At Honor, we believe in transforming education through collective engagement. In these videos, you'll discover how easy it is to migrate over or set up a course, activate your course materials, and invite your students to meaningfully engage with the content and with each other.

You can start anywhere, but loading up your learning material first is an easy way to get going quickly. Add new Materials in the Materials Tab by clicking the + button and selecting one — or multiple— files to upload. Honor recognizes almost any file format you have stored on your computer or in the cloud. For learning material like URLs, including YouTube video links and websites, you’ll be able to add that later directly into your course.

To find everything easier later on, you can also create a folder for groups of topics or subjects.

Now that your Material is loaded, let's build out a course. Click the + New button in the Courses Tab. Name your course, add a course code if you’d like, then click Create. Now add an image to your course to give it a compelling look with visual context. Open the drop-down menu on the course card and select Add Preview Image. Horizontal images work best, around a standard 3:2 ratio. If you don’t have the perfect image ready to plug in, a terrific resource for royalty-free images is Unsplash.com.

Double click into your course. Now let’s lay out some empty Topic cards. Topics are self-guided. They can be used either as stand alone learning experiences, or to complement in-person sessions. We’ll use a simple time-based Topic structure for this video. Name your Topic and select its visibility level. You can drag topics around, rename them, and change visibility at any time.

Let’s pick one Topic to build out. Create a sequence to stitch together your story within the Topic. First, let’s add narration. Adding Narration helps set up this Topic for your students. Give some extra context, like learning objectives or explaining the purpose of this particular topic.

Now, add a few different kinds of Materials from your library. We’ll add an EPUB, a video, and image, and a URL in this example.

And finally, let’s add a Prompt: Prompts are an important way to build engagement through quick responses to questions. Also, they are a helpful mechanism for you to check the pulse of the class; we’ll cover this in the Analytics video later. There are three types of Prompts: Short Answer, Multiple Choice, and File Upload. Prompts default to public, meaning students will see their peers’ responses once they submit their own. This contributes to social learning through collective engagements. If you want responses to be private, you can uncheck this setting.

Your course becomes special and distinct when you add your voice and context to the learning material. Start by opening any Material, then add a title and introduce this learning material with a description. Maybe set some context for why you’ve included this in your curriculum. You might also want to add an attribution indicating the source of this material.

Customize the length or size of the material to focus students only on what you want them to see. Maybe you want your students to only read one section of the book, or watch one part of the video. This helps them focus on what really matters and improves retention during study sessions.

With Honor, you can easily add your voice or written notes onto any learning Material at any point: Click Commentary and add either an audio or text message directly into the material. This extra context is so crucial for your students because it deepens their learning. Maybe you want them to pay special attention to a certain part, or perhaps this is a moment where you know people get stuck and you can give them some help.

Assessments provide a way for students to submit assignments or responses that you want to track in a systematic way. For example, you want to assign a grade or participation credit for the submission. There is a built-in workflow that allows you to accept the student submissions, or send it back to them with comments.

To create an Assessment, click the + New Assessment button and give it a name and due date. Add instructions or other details in Details. Then select what type of assessment you want: file upload, short answer, or an external submission in another tool, such as another LMS.

Once you’ve stitched together your narrative and added your context and voice, it’s time for learners to add theirs.

Our Reaction Button and Notebook in Honor Learn allows students to save content in a totally new way. The Reaction button invites students to highlight a portion of the material, and then react with: Important, Unclear, Interesting, or Debatable.

We invite students to critically think about not only what they want to save, but also why. Students can make reactions to images, a passage in a reading, or a moment in a video.

Once they make a reaction, they can also add a note about their reaction. They can choose to make the note public – so that other students will see it – or they can make it private. Either way it is then saved to their notebook.

Reactions and notes are not only useful for self-study; they become a source of social learning because they can see each others’ reactions and public notes. The summary of reactions for a section of the material is represented as an Energy Pill.

The energy pills and public notes are also helpful for you as a teacher. You can see where the “reaction energy” is concentrated in the material, and you can determine what material is perhaps unclear or worth exploring more in class.

We’ve found that prompting students to make Reactions frequently at the start of a course greatly improves engagement throughout the semester. For this reason, we recommend that you add either a “Getting started with Reactions” to your first Topic, or explain the importance of using this feature in a live session.

Honor’s Contextual Analytics are a powerful way for educators to see real-time student engagement and keep a pulse on their class. Our analytics are uniquely collected and presented right next to their data counterpart, so you never lose context. Everything is delivered right where you need it, when you need it.

The Engagement Sidebar appears at every level of your course: In a Course, drilling down into a Topic, and further down within Materials. Let’s start at the Course level.

The Course Engagement sidebar provides analytics of your class as a whole, looking at the all Topics within your course for important insights like:

Course Progress, which shows how coursework is being completed up to this point in time, broken down into Topics. Click the module for precise completion percentages per Topic.

Course Time Spent shows an at-a-glance average and median time per Topic. Opening the block up gives you a breakdown of exact times per Topic.

Course Reactions show how many Reactions have been made by your entire class across all Topics. Clicking into the block shows a Reaction breakdown per Topic.

Let’s go into a Topic and look at the same sidebar framework for Topic Engagement.

Topic Progress breaks down coursework one level deeper, showing completion time per Material and Prompt within this Topic. Open up the block and see exact completion percentages.

Topic Time Spent shows an at-a-glance average and median time per Material and Prompt within this Topic. Again here you see a breakdown of time per unit.

Topic Reactions shows how many Reactions have been made by your entire class across all Materials within this Topic. Clicking into the block shows a Reaction breakdown per Material type.

This framework continues all the way down to the Material level, for insights with precision and context.

The Material Engagement sidebar provides three areas of analytics:

Again, Progress breaks down your students’ progress through this particular material.

Time Spent breaks down how much time has been spent engaging with the Material.

Reactions break down Reactions to the Material, grouped by their location and Reaction type. You can see where students have reacted and how. This helps you keep track of how learners are engaging with the material.

Prompt Engagement similarly provide details on how your students are answering Prompts:

Responses tell you the total submissions of this particular Prompt. Open the module up to show a snapshot of all of your students’ responses, and click in to see each student’s individual response.

Progress shows a snapshot of how many have completed the Prompt. Click in to see more detail.

Finally, Time Spent shows summary statistics for how much time your students spent on the Prompt.

All these insights help you gauge participation, prepare for live sessions, and perhaps most importantly, gain real-time visibility into students who might be falling behind.