Tag: Faculty Development

Helpful Habits for a New Semester!

The beginning of the semester is always a good time to try something new to make teaching more effective and more efficient. We’d like to start the spring semester with both a pedagogical tip and a practical tip that hopefully will make your courses more successful and less time-consuming to manage.

Pedagogical Tip: Be consistent in both the structure and formatting of elements in your course site. For example, compare these two screenshots of my announcements page with each other:

consistency blog post

While it’s true that the second picture looks a little boring, compared with the variety in colors, titles, and fonts in the first picture, students will find it easier to develop the habit of attending to weekly announcements and to absorb the information they contain when the structure and the formatting are consistent.

Another reason to keep formatting consistent and low-key is to make text more accessible to screen readers, i.e. text-to-speech programs used by the visually impaired. Screen readers can get tripped up by inconsistent formatting or text with lots of different types of emphasis. So pick a font that you like and stick to it, and pick either bold, underline, or italics for emphasis, and stick to that. It will make things easier for both you and your students!

See our Accessibility Resources Site for more information on accessible course sites and materials.

Practical Tip: Keeping your Dev sites up to date. As you all know, the process of getting online courses up and running at the beginning of the semester can be a bit hectic (or even very hectic). A great way of making your own life easier is to keep your Dev site updated with all the changes you make to your course during the semester (the ones you want to keep, of course). You have a couple options for how to go about this:

  1. Always make changes to the Dev site immediately after making them in your live course
  2. change_log_doc1Keep a log of changes as you make them in the live course site in a document or spreadsheet. You can even keep this document in your course (just don’t make it available to users). Then, at the end of the semester when things are not so hectic, take an hour or two to sit down and add all the changes you want to keep in your Dev site.

Why is this so useful? Once you’ve updated your Dev site, your course is ready to copy. All you have to do at the beginning of the next semester is adjust all the due dates and availability dates for time-sensitive items in the course. This makes for a relaxing break!

Have a great spring semester,
Sarah & Antonia

Happy New Year! And: Getting updates through “Subscribe” for Blackboard discussions

All of us at OFDIT wish you a happy new year and hope you have had enjoyable holidays. May 2016 be a successful teaching year for all of you.

Starting last year, SPS is now also offering a 3-week winter session. When teaching an intensive course over such a short time, it can be especially challenging to keep up with new Discussion Board posts in your Blackboard course site. One solution for both you and your students is to use the Subscribe option offered for individual discussion forums. By enabling this feature — and subscribing to either entire forums or particular threads — you will receive an email every time someone in your course posts a new entry.

Aside from using this feature in an intensive course, where being responsive to students’ questions is even more time-sensitive than usual, it can also be helpful to enable subscriptions for forums such as “Q&A” or “Ask Your Instructor” in any of your spring or fall course sites.

Here is how to make subscription an option for yourself and your students:

1) On your course site, go to the discussion board.

DB dropdown menu2) Hover over the title of the discussion forum you’d like to enable Subscribe, click the downward arrow and select “Edit” from the menu.

3) On the next page, scroll down to “Subscribe” options.

DB allow subscriptions4) Here you can allow subscriptions to either the entire forum (recommended for Q&A forums, for example), or to specific threads within the forum. You can also choose to either include the body of the post in the email, or simply a link to that post.

DB subscribe5) Back on the Forum page you will now see the option to Subscribe on the banner above the list of threads. Make sure to click it to receive email notifications, and to let your students know about this option as well.

6) If you ever want to stop receiving these emails, simply click Unsubscribe.

Please note, after receiving an email reminder you will still need to log into Blackboard to leave a post or reply.

We have also created a new quick guide with more detailed step-by-step instructions for your reference.

Please feel free to contact us with any questions about this, or any other Blackboard features: Sarah Kresh and Antonia Levy

 

Troubleshooting Final Grades Calculation Brings Vacation Closer

happynewyearThe end of December signals the approach of the New Year. OFDIT hopes to help instructors manage their workload and bring those celebrations even closer with the publication of new Quick Guides explaining how to easily tabulate students’ final grades using either Total Column or the Weighted Total Columns.

Both guides outline which settings to check to guarantee that your students’ grades are accurate and easy to report.  Generally speaking, final grades correspond to the percentage of points students have earned relative to the number of point possible. In Blackboard, there are two ways you can calculate final grades: either by using Total Points and by setting up a  Weighted Total.

A Total Column calculates final grades by simply adding up all of the points a student has earned and dividing it by the total number of points possible in your course. In other words, the weighting of assignments is done by assigning a different number of points possible per assignment. For example, a paper worth 100 points counts more toward a student’s final grade than a quiz worth 10 points.

In contrast, a final grade calculated using the Weighted Total is based on the respective percentages you assign to various columns and categories of assignments. When setting up the Weighted Total column, you’ll determine the weight of either a column (i.e. a single assignment, such as the Final Paper), or a category (i.e. a group of assignments, such as discussions or quizzes). A Weighted Total is calculated independently of the actual points an assignment is worth. For example, in a scheme where essays are weighted to comprise 25% of the final grade and quizzes 10%, a paper worth 10 points and a quiz worth 10 points would have different values (weights) for the final grade. The Weighted Total quick guide walks instructors through the process of making sure their calculation is properly arranged to compute accurate grades.

Whichever method you use to calculate your grades, OFDIT can help. We are offering targeted training on this precise issue via our Brown Bag Bytes lunchtime workshop series. To register for these or other trainings please sign up here, or fill out our form for one-on-one training.

Happy New Year and Happy Grading!

Dominique & Antonia

Invitation to “Accessibility as Good Pedagogy: Universal Design for Inclusive Learning”

Come out and join the Office of Faculty Development and Instructional Technology in celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). We honor this milestone with a webinar on how to make teaching and learning accessible to students with diverse educational needs.wordcloud accessibility

Accessibility as Good Pedagogy: Universal Design for Inclusive Learning
Wednesday, 12/2/2015 from 12:30 – 1:30 PM ET

Please register here even if you cannot attend the live webinar. A recording will be available to all registrants.

I am happy to co-facilitate the webinar with Christopher Leydon from the Office of Student Services. In this presentation and Q&A session we will introduce the principles of universal design for learning (UDL) and how their use not only accommodate students with disabilities but also benefit other diverse populations within the SPS faculty and student body. The importance of these practices lies not only in the requirement to make our educational environments inclusive, but in their ability to help us as effective educators.

Please register here. We look forward to you joining us next week!

Teaching Tip: VoiceThread introduces threaded comments

If you have used VoiceThread in your course then you already know that it is a great tool for creating a discussion around a multimedia presentation, a PowerPoint slide show, a song, or even just a page of text. Recently VoiceThread introduced a few new ways for participants to interact with VoiceThread slides: direct replies, threaded replies, and private replies.
comments in VT

  • Direct replies allow you to click on a comment and have your reply appear directly below that comment, instead of putting your response at the very bottom of the comments bar.
  • Threaded replies are like direct replies, but they start a thread from the original comment and they are visually distinct so you can see who is participating in a particular thread of comments.
  • Private replies are recommended for individual feedback or for private “sidebar” conversations between VoiceThread participants.

See this VoiceThread video for a short overview of these new reply options.

Here’s what a thread of replies looks like:

VoiceThread threaded repliesAllowing threaded replies is not a default setting in VoiceThread. Here’s how to enable them:

  • On your VoiceThread Home screen, hover over the VoiceThread in which you want to enable threaded commenting, and select Edit in the lower left corner.
  • On the next screen, click on the blue pencil on top to edit the VoiceThread settings. In the window that opens, select the Playback Options tab and tick “Enable threaded commenting.”

The threaded reply icon will now be available when participants click on a comment.VoiceThread add threaded replyIf you have any questions about replies (or any other feature) in VoiceThread, please feel free to contact Sarah Kresh or Antonia Levy.

Fall: Sweaters, Pumpkins, and Video Bootcamp!

It’s that time of year again, SPS Faculty: warm layers, the return of all-things-pumpkin, and the Office of Faculty Development and Instructional Technology helping you to bring tech innovation to your teaching.

Sarah Kresh & Dominique Nisperos, our new ITAsAs we enter the fall season we are also happy to welcome our two newest Instructional Technology Assistants, the indomitable Sarah Kresh and Dominique Nisperos who are joining us from the CUNY Graduate Center programs in Linguistics and Sociology respectively. They look forward to sharing their knowledge and helping you to create the best possible experience to your students.

We begin October with new sessions on how to make your course content accessible and dynamic. If you are new to video-lectures, fear not! If you’re a seasoned video vet, you can take your skills up a notch. Sign up for our Course Video Bootcamp (Oct. 26 – Nov. 2), and in just over a week we will get you on track to produce hauntingly engaging videos that your students will scream over! This bootcamp is learner-focused and will be adapted to beginners and experienced video-makers alike.

We are also kicking off a new endeavor this fall semester: In our training Making Your Course Accessible to All, we will introduce the principles of Universal Design in Learning and explain how a few considerations help ensure that all students can understand, navigate, and contribute to your online courses. Register today!

And don’t forget our weekly online TechHelp Drop-In Hour on Wednesdays from 6-7pm EST in case you’d like some immediate one-on-one support.

Join us! We are looking forward to working with you in trainings that are all treats, no tricks.