worksheets that provide additional practice for the students. Please either provide these info sheets and worksheets to the students when needed or see that they download and print them off themselves. These sheets are located on the “Content” page.

If you are a facilitator for German I and German II, you have access to the keys for the Info Sheets and Worksheets under 'Teacher Information'. Students also have access to the info sheet and work sheet files, but not to the answer keys. You can let students check their worksheets with the keys by either printing the keys or letting students see them online. Alternatively, you can collect the worksheets and check them yourself.

6. Other Activities
Please look at the outlines to see what the students are supposed to work on each day. Occasionally there are activities such as games, which can be done only if there are several students in your class. If you have only one student, that student may be able to do these activities with us over the phone by calling us toll-free at 1-800-423-6493.

7. Quizzes and Tests - see Video "Tests"
It will say in the chapter outlines when students are supposed to take tests or quizzes. Usually, there are 2-3 quizzes and one test per chapter. To take a quiz or test, students click on “Quizzes” in the top margin. They will be required to type in a proctor password. A list of these proctor passwords is located under "Content" in the "Teacher Information" section. These proctor passwords are not accessible to students since all of our quizzes and tests are closed-book and need to be proctored. Students will have to come to you to ask for a proctor password whenever they get ready to take a quiz or test. There are also mid-term exams and final exams available for those schools requiring them.

Beginning with the Chapter 5 test (in German I), the final test question is an oral part. Students have to call us (1-800-423-6493) to do this speaking test over the phone. The space for their grade on the speaking test is listed under "Grades." Even though it is entered separately, it is still counted as part of the test grade. Please do NOT allow students to take all of their speaking tests at once at the end of their course. In addition to assessing a students' speaking skills, we also give corrective feedback that would be useless if students took all of their speaking tests at once.

8. Tutoring Sessions
A very important part of our courses are weekly tutoring sessions. Please call us as soon as possible to schedule these sessions. The sessions can be done over the phone on our 800 line. If you have more than one student we would like for you to group students around a speaker phone so that we can talk to them in groups of up to 5. We can also do these sessions over the Internet (iChat or SKYPE, www.skype.com, for which our user name is german_online). If your school has a distance learning classroom, that would be a third option for these sessions.

9. Grades - see Video "Grades"
Students receive grades for the online quizzes, tests, and assignments and in German 3 and 4 for some projects. Most quizzes are graded entirely by the computer, but tests are always graded manually by us. As soon as a test or quiz is graded, the grade shows up on the student’s list of tests and quizzes.

Grades may be accessed by following these instructions:

Log into the German Online course website
Click on the appropriate course
Clicking on “Grades” in the top margin. This is also where you can see your students’ grades.
To pull up only your students’ grades, enter “stu” followed by the last 3 digits of a student’s user ID, (e.g., “stu293”) in the search box.
For privacy reasons, we do not use actual student names on our website. A student's generic first name is made up of the letters "stu" for "student" and the last three digits of that student's user name. Starting with the 2009/2010 school year, a student's generic last name will be an abbreviation of that student's school. Please contact us to find out that abbreviation for your school. By entering that word in the search box you will be able to pull up all students at your school at once.

10. Special characters
Correct spelling in German requires use of several special characters. Instructions for making these are available on our website. Click on “Content” and look for “How to make German characters” under Section3.

11. Additional Information
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us. You can reach us through our toll-free number, 1-800-423-6493 (Mo-Fr 7:30 am to 5:30 pm Central Time), or write an email to This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it or This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it .