Progress and Pacing

The opportunity for asynchronous learning and individualized pacing offers a lot of flexibility, but also means that keeping track of your progress and pacing is crucial to success in your NSO courses.

Tracking your Progress

The first step to tracking your learning progress is knowing where to look! Your NSO Account is the best place to go to understand where you are at in your course and how you are doing. Both students and parents can use their accounts to monitor progress in NSO courses.

Log into your NSO Account

Tools for Monitoring Progress

Here are some helpful tools in your NSO Student and Guardian Accounts to use to track your progress:

Academic Snapshot
Gradebook

Academic Snapshot

View how you are doing in your course at a quick glance.

Your Academic Snapshot provides a quick overview of how you are doing in each of your courses. Here is the information you can find on your snapshot:

Last Activity: Your last activity tells you the last time you logged into the course (not the last date work was submitted).
PR: An indicator of your progress in the course.
Grade: This grade is based on all of the assignments in the course. Your grade will continue to increase the more assignments you complete. At the end of the term, this is the grade that will be used for your transcript.
Quality: A measure of how you have done on graded assignments turned in so far; This helps you track how you are doing on your assignments but is not the percent used for your final grade.
Duration: The start and end date for the course.
Progress: This is a visual indicator of how many of your assignments have been submitted and graded (on the left) compared to how many total assignments are in the course (on the right). The red shows what has been submitted and graded and the blue shows what would need to be completed by the end of the week to be on pace.

Gradebook

View all your assignments and your grades earned

Your gradebook is one of the best places to go to see the big picture of how many assignments you have in your course and what you have completed. You can click on the link on the left-hand bar to see your gradebooks.

In your gradebook you will see a list of all of your assignments for the course, how many points they are each worth, how many points you earned, the date you submitted each assignment, and the date each assignment was graded by your teacher.

Progress Indicators on the Academic Snapshot and Progress Report

In addition to accessing your progress in your NSO Student & Guardian Accounts at any time, you will also receive a weekly progress email to keep you updated. Both the Academic Snapshot and progress emails have indicators to offer a quick way to get a sense of your engagement and progress in your course. More detailed information about your assignment submission can be found under your grade book.

Here are what the progress indicators (PR) mean:

OK: You have submitted work in the past week and are on pace to complete your course by the end date
MW: You have submitted work in the past week but are falling behind in pacing
NR1: You have not submitted an assignment for one week
NR2: You have not submitted an assignment for two weeks
NR3: You have not submitted an assignment in three weeks and are at risk of being withdrawn from the course.

Making your Pacing Plan

Creating a plan for your pacing when you are first enrolled in your course not only ensures that you cover all the material in a timely manner but also allows for a deeper understanding of the content and reduces your stress as you work through the course. It also helps avoid that last-minute sprint to complete your course as your end date approaches!

Here’s how to do it:

Step 1: Log into your NSO Student Account and go to the Main Page. You can find all the information you need here. You will need to be enrolled in your course already to find the information to create your pacing plan.

Step 2: Determine your course duration using your start and end dates listed on your Academic Snapshot.

Step 3: Check the total number of assignments. If you have 45 assignments total and you haven’t completed any yet, then that is the number of assignments you will use to create your plan.

Step 4: Divide the total number of assignments you have left to complete by the weeks remaining, rounding up to the nearest whole number to find out how many assignments to complete each week. You can use this Time Date Calculator to help calculate the number of weeks.

Using your Pacing Plan

At the beginning of each week, take a moment to review how many assignments you plan to complete. As you finish each one, check them off your list. If you fall behind, you can adjust your guide using the steps above.

Staying on track is important for your learning and you are up to the task!