by Jonathan Wade | Jul 2, 2020 | Blog, Event, Faculty Development Workshop, Learn
Moving Rapidly to Remote Instruction (MRRI) will help you rapidly develop your face-to-face course for remote instruction for this fall’s semesters. If you are planning on teaching a fall course that needs to move online quickly, attend this three-week online workshop that will walk you through an intentional course design process and provide the expertise of the Coulter Faculty Commons who are experienced online faculty. This is not the full Online Course Design Institute, but will take you through the streamlined basics of creating an online course so that you can be prepared for the Fall of 2020.
Dates: July 10 – August 1, 2020
When: There will be a combination of live Zoom sessions, recorded tutorials, content and assignments/deliverables. You will have the opportunity to have 1:1 conversations with CFC staff and experience online faculty. Expect to commit 8 – 10 hours each of the three weeks to complete this process and be ready to teach.
Where: Fully Online through Blackboard, Zoom, and Teams
Outcome: By the end of July, you will have your online course designed and developed, in Blackboard, with a teaching/facilitation plan in place. You will also have the support of colleagues and the CFC throughout the summer.
The workshop is free and open to all instructors, including adjuncts. Please register, to let us know you are joining us and to allow us to ensure that we have enough facilitators to make this workshop successful!
by Jonathan Wade | Jul 2, 2020 | Educational Technology, Online Learning (Blackboard)
At the current time WCU has an agreement with Respondus for three tools.
One is a limited tool that gives faculty an ability to import text quizzes into Blackboard and export them from Blackboard. That tool is called Respondus 4.0.
The other two are related to proctoring of remote tests. One product, Respondus Lockdown Browser can be used without the other Respondus Monitor, but Monitor cannot be used without the Lockdown Browser.
WCU has published information about how to use these tools in the WCU Blackboard environment, but, if faculty have an interest in more intensive training, the Vendor is providing training. Feel free to check out the Respondus training options.
Faculty who are going to require the Respondus Monitor need to inform students that they will be recorded during exams. Sample language is available in