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