October 24

The Write Place Resources

The Write Place at St. Cloud State has updated their resources website. Now it is easily found and easy to navigate.

I would recommend including the link to the Resources page on your D2L course website. Having your own “Helpful Resources” module in a D2L Brigthspace course or including helpful links in your “Start Here/Welcome/Course Information” module provides everything in one place for your students, which gives them more course time and reduces the number of questions/emails you would get as an instructor.

write-place-scsu

And don’t forget our Library Widgets!

Category: Course Design, D2L Tip of the Month, Online Teaching Pedagogy, Quality Matters | LEAVE A COMMENT
October 12

Free Open Online Course: Designing Digital Media for Teaching & Learning

This four week long open course (digitalmediaeducation.org – Join here) offers different paths of engagement with digital media. You will be using free tools to create, implement, and assess digital media for teaching and learning.

The course started this Monday, October 10, and will be running until November 6. It requires about 2-3 hours of work per week. There is also a possibility of getting a certificate from ISTE Teacher Education Network. The course is designed by faculty and graduate students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Education. They also lead a Google+ Learning Community (for which a gmail account is needed).

The course is very easy to navigate and has set learning objectives and the schedule. If you were wondering how to engage digital media in your course, this can be a great start!photo-credit-to-designing-digital-media-course-website-welcome-page-screenshot

 

Category: Course Design, Online Teaching Pedagogy, Open Educational Resources, Professional Development, Spotlight on Ed Tech | LEAVE A COMMENT
September 22

D2L Brightspace eLearning Webinars

Mark your calendars! Every Tuesday, starting next week, D2L Brighspace experts and users will share their stories on various topics, ranging from accessibility, to gamifying your course, to Quality Matters.

Below is the list of upcoming webinars (click here to register):

  • Sep 27, 3:00 PM ET : York Technical College and Accessibility: The How and the Why of It
  • Oct 4, 3:00 PM ET : Jazzing Up Online Assessments
  • Oct 11, 3:00 PM ET : Maximizing Brightspace Tools to Create a Gamified Online Learning Environment
  • Oct 18, 3:00 PM ET : What’s Your Story(line)? Developing Engaging Learning Experiences by Extending the Content Tool
  • Oct 25, 1:00 PM ET : Setting The Tone In A Brightspace Course With QM Standard One

 

However, you can always explore past webinars as well, since there is pool of recorded webinars on D2L Brighspace Resources page.
d2l-resource-library
Category: Accessibility in Online Learning, D2L Tip of the Month, Open Educational Resources, Quality Matters | LEAVE A COMMENT
August 9

SIG Webinar Handouts & Presentations

SIG Learning Spaces and Instructional TechnologyD2L Brightspace: Free “Getting Started” webinars, presented to you by SIG members, offer a variety of topics. Click here to register for upcoming SIG webinars! Some of the upcoming events are listed below:

 

  • Introduction and Overview of D2L Brightspace – August 15, August 17, August 18
  • Organize Your Content – August 23, August 25
  • Using Respondus Quiz Tool – August 11, August 30
  • D2L Brightspace Quiz Tool – August 10, August 12,
  • Announcements (formerly News), Classlist and Email – August 23, August 24
  • D2L Brightspace Discussion Board Tool– August 22, August 25
  • Points Based/ Weighted Gradebook – August 25, August 30
  • D2L Brightspace Assignments Tool (formerly Dropbox) – August 11, August 30
  • Groups in D2L Brightspace – August 30, August 31
  • D2L Brightspace Rubric Tool – August 23
  • Creating a Community: Using Brightspace to Welcome Students – August 31

 

In case you cannot attend one of the webinars offered at those dates, here is a folder with resources and handouts from the presentations.

Category: Course Design, Online and Distance Education, Online Teaching Pedagogy, Open Educational Resources, Professional Development | LEAVE A COMMENT
August 9

5 WAYS TO SAVE TIME WITH RESPONDUS 4.0

Respondus 4.0 News can be found here.

Instructors use Respondus 4.0 because it saves them time preparing online tests. Lots of time. Here are just five ways Respondus 4.0 accomplishes that.

1. Import Wizard
The feature with the greatest time-saving potential is the Import Wizard. Questions for an entire exam can be imported with Respondus 4.0 in minutes. For example, an exam already in MS Word format can be imported with images, equations, tables, and most types of formatting. This article explains how it works: Importing Questions from MS Word with Respondus 4

2. Respondus Test Bank Network
Publisher test banks typically include thousands of questions for a textbook, but using the questions to create online exams can be cumbersome — unless you use Respondus 4.0. Over 25 of the leading textbook publishers in higher education make their test banks available from the Respondus Test Bank Network. These ready-to-use questions make creating an online exam a breeze with Respondus 4.0. Learn more by watching this video: Using Publisher Test Banks with Respondus 4.0

3. Publish Wizard
The Publish Wizard is part of the “magic” of Respondus 4.0. Once an exam is created, it takes less than a minute to publish an assessment to one or more courses in a Learning Management System. When an institution has a campus-wide license, administrators can input “preconfigured server settings” so instructors only have to enter their user name and password for the LMS. This video shows how it can be set up: Using Preconfigured Server Settings

4. Moving Exams Between Learning Systems
Respondus 4.0 makes it easy to move exams from one learning system to another. This is useful when more than one LMS is used at an institution, or when an instructor moves to an institution using a different learning system.  Simply “retrieve” the original exam using Respondus 4.0 and then “publish” it to the new system. The entire process takes just a few minutes, as shown in this video: Moving Assessments Between Two Learning Systems

5. Working Offline
Sure, you usually have access to an Internet connection. But when you don’t, it’s nice to be able to get work done with Respondus 4.0 because most tasks can be done offline. The client-based interface for Respondus 4.0 is also faster than web-based applications because you don’t have to wait for web pages to load.

A few minutes here, a few hours there … it all adds up to tremendous time savings with Respondus 4.0. You won’t find a faster way to create online test.

(This post taken from Respondus.com Blog.)

Category: Course Design, How Does It Work?, Product Watch | LEAVE A COMMENT
July 29

How to Design Standards-Based Online Courses

David Raths wrote for Campus Technology about two universities that use Quality Matters rubric and how it helped specific faculty members benefit from it.

Bethany Simunich, director of online pedagogy and research at Kent State Online (OH) shares about her institution using QM: “…there are key benefits to designing a whole course upfront. In a face-to-face course, designing and teaching are more merged. You can make more changes on the fly. “With online teaching you have to design it all out ahead of time, and that is the thing that QM helps with so much,” she said. It helps faculty think through not just the pedagogical design, but also about things specific to the online classroom — creating a good course structure and good navigation; inserting the teaching presence into the course; and having students create their own social presence. “I need to purposefully think about all those things before my course begins,” Simunich added. “The QM rubric goes through all of that to make sure I have all the facets of my course. When I design an online course, I think about the entire design before the course begins. When it starts, I concentrate on teaching.”

Read the full article here.

Category: Course Design, Online Teaching Pedagogy, Quality Matters | LEAVE A COMMENT
July 12

The Chronicle Vitae: There’s No Such Thing as Asynchronous Teaching

The Chronicle of Higher Education Vitae Columnist Nicole Matos published an insightful and interesting post on teacher presence (presence, timeliness, and responsiveness) in online courses. You can view the full post, but here I will list her main suggestions:

  • Online teaching should be “just-in-time” teaching. Instructors need to be every bit as mindful of timeliness and urgency in an online course as they are in a face-to-face classroom, and maybe even more so. In a traditional classroom, you wouldn’t normally answer a student’s question with, “I’ll get back to you on that in a few days,” or worse, with a sort of blank, unreadable stare (“Did the professor hear me? Do I even exist?”). But that is the impression created when you fail to respond to emails in a timely manner or leave essays sitting unattended in an online folder. Does that mean online instructors need to be on call 24-7? No. It is perfectly acceptable to maintain business hours, or to set your own quirky hours, so long as you communicate those time limits to your students.

  • Remember to both look forward and gesture back. Because different course materials are often sequestered in different folders or on different screens, it is important for online instructors to consciously build bridges between past, present, and future information. To that end:

  1. I frequently provide quick-and-dirty summaries of past topics, both for reinforcement and review: “Discussion so far looks great! We have been talking about such things as why literature is more like biology than you would think, about the Rhetorical Triangle, and about the differences between literary, pragmatic, and pleasure reading.”
  2. Then I might connect that content to new material: “Both the broad question of how you ‘dissect’ a literary text and the interactions of the Rhetorical Triangle lead directly into our reading for Thursday, where we will consider different modes of literary criticism.”
  3. Finally, I might suggest ways to integrate old and new content: “Does it make sense to attempt to map the different schools of literary criticism against the Rhetorical Triangle? That’s an experiment I’ll urge you to try in our next discussion.”
  • Standardize your course schedule. With students checking in at various points, it is up to the teacher to create some moments of unified class time. In online courses, students are generally free to take advantage of looser scheduling, completing assignments on Monday and Wednesday one week, and on Tuesday and Thursday another week. But I strongly recommend that you not take the same liberties in structuring your due dates or grading. I have seen online courses in which due dates were rotated on three-day, four-day, and five-day cycles, to the confusion of all.Instead, I standardize my due dates — discussion posts are due on Tuesdays and Thursdays, all other projects on Fridays by noon, for example… I am as explicit as possible about when exactly I’ll be doing my grading: “I expect to be grading these assignments on Sunday afternoon, so look for my responses then.” If I have to vary my schedule, I announce the change: “I’m a little behind, but will be completing this round of grading on Monday between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m.” Such small courtesies matter an extraordinary amount to online students.
Category: Course Design, Online Teaching Pedagogy | LEAVE A COMMENT