Tag: fall 2016

Retiring Learning Object Tools in CUNY Blackboard

Icons of Campus Pack tools in BlackboardAs you may have heard, CUNY will retire Learning Objects tools — i.e. Campus Pack blogs, wikis, journals, and podcasts — in Blackboard at the end of the Fall 2016 semester. If you have been using these tools, which have characteristic orange icons, you’ll want to save copies of student-created content for your records and recreate course activities using Blackboard-native tools.

We have created a short video tutorial that shows how to do this plus how to create Blackboard blogs and wikis in your course site to replace the ones that will be retired.

Here are the basic steps for saving your Campus Pack (CP) content:

  1. Go to your Blackboard course site.
  2. Navigate to the Campus Pack blog, wiki, or journal assignment.
  3. Click View.
  4. Click “Export”, or “Export Site” (in CP blogs and wikis, on the bottom-right of the menu; in CP journals at the top of the screen with the other menu options).
  5. Save the .zip file to your computer.

This process creates a compressed folder with an .html file for each page of the site (whether journal, blog, or wiki), which can be opened in any web browser. Please note, comments in blogs or wikis will not be retained. When saving journals, you can select an option to include comments.

To save blogs or wikis with comments, unfortunately the only way is to print each page with comments to a .pdf file:

  1. On the blog/wiki page, click on Print with Comments near the top of the menu to the right of the screen.
  2. For printer, select “.pdf” and then save the resulting PDF file to your computer.
  3. Repeat these steps for every page with comments that you wish to have a record of.

To save media from a CP podcast, open the podcast, right-click on the media in the player and select “Save Video/Audio As.”

Please email us with any questions you might have, or if you’d like any support with this transition.

Teaching Tip: Facilitating Group Work in Online Courses

Group work promotes engagement with course material and prepares students for workplace collaboration; still, some students dread it. Careful planning can help you design online group activities that give your students the benefits of working collaboratively while avoiding the pitfalls of online group assignments.

group-work-imageIn online environments, it can take more time to coordinate group tasks and divide responsibilities among the group. It is a good idea to build in at least three weeks for groups to work on a small-scale assignment. Since online students do not have class meetings where they can exchange ideas and arrange their responsibilities, it is also important to ensure that each group has its own workspace, such as a group discussion board. Encourage members to connect early on, perhaps through an ice-breaker you design, before the assignment begins. The ideal group size online is three or four, since it is not uncommon in larger groups for some members to contribute less than others. For more information about best practices for online group work, check out Blackboard’s blog post or this article from Online Learning Insights.

Provide a platform for accountability and peer evaluation.
It’s important that group members be held accountable for the quality of their contributions, their levels of responsibility, and their professionalism in the group setting. Peer evaluations provide you with a way to factor those behind-closed-doors variables into each student’s grade. It’s a good idea to schedule peer evaluations several times over the course of a term in order to provide opportunities for adjustment and improvement. It’s also a good idea for you to check on groups to evaluate their progress and gauge whether all members are contributing. If you see that a group member is not participating, you can send them gentle reminders to get them back on track. You should also decide what kinds of consequences will be in place for group members who don’t participate, and communicate this clearly to students.

Build in opportunities for groups to interact with each other.
There are several ways to implement inter-group interaction. For example, the whole class could work on a single large project, with each group producing one part of the whole. At the end of the course, students can see and experience the final product they all contributed to. Alternatively, each group can work on its own version of a smaller project, and in turn provide feedback and critiques to other groups while seeing different approaches and perspectives. Wikis are a great tool for implementing both methods. As this article on effective online group work states, group activities often fall into one of three categories:

  • There’s no right answer, such as debates, or research on controversial issues.
  • There are multiple perspectives, such as analyzing current events, cultural comparisons, or case studies.
  • There are too many resources for one person to evaluate, so a jigsaw puzzle approach is needed with each student responsible for one part.

Also, see this blog post on four strategies for effective collaborative group work. Ultimately, the goal is to design group work that is truly collaborative, i.e. the students will benefit more from doing the activity as a group than doing it alone.

Want to learn more about facilitating group work in your Blackboard course site? Sign up for our training on October 21 at noon.

Krystyna, Sarah & Antonia

 

Join us for a Fall Bootcamp Adventure!

We are offering another Video & VoiceThread Bootcamp in which you can either gain new skills or sharpen old ones when creating engaging media for your teaching. If you’ve previously created course videos, maybe you’d like to integrate VoiceThread into your teaching as well? Or you let us help you sharpen your video editing skills in Screencastomatic Pro?

voicethread-logoThis bootcamp is learner-focused and we will tailor instruction to your skill level, so novices and masters alike are welcome. Whether you are a perennial or budding video-creator and VoiceThread user, this week-long workshop will plant the essentials of creating dynamic videos and cultivating vibrant content.

The bootcamp will run from Monday, November 7 – Sunday, November 13. There will be some activity required every day during that week, and by the end you will have:

  • The technical skills to create multimedia artifacts for your courses.
  • Knowledge of what makes a pedagogically effective multimedia artifact.
  • A multimedia creation ready to include in your current or future courses.
  • A plan for a second multimedia artifact to create for your courses.

