Blackboard update and more!

Dear Colleagues,

It's finals week. Yeah! Almost done. Reminder: grades are due in UAOnline on Wednesday, December 20.  I'll be out on sick leave for shoulder surgery starting December 15 and may or may not answer your emails – I am not sure how I'll feel.

Blackboard Learn update on December 22

There is a planned update of Blackboard Learn scheduled on December 22.  There are not big changes in Blackboard itself – mostly bug fixes.  However, some of the add-ons are changing.  Blackboard will be unavailable from 5 am to 3 pm on Friday December 22. 

Online grading in Blackboard is changing

I have loved the online assignment grading option in Blackboard and shared it with many faculty.  It's called Crocodoc and it has been replaced by Box.  There is a tradeoff: less functionality in the annotations on the document (bad), but more file types are now viewable online (good).  There's a bit more to it than that, but you get the idea.

Two versions of Blackboard Collaborate this spring

Blackboard's new version of Collaborate, Collaborate Ultra, will be available in the updated version of Blackboard Learn, along with our current version. They are very different.  I plan to use Ultra in the Tech 490 class. 

Here are some Collaborate Ultra resources:

• Start Here with  the Basics!
• Help for Moderators
• Help for Participants 

End of semester reflection

It's always good at the end of the semester to make a few notes to yourself about how your classes went.  Note what worked really well and what you might want to revise next time. 

Learn to teach online

I will be teaching Tech 490 The Design and Delivery of Online Classes this spring.  Register in UAOnline and use your tuition waiver.

 

Best wishes for the holidays,

Lee

CTC Ed Tech News November 27, 2017

Dear Colleagues,

The semester is winding down… Here are a few tidbits for you:

Tech A490- The Design and Delivery of Online Classes

Are you getting ready to teach online for the first time?

Do you want to improve your online course?  

Do you want to utilize more online resources in your face-to-face class?

Do you want to streamline course management via online tools?

If you answer, "yes," to any of these questions, check out Designing and Teaching an Online Course - 36821- TECH A490 - 202 in UAOnline. Community and Technical College is offering this 3-credit, 400-level course on designing, developing, and delivering an online course.  The course will, of course, be taught online - with Collaborate meetings every other Monday night.

Coursework will be geared toward learning and applying good online instructional practices. Participants will use a variety of tools in Blackboard and will revise or develop several modules for their course.

The course will run spring semester from January 16 - May 5.

All participants must have a course to work on.  You can obtain a Blackboard dev shell for your course if necessary.

Register for Tech 490 in UAOnline and use your tuition waiver – pay only the university fees.

CTC Instructional Designer Lee Henrikson developed the course for UAA CTC faculty (including adjunct faculty), however all UA faculty are welcome.  The course will be co-taught by Lee Henrikson from CTC and Debbi Canavan from Kodiak College

Course Description

Provides practical and theoretical advice and support for the design, development, and delivery of an accessible online course. Models current best practices, facilitates online peer sharing, and demonstrates tools and strategies available in Blackboard. All required work relates to an online course that the class member is developing or revising.   

Blackboard inline grading changing in January

There is a planned upgrade of Blackboard scheduled on December 22.  The biggest change will be the inline grading.  Blackboard currently implements inline grading through "Crocodoc" which will no longer be available as of January 15, 2018. "New Box View" will replace Crocodoc with the upgrade on December 22. The good news is that it supports many more file types.  I can say more about the pros and cons of the new software after I have a chance to play with it - New Box View should be on our testing server any day now. 

IDEA Surveys

IDEA surveys opened to students today in courses with more than 10 students. Students access the survey through the Course Evaluation link in the Blackboard course menu.

Please remind your students about the importance of completing the IDEA surveys to increase your response rates.  Here are more information and additional resources for using IDEA.

Why students procrastinate  

This article on procrastination is worth the read.  Let me whet your appetite with this quote (bold in the original):

[N]ot surprising, students procrastinated less when they thought the assignment was interesting. Think authentic assignments—ones that give students a chance to do work like that done in the discipline. Assignments that involved using a variety of skills also made students procrastinate less as did clearly understanding the assignment requirements. Incentives get students to start working as does having assignments connected to each other, or broken into units, so that the second part cannot be completed until the first part is done. And norms are influential. If everyone else is at work on the assignment, that engenders enough guilt to get others started.

Best regards,

Lee

Lee Maria Henrikson
Instructional Designer
907-786-4903
http://ak-lee.blogspot.com
UAA Community and Technical College
Building Alaska's Workforce

CTC Ed Tech News, Nov. 3, 2017: Distance Ed Week

Colleagues, 

It's Distance Ed Week November 6-10! Check out Academic Innovations & eLearning's National Distance Learning Week webpage.  It is full of learning opportunities. NDLW is November 6 - 10, 2017.

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Give yourself a FREE professional development boost!  Let your mind wander into other creative areas for a health break from the classroom demands.  Check out some of these offerings and schedule one or more as a "recharge" break for yourself.  Free PD doesn't come around very often!    Take advantage! 

Thank you,

Lee

Lee Maria Henrikson

Instructional Designer

907-786-4903

http://ak-lee.blogspot.com

UAA Community and Technical College

Building Alaska's Workforce

CTC Ed Tech News Oct. 24, 2017

Dear Colleagues,

It's just past the mid-semester point.  We are all settled in to the fall routine. Here are some things to do and think about.

Entering Grades in Blackboard Learn

It is important that you enter grades for every student for an assignment.  If a student deserves a 0 because the assignment wasn't submitted, enter the 0. Don't wait until the end of the semester to enter the grade.

Here's why: By default, the Blackboard Learn Grade Center is set up to show a running total. That is, it shows what the grade would be for all the assignments that have been graded. 

So, if there are 4 assignments due (and you are using points), and the student only submitted 3 assignments and received 100 points on each of them, the running total for those 3 is an A, 300 pts/300 pts.  If no grade is entered for the missing assignment, that's what they see. However, if 0 points are entered for the missing assignment, then the running total is 300 pts/400 pts or 75%, a C.  That's a wake-up call. 

Bottom line: when you grade, enter a grade for every assignment, even if it's a zero.  It gives the students a realistic picture of their progress.

Professional Learning Opportunities

Blackboard Innovative Teaching Series (BITS) webinars

October 26 at 3:00pm EDT 
"7 strategies for a student-centered course"
Do you want to create an engaging course that allows students to construct knowledge through participating, interacting, and sharing? Join Dr. Rene Martinez of Regent University (VA) for seven strategies on how to make your course student-centered in order to successfully engage your students. 

November 9 at 1:00pm EDT 
"Using humor to engage students online"
Want to learn how to effectively incorporate appropriate humor into online courses to enhance the learning journey? Then this webinar is for you! Join Lisa Panagopoulos of University of Massachusetts Lowell for tips and strategies.

There are also recorded webinars available  on the registration site.

Quality Matter Improving Your Online Course (IYOC)

November 10 – December 1, 2017

This workshop explores the Quality Matters (QM) Rubric and provides a framework to improve online and blended courses. Participants use the QM Rubric to review their own online or blended courses and develop a course improvement plan. Participants must have a developed online or blended course to work on. The IYOC workshop runs asynchronously in QM's Moodle LMS. Register by November 7th to secure your seat. Limited to 20 participants. For more information, please contact Debbi Canavan.

Tech A490 in spring

I will be teaching Tech 490 Designing and Teaching an Online Course this spring.  It will be in UAOnline soon and available for tuition waiver. Here's the course description:

Provides practical and theoretical advice and support for the design and development of an online course. It models current best practices, facilitates sharing online, demonstrates a variety of tools and strategies available in the Blackboard environment, and provides direct instruction about online teaching and learning. All required work relates to an online course that the class member is developing or revising.   

There will be eight synchronous online class meetings on Monday nights during the semester.  Debbi Canavan will be co-teaching with me.

Encourage you students!

This study from the UK found that sending weekly encouraging texts to students lead to lower dropout rates.  The findings don't surprise me.  It reminds me of the work of Nel Noddings on caring in education.  Most instructors do care, but it's important that the caring show up in relationships.  It really helps.

"I do not mean to suggest that the establishment of caring relations will accomplish everything that must be done in education, but these relations provide the foundation for successful pedagogical activity." Nel Noddings

I regularly ask the faculty I work with to post announcements and to reach out to students who haven't logged in to Blackboard for a while.  Human beings are relational animals.  Connections and a sense of caring matter. 

Thank you,

Lee

Lee Maria Henrikson

Instructional Designer

907-786-4903

http://ak-lee.blogspot.com

UAA Community and Technical College

Building Alaska's Workforce