Milestones

Overview

Ever wish students would stop saving all their discussion posts and replies for the last night of the week?

Milestones help you turn one big deadline into smaller, clearer steps. For example, you could ask students to make their first discussion post by Wednesday, then come back to respond to classmates by Friday. Students can see what they need to do and when, and you can easily check their progress.

Milestones are also a handy way to make participation expectations visible. You can use them as a checklist while you grade student work yourself, or turn on participation auto-grading to award points when students complete the required contributions. Auto-grading checks participation, not the quality of students' ideas.

You'll find Milestones in Discussions, Social Reading, Individual Assignments, and Peer Review. This guide uses Discussions to show how setup works, then explains what differs in other activity types. The basic workflow works across learning management systems (LMSs), with a few extra notes for Canvas below.

How Do Milestones Impact Grading, especially Auto-grading?

Milestones have several impacts on grading:

• If you set up Auto-grading using the wizard, your points will automatically be divided equally between the two milestones. At the end of the wizard setup, you can choose to Configure Additional Settings if you wish to allocate points differently.
• If you set up Auto-grading using the editor, you will need to allocate points manually between the two milestones. See Milestone Setup Using the Editor.
• If you're using Auto-grading, grades will pass back to the gradebook for a particular student when the student completes all milestones or when the assignment due date passes.
• If you're operating in the Canvas LMS, student submissions will appear in the SpeedGrader for a particular student when the student completes all milestones or when the assignment due date passes.

Before You Start: Decide What Students Should Do

Think about when you'd like students to contribute, and what they should do at each point. For a weekly discussion, you might choose:

• Wednesday: Publish one original post.
• Friday: Publish two comments or replies.

Each individual due date is a Milestone. A Milestone has participation requirements and can have a Complete By date. You can set up Milestones without dates if you only want students to see a checklist of requirements.

A Milestone deadline doesn't stop students from participating early or automatically close the activity afterward. Those behaviors depend on the activity's availability and participation settings.

Set up Milestones in the Wizard

The wizard is the quickest way to create a discussion with an initial-post deadline and a later response deadline.

• Create a Discussion and go to the requirements step in the setup wizard.

• Enable Milestones, then choose how many posts and comments students should make. In the wizard's basic setup, the comments requirement can be met with either comments on posts or replies to comments.
• Choose how many days before the assignment due date students should finish their original posts. The response Milestone will fall on the assignment due date.
  • Note: Be sure you set the final due date in your LMS if your LMS allows (Blackboard, Brightspace, and Canvas). The final due date should match when the final milestone is due.
• If you'd like more or fewer milestones or would otherwise like to fine tune your milestone settings, you will have the chance to do so at the end of the setup process. During the final step, instead of choosing Publish, select Configure Additional Settings. You can then follow the instructions for Milestone Setup Using the Editor.

Set up Milestones Using the Editor

Watch the video or follow the text instructions that follow to set up your milestones using the Harmonize editor.

• Open your Discussion and select Edit beside the instructions.
• Open Milestone Due Dates for an ungraded activity, or Milestone Due Dates & Auto-Grading for a graded activity.

• Select Add Milestone if you need another checkpoint.

• Choose the date your Milestone deadlines should be based on. Due Date is the simplest choice for a typical weekly discussion. You can also base them on Available From or Available Until, or select I don't want to set Milestone Dates if you only need a checklist.

• For each Milestone, set its Complete By date (or the number of days before or after your selected date) and the number and type of contributions required.

• Review the displayed dates and total requirements. Add word minimums or participation auto-grading if desired.
• Select Publish to make your changes available to students. Saving a settings draft alone does not publish the changes.

Why base Milestones on an assignment date? Suppose students must post two days before Friday's due date. If you move the assignment due date to the following Friday, the post deadline moves with it. When the date is managed by your LMS, update it there.

We recommend keeping the last Milestone aligned with the assignment's intended deadline. If you extend a due date, also check whether the activity will remain open for students to participate.

Setting Minimum Word Counts

Want students to go beyond a quick "I agree"? You can set minimum lengths for their written contributions:

• Minimum Word Count for Posts: Applies to each original post.
• Minimum Word Count for Comments: Applies to each comment or reply, including when the two response types have separate requirements.

Leave a minimum at 0 if you don't need one.

The minimum applies to each contribution, not to the student's combined word total. Students can still publish something shorter, but it won't count toward the Milestone requirement. Words in uploaded files don't count toward the minimum for text entered in the contribution.

For more details, see Milestone Word Count Minimums.

Optional: Enable Auto-Grading for Milestones

For a graded Discussion, you can turn on Turn on Participation Auto-Grading to award points for contributions that meet the Milestone requirements.

• Turn on participation auto-grading in the Milestone settings.

• Enter the points available for each Milestone. The combined total must be greater than zero.

• Decide whether to turn on Give Credit for Late Participation:
  • On: Late contributions that meet the requirements can earn their normal participation points.
  • Off: Late contributions can still complete the requirements, but they won't earn points.

• Check the total against the point value in your LMS, then select Publish.

Students can earn partial points when they complete some, but not all, of a Milestone's requirements. A student who meets every requirement on time earns all the participation points when late credit is off. Auto-grading doesn't evaluate the quality of the work. You can review student work and adjust scores using the applicable grading workflow.

The Milestone scores combine into one assignment grade in the LMS, not a separate gradebook entry for each Milestone. Harmonize can scale the participation score to the LMS assignment's maximum points, so matching the totals makes the scoring easier to interpret.

For more examples, see Auto-Grading.

Teacher View

When milestones are setup in a discussion, teachers receive an overview of milestone progress across all of the students participating in the discussion:

• A solid green bar represents the percentage of students who have completed a milestone.
• A light green bar represents the percentage of students who have made some progress towards completing a milestone.
• A gray bar represent the percentage of students who have made no progress on a milestone.
• The total number of Posts and Comments & Replies for the entire discussion are displayed next to the milestones.

Student View

Students receive a similar view to teachers when milestones are setup on a discussion, the main difference being the overview tracks only their personal progress:

• A solid green bar shows how much progress a student has made on a milestone.
• A green checkmark appears next to milestones that have been completed.
• Counts for Posts, Comments & Replies and Responses Received show the student's contribution to the discussion and reactions from others in the discussion respectively.

If a student is late in completing one or more milestones, they will be presented with a slightly different view:

• A solid red bar shows how much of milestone progress was completed after the milestone due date.
• A red checkmark shows which milestones were completed after the milestone due date.
• A red attention icon shows which milestones are incomplete and overdue.

Milestones in Other Harmonize Activities

The same idea applies in other activities: show students what they need to contribute and, when appropriate, when they should do it. However, the available requirements and setup options differ.

Social Reading

Ask students to make annotations and respond to others' annotations. Simply opening the PDF doesn't fulfill a participation requirement. Social Reading doesn't offer the same automatic word minimums as Discussions. See Creating Graded Social Reading Activities.

Individual Assignments

Organize private submissions, journal entries, or follow-up reflections using posts and responses. Discussion-style advanced response requirements aren't available. See Create an Individual Assignment.

Peer Review

Guide students through submitting their work and then reviewing others' work. Peer Review uses a fixed two-Milestone structure, and students must meet the submission requirements before entering the review workflow. See Create a Peer Review Assignment.

Milestones for Canvas Users

Milestones have additional functionality for Canvas users. Harmonize milestones sync back to Canvas and will appear in two main places.

First, milestones will appear on the Course Calendar.

Second, milestones will appear on the student To-Do list.

Note: the final milestone will appear with an Assignment icon. Earlier milestones will have the Calendar icon.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. Do I have to use Milestones?

• No. You can create a Discussion without Milestones. They are especially useful when you want students to see clear participation requirements, contribute at different times, or earn participation points automatically.

Q. Can I use Milestones without auto-grading?

• Yes. Milestones can simply show students what they need to complete and when. Leave participation auto-grading off if you prefer to assess their work yourself.

Q. Does a Milestone deadline prevent students from posting afterward?

• No. A Milestone's Complete By date is a checkpoint, not an automatic lock. The activity's availability and participation settings control when students can contribute. If you use auto-grading, your late-credit setting determines whether a late contribution can earn participation points.

Q. Can students complete later Milestones early?

• A Milestone deadline does not itself delay participation. Students can work earlier when the activity's availability and participation settings allow it. Peer Review has its own submission prerequisite. Explain in your instructions if you want students to return on different days rather than completing everything at once.

Q. Will students receive reminders?

• Yes. By default, students receive immediate notifications when a milestone is due in one day or past due. Students can, however, turn these notifications off or adjust their frequency.

Q. Do Milestones work with groups?

• Students still have individual requirements. Group visibility determines whose work they can see and respond to; it does not make one student's contribution satisfy the whole group's participation. Check group membership and audience settings when planning response requirements.

Q. What if students contribute files or recordings?

• Check the required contribution type and any text minimum. A file or recording belongs to its surrounding post or response. Words inside attachments do not meet an editor-text minimum. If your activity invites media responses, choose text requirements that fit the task and explain how you will assess the media.

Q. How can I review an individual student's Milestone progress?

• Open the activity view and select a student. In Canvas, select Activity. In other LMSs, select Grades & Activity for a graded discussion. The individual view brings together the student's contributions and Milestone progress so you can review completed, late, and missing requirements.
• You can also review contributions in the main discussion area, but they are spread through the conversation. Selecting a student in the activity view provides a clearer individual review. See Harmonize Activity View.

Q. What should I check when reusing an activity?

• Review the dates and requirements before students begin. Confirm the date anchor, offsets, displayed completion dates, LMS due date, availability, word minimums, and point totals. When the anchor date moves, its Milestone dates move with it. Check group settings and late-credit policy for the new class as well.

Q. Do responses to classmates, instructors, or a student's own work count?

• Yes. Ordinary Discussion Milestones do not distinguish who receives the response. A qualifying public comment or reply can count whether it responds to a classmate, an instructor, or the student's own work. It must still match the required response type and meet the word minimum. Individually private responses do not count toward ordinary Discussion response requirements.
• You cannot require different recipients through Milestones. Milestones cannot require responses to different classmates, restrict credit to classmates rather than instructors or self, or require a response specifically to your prompt or instructor post. Put those expectations in your instructions and assess them when reviewing the work.

Q: Is there a limit to how many milestones I can have?

• No. The sky's the limit!

Q: I'm using Canvas. Will student submissions pass back to the SpeedGrader after each milestone?

• No. Student submissions will appear in the SpeedGrader for a particular student when the student completes all milestones or when the assignment due date passes.

Q: I set up milestones and auto-grading using the wizard. How does it know how many points to assign to each milestone?

• If you set up auto-grading and milestones using the wizard, your points will automatically be divided equally between the two milestones. At the end of the wizard setup, you can choose to Configure Additional Settings if you wish to allocate points differently.

Q. What should I do with milestones before deleting a Canvas assignment?

• If your Canvas assignment is linked to a Harmonize activity with multiple due dates (milestones), delete all milestones in Harmonize before deleting the Canvas assignment.
• Milestones appear on the Canvas course calendar and student To Do list. If you delete the Canvas assignment without first removing its milestones, those dates may remain visible to students even after the assignment has been deleted.