Here is what previous bootcamp participants have said about their experience:

Course Video Bootcamp is well worth the time I spent doing it. I learned so much and I know that it will help me assist my students by giving them visual aids that work much better than reading a book or powerpoint. I also learned where to go should I have questions about what I learned. Great class.

This experience provided me with the tools that I needed to work with VoiceThread without being intimidated by it. It was a challenging experience but there was a great amount of support and guidance.

Video Bootcamp was a great experience! Within a week, they took me from technically-inexperienced to being able to produce my own video for use in my course! The support from the staff was great and really enabled me to learn a lot in a short period of time!

If you’d like to join us for this summer adventure, please use this form to sign up for the bootcamp.

We are looking forward to working with you in November,
Sarah & Krystyna

Turnitin available in Blackboard! And: Join us for a training.

With both Turnitin as well as SafeAssign available now, SPS faculty have more options for creating and checking writing assignments for originality within your Blackboard sites.

SafeAssign was recently integrated into the Blackboard Assignments interface. To use SafeAssign, simply tick the box in the “Submission Details” section of a regular Blackboard assignment.screenshot Safeassign in Blackboard

You may already know Turnitin from using it outside of Blackboard. It is now available CUNY-wide through Blackboard, as a separate assignment type in the Assessments dropdown menu.

screenshotA Turnitin assignment is fully integrated with Blackboard: students access it like any other assignment in your course, and you can view and grade assignments directly in your course site. Turnitin differs from SafeAssign primarily in that it has a much larger database, including billions of web pages and hundreds of millions of journals, periodicals, books, and student papers against which it compares students’ submissions for plagiarism.

Turnitin offers a user-friendly inline grading function, called Feedback Studio, where you can leave voice and text comments, markup papers with comments or “QuickMarks” (i.e. preset comments with explanations that you can customize to fit your needs and insert into students’ assignments), as well as Turnitin-specific rubrics or checklists for grading.

Also included are functions such as Revision Assignment, which allows you to create assignments with multiple drafts; and PeerMark Assignments, which give students an opportunity to participate in peer review, with Turnitin managing the distribution of papers for review according to settings you choose.

Here are the steps to replacing existing Blackboard assignments with Turnitin:

  1. Copy the assignment’s instructions and take note of its settings (e.g., in a Word document).
  2. Delete the existing assignment from your course site.
  3. Recreate it as a Turnitin Paper Assignment by hovering over Assessments > Turnitin Assignment. Paste the assignment instructions you had copied, and check all Optional Settings for accuracy.
  4. Remember to make these changes in both your dev and live site.

Note: Turnitin assignments are automatically created in a grading category called Turnitin Assignment. If you use a Weighted Total column to calculate the final grade, be sure to change it to include the Turnitin Assignment category, or change the category of your Turnitin Assignment in the Grade Center.

Some useful resources for learning more about Turnitin:

There is still time to sign up for our upcoming online Turnitin training sessions. Please join us on one of the following dates:
Tuesday, September 27 at 6pm
Thursday, October 6 at 3pm
Tuesday, October 18 at 12pm

Looking forward to working with you!

Antonia, Sarah, and Krystyna

Welcome to the fall semester at CUNY SPS!

Dear SPS faculty,

We hope your fall semester is off to a smooth start. During the month of September and October, OFDIT is offering a different online training almost every day of the week to help you put new skills in your online teaching toolbox. There is something for everyone, whatever your schedule so please review our training calendar and read more about some of the sessions below.

We are excited to be running trainings on Turnitin, a new CUNY-wide writing assignment tool with a plagiarism checker, an easy-to-use grading interface, and a user-friendly peer-review function that students can use to review their own and their peers’ writing.

We have also added two new training topics to our growing list of one-hour online sessions: Facilitating Group Work and Monitoring Student Progress in Blackboard. Student group work encourages active engagement with course material and develops interpersonal skills that will be vital on the job market. Our group work training covers the technical details of Blackboard’s Groups tool as well as strategies for how to facilitate group work in an online environment. Monitoring student progress can be difficult in an online class. Our training on this topic introduces the tools that Blackboard provides to help you keep abreast of who is doing well in your course, who needs a little encouragement, and who might need more support.

In addition to these new topics, we have several sessions of oldies-but-goodies on offer, such as creating videos for your courses, using VoiceThread as a multimedia discussion tool, and using Blackboard to its fullest potential to make your course more effective and your life easier. Last but not least, Creating Accessible Documents for Your Course covers how to create Word, Excel and PDF files that are accessible to screen reader users and more easily understood by everyone. One of the biggest advances of the online education revolution is the potential for higher ed to be inclusive of all students; this training gives you a couple tools for following through on that promise.

To read about all of our upcoming training sessions, click here. To sign up for scheduled training sessions, fill out this form.

Wishing you a wonderful fall, and looking forward to working with you,
Antonia, Krystyna, and Sarah