CTC Ed Tech News September 18, 2014

Thoughts for the week

Atomic Learning

Here's a tutorial from Academic Innovations and eLearning on adding Atomic Learning modules to Blackboard.  Just remember, if you want to view the modules, login to Blackboard in a different browser with your student account.

Student Evaluations

You don't have to wait until the end of the semester to collect feedback from your students.  Robert Talbert shares his strategies, approaches, and reasons for collecting more frequent feedback from students.  His questions are simple and he explains to the students what he's doing or not doing based on the feedback. Student feedback is a great source of information on how to improve teaching. 

Passwords- Again

The recent hacking of Gmail accounts shows the importance of having strong, unique passwords.  This article from Computer World explains it all very well.  So, for you readers, this means that your UAA password has to be unique. If you use your UAA email address to create an account on, say, Dropbox, use a new password.  Do not use your UAA password on any other system anywhere. Period. I use Keeper to keep track of my passwords. LastPass has also been recommended to me as a way to keep track of passwords.  Yes, I wrote about this last spring. I'll probably write about it again. 

Design for eLearning

This blog post summarizes the research by Clark and Mayer on how to make eLearning more effective. It gives 10 guidelines on design that help maximize learning. I admit, I have Clark and Mayer's book E-learning and the Science of Instruction by my computer.

CTC Ed Tech News April 16, 2014

Details, details

The final exam schedule is up. You can check the time and room assignment for your final exam. Remember, the final exam time is not optional. The time allotted to your final is required to meet the contact hours for your class.

Summer and fall course shells are now available. If you don't see a Blackboard shell for a course that you expect to teach, verify with your department administrative assistant that the course is assigned to you. She or he will need to go into Banner to add you to the course. The course will show up in your list the day after you are added in Banner.

More "best practices"

I like this list of 10 Best Practices for Online Learning. Actually, many of the practices are good for traditional classes as well.

There be dragons out there, really mean dragons

It's a really dangerous world out there on the 'Net. Maybe you've heard about the Heartbleed bug in secure (oops!) web servers. It allows stealing of information that is supposed to be protected and secure - like passwords - but doesn't leave any evidence of the theft. So you don't know if the passwords were stolen. The UAA servers were not affected, but Dropbox and Facebook, along with many other sites, were affected. So, if you get a notice to change your password on a site, do so.

Here's my particular rant: Do not, I repeat, do not, use your UA password for any other login on any other site. If this password is stolen, your access to UAOnline is compromised. That's where we enter grades for students, that's where our pay information is. The UA password should be unique and only used for UA systems. Period. If you have used that password anywhere else, I beg you, go to the Me site and reset your password right now.

If you want more information on Heartbleed:

Prof Hacker Article on Heartbleed

CNET FAQ on Heartbleed

LastPass Heartbleed checker -paste a web address in to see if it's been compromised.

I am changing lots of passwords this week. I do use unique passwords for important sites like my bank, credit card, and UAA. I have a password manager, Keeper, that I can access on the web that keeps track of my passwords. Two IT professionals I talked to today (one of them is our own Bill Atktins) really like LastPass.