Creating and Managing Assignments

What are Assignments?

An “Assignment” is a list of tasks you can give your students to complete using their virtual portfolio. 

Each Assignment has its own start dates and due dates – you can have one long assignment lasting the entire trading session, or give students smaller assignments week by week.

Types of Tasks

There are three types of tasks that you can assign:

• Watching tutorial videos demonstrating how to use the StockTrak.com website and research tools
• Reading educational articles about investing, personal finance, and career development
• Making certain types of trades 

Tutorial Videos

There are over a dozen tutorial videos available on the StockTrak Video Center. These include:

• Site Navigation – walkthrough of the website for students, including all of the different portfolio pages and how they work
• Security Type Tutorials – walkthrough for each security type, showing how they are traded and what makes them unique compared to other securities
• Order Type Tutorials – walkthroughs for limit, stop, and trailing stop orders, along with how to best utilize different order terms
• Research Tutorial – walkthrough of using the integrated StockTrak research tools

Including a Tutorial Video in your assignment will require your student to watch that video to get credit. Including an assignment with tutorial videos can greatly speed up how quickly students get familiarized with their portfolios.

Reading Articles

The StockTrak Learning Library has hundreds of articles about investing, personal finance, and career development. You can assign these articles as Required Reading for your class as part of an assignment.

If you assign an article, students will need to read the article and answer a short quiz at the end to get credit.

You can also configure how we store the grades for these quizzes – either recording the result of each student’s first attempt in a permanent “Grade Book”, or letting students re-try the quiz to get a perfect score.

Making Trades

Finally, you can also require your students to make certain types of trades in their StockTrak portfolio. This can be something basic, like placing 10 total trades, or more specific, like using 3 Trailing Stop orders or trading 3 stocks from the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Getting Started With Assignments

Once you have created your class, return to your Professor Dashboard. From here, click “Manage Assignments” on the right side of the page, or “Create/View Assignments” under “Admin” in the main menu.

This will open the Assignments Administration page. Next, click “Create New Assignment”.

Choosing Tasks

To create your assignment, first give it a name, and choose the start dates/due dates. Based on Professor feedback, what works best is creating several smaller assignments lasting about 2 weeks each – this helps ensure your students are regularly checking in on their portfolio.

Now you can pick the tasks you want your students to complete as part of this assignment. 

We recommend that every class include the first 10 items (the group called “Investing Fundamentals”) as their first assignment. This is a selection of articles covering basic glossary terms your students will need to know, along with three tutorial videos walking students through the different resources available, and walking through placing their first stock trade.

To include an item in your assignment, check the box at the left of the item:

There are over 150 assignments to choose from – the assignments available will differ depending on your class type.

All classes will have:

1. “Investing Fundamentals” – the ten activities we recommend for every class
2. “Intermediate Investing Tips” – items we recommend for the second assignment, covering mutual funds, ETFs, Bonds, and basic research
3. “Career Development” – discussing resume building, certifications in the finance industry, and help getting internships
4. “Basic Trading” – requiring students to make certain buy/sell orders)
5. “Order Types” – (requiring students to use different limit and stop orders)

If you are using StockTrak as part of a Personal Finance class, you will have an additional 60 articles and activities covering Personal Finance topics like budgeting, insurance, credit, and debt.

If you are using StockTrak as part of an Investments, Portfolio Management, or Derivatives class, you will have additional articles, videos, and trading tasks focusing on options and derivatives trading

If your school has a site license to StockTrak, you will have both the Personal Finance and Derivatives tasks available, plus our 10-chapter Investing 101 Beginner’s Investing Course. This is a self-contained investing e-book of 100 investing topics designed for novice students taking part in department-wide or campus-wide investing challenges.

Once you have selected all of the items you want to include in this assignment, click “Create” towards the top of the page.

You can then create additional assignments for this class, or view the Report Card.

Assignment Report Card

Once you have created your class assignment, you can return to the “Manage Assignments” page to view the Report Card:

The report card will list all of the students in your class, along with their current progress towards each assignment. You can click the “Details” button to see their progress for each individual assignment button.

If you have graded quizzes, you can also click the “Grade Book” tab to see your student’s saved grades for each quiz.

For Students – Finding Assignments

Once you have created an assignment, a progress bar will appear on your students’ dashboards:

They can see the individual tasks that you assigned by clicking on “Assignments” under “Dashboard” on their main menu: