August 16

ATT Sessions at Fall 2016 Convocation

August 17 – 19, 2016  is the Saint Cloud State University Fall Convocation, sponsored by Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL). Many sessions will be held on topics ranging from describing our students, to Our Husky Compact, university policies, digital badges, and media.  You can view the Full Schedule here. Our Academic Technologies Team will be holding two sessions described below:

Wednesday , August 17, 2:10 – 3:10 Concurrent Sessions B-1, Atwood Memorial Center, Glacier North

From D2L Gradebook Tool to ISRS

Faculty can use the D2L Brightspace Gradebook to upload their final class grades to the E- services website (ISRS) quickly and efficiently, thereby saving an estimated 15 hours per semester. SCSU’s Academic Technologies Team -D2L Administrators and Instructional Designers – will demonstrate how the Gradebook integrates with E -services. Following the session, instructors can arrange an individual session with one of them for further training and support.

Friday, August 19, 8:45 – 10:00 Concurrent Sessions D-1,Centennial Hall 455

Kaltura MediaSpace: Media creation and sharing tool for faculty

MediaSpace™ by Kaltura, available to all SCSU Faculty, allows users to record audio, video, or capture anything on their computer screen. The recording can be then streamed and shared in a D2L Brightspace course shell or via email. In this session, participants will learn how to make the best use of this tool in their work. In addition, they will be able to arrange an individual training/support session with one of the SCSU Academic Technologies Team’s MediaSpace™ trainers.
St. C_Logo-Group
Category: Online Teaching Pedagogy, Professional Development | 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 3

Minnesota eLearning Summit 2016 Presentation Materials

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

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

Just like last summer, the MN elearning Summit organizers encouraged the presenters to share their presentations with the broader audience. Here, you will find the various 2016 sessions materials.

Some of our favorites:

Category: Open Educational Resources, Professional Development | LEAVE A COMMENT
August 2

Managing Online Learning: Free Online Courses

IMG_2802FutureLearn and The Open University with partnerships from universities across continents offer a selection of free online courses (with possibilities of gaining certificates too). Here are the five courses listed that can help you understand online learning better – you can recommend it to your students or take a look yourself if interested. Click on each link below to learn more/enroll in the course.

Get Started with Online Learning: This free online course will explain how you can study online without putting the rest of your life on hold.

Learning Online: Learning and Collaborating:Become an effective online learner and develop your online communication skills when working with others.

Learning Online: Managing Your Identity: Reflect on how you want to present yourself online and take positive steps towards these goals.

Learning Online: Reflecting and Sharing: Get the most out of online learning by reflecting and sharing your learning with others.

Learning Online: Searching and Researching: Improve your online research skills and your ability to critically analyze sources of information.

Category: How Does It Work?, Online and Distance Education, Open Educational Resources | LEAVE A COMMENT
August 1

Brightspace Binder

This week, a new feature appeared for our students in D2L Brightspace. It is a learning tool called Binder, and it unifies essential functions today’s students need: it places all course materials in one place, they can reach them from any device (lap top, tablet, phone) online and offline, they can highlight the documents and study directly from the app.

Here is a brief overview:

  • For our SCSU students, it appears directly on the course content page (there is a button “Send to Binder”)
  • It is a one step process to create a Binder account and it is linked to their D2L Brightspace
  • It allows for 2 GB of space
  • It supports a variety of document types
  • They can sort and filter documents
  • They can create annotations and mark up the documents

D2L Binder2

D2L Binder

 

 

 

 

Category: D2L Tip of the Month, How Does It Work?, Open Educational Resources, Product Watch, Spotlight on Ed Tech | 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
June 15

Educause: 7 Things You Should Know About…™

EDUCAUSE 7 Things You Should Know About …™ is a series of publications that provides concise information about diverse range of professional challenges in higher education IT, from updates on current developments to explorations of important overarching issues. Use these quick reads to get essential information on emerging technologies and related practices, including potential implications and opportunities. Each two-page brief focuses on a single technology or practice and how it relates to higher education.

Here are the seven questions they answer in each publication:

  1. What is it?
  2. How does it work?
  3. Who’s doing it?
  4. Why is it significant?
  5. What are the downsides?
  6. Where is it going?
  7. What are the implications for higher education?

Among the most interesting topics, which you can skim through in less then a minute yet learn a lot, are: Remote Proctoring, One-Button Studio, Institutional Self-Assessment, Universal Design, Games and Learning, Open Educational Resources, E-Books, Podcasting, and many more.

They group the topics into two themes: Campus-Wide IT and Learning Technology Topics (click on each to access the list of publications).

Category: How Does It Work?, Online Teaching Pedagogy | LEAVE A COMMENT
June 8

Open Course: Designing and Teaching for Impact in Online Courses

Indiana University is offering a self-paced open and free for all course through Canvas network on DESIGNING AND TEACHING FOR IMPACT IN ONLINE COURSES.

The course started June 6th, but you can enroll anytime. It takes about 2 hours of work per week and you can receive a badge for completion. The course offers help with design and with online teaching. ” It explores the backward design process beginning with learning outcomes, followed by assessments, activities, and content. It also includes topics such as online presence, course structure, usability, visual design, accessibility, multimedia, syllabi, and course management. It is a non-facilitated course where participants can work through the modules at their own pace based on their own needs and interests.”

Course map Canvas credit to Indiana Univeristy Designign and Teaching for Impact in Online CoursesWe would definitely recommend it to those who are interested in the topics mentioned above, and for faculty concerned about offering a quality course online that would support student success.

Category: Course Design, Online Teaching Pedagogy, Open Educational Resources, Professional Development | LEAVE A COMMENT