August 22

D2L for Students: Pulse App

Pulse App looks on a phone The basics: It keeps students on schedule.

Instructors: Use dates in D2L.

Both for Android and IOS platforms, ready for free download. It is built into the system so the students see courses they are enrolled in (that were requested by the instructor  to appear in D2L Brightspace Learning Environment).

Ease of use, student centered: Shows calendar, courses, notifications.

The app is color coded and students can filter through courses.

Notifications: updates e.g. new announcement, new content, new grade (students need to subscribe in the Learning Environment before they get notified in the app). Pulse app draws from courses but students can add their own notes.

Faculty can help by setting the dates in announcements, content, assignment folders (dropbox) and quizzes and displaying it in calendar. You go to restrictions to manage dates and whenever you specify a due (or end) date it will automatically feed into Pulse.

August 15

Technology for Teaching & Learning (T4TL) Showcase Today!

Faculty members, library staff, and our Academic Technologies Team staff will be presenting on specific educational technologies today from 1 pm until 3 pm in Voyageurs rooms in Atwood, as part of the Fall 2017 Convocation.

There will also be instructor workstations and help available.

Come and learn about Virtual Reality in the classroom, Syllabus Re-Design and Development, Open Educational Resources, Library D2L Widgets , D2L Awards Tool and Intelligent Agents, Adobe Connect and Media Space, among other topics.

We will continue to promote T4TL at other campus events in the future!

 

August 14

Intelligent Agents Tool in D2L Brightspace

A list of all tools under Course Admin i nD2L with Intelligent Agents circled

 

Intelligent Agents is a tool in D2L Brightspace that can increase instructor presence by sending pre-set, automated emails triggered by pre-set criteria.  I like to call it the Virtual Teaching Assistant as it helps with some administrative tasks, acting on your behalf.  You can see on the picture above where it is located under Course Admin. Below are the details about the tool, as well as how to set them up in D2L.

  • Automated Messaging System: Sends emails once pre-set criteria is evaluated for students.
  • Most common: log-in criteria or release conditions (e.g. no submission to a folder).
  • Notifies the course instructor about a potentially troubled student (providing additional background information, such as an unattempted quiz, a quiz grade or a task (in)completion).
  • Only the instructor sees this tool. When users are evaluated as true on the condition you have set, an email you have previously wrote is automatically sent. A personalized message with the ability to link to resources (remedial or reinforcing) leads to increased instructor presence and student satisfaction.

To set them up in D2L:

  1. Go to Course Admin, find the tool by name or in Communications category. Go to settings and Set custom values for this course (name that emails come from (your name) and put your preferred reply-to email). Save.
  2. Click on New.
  3. Name it, check it as enabled, set criteria (Course Activity log-in or Create and Attach a Release Condition (determine the Condition Type and Details from the dropdown menus)).
  4. Determine whether the Agent will act only once or set a schedule for running dates.
  5. Choose HTML as the Email Format. Copy-Paste the replace strings (To*: {InitiatingUser}; Email Subject: e.g. Reminder for {OrgUnitName}; start the email with, for example: Hello, {InitiatingUserFirstName}). Save and Close. Do a Practice Run, if you wish, to see identified users.

August 8

Short and Reusable Recordings

Our colleagues from the U of M presented at the Minnesota E-Learning Summit on using videos in your courses. The handout below summarizes their main points about creating engaging, relevant, sustainable videos. One interesting point they made is that students will rather watch several videos that make up 20 minutes total, than just one 20 minute long video. I guess the “binge watching” culture prevails. 🙂 The Reusable Relevant Recording Creating Engaging and Evergreen Course Content handout: granualr, modular, reusable, quality, aligned, engaging, short (video), sustainable

August 4

MN eLearning Summit Resources

Image credit: https://cceevents.umn.edu/minnesota-elearning-summit

 

After an excellent gathering at Normandale college, many presenters have shared their handouts or presentations (new tab).

One of my personal favorites was the presentation on accessibility or specifically how to accessify your digital instructional materials (opens in new tab) , by Sara Shoen and Ann Fandrey from the U of M. In addition to their presentation they also provide a handout with core skills to be addressed on the path to accessible documents, presentations, emails, website, and videos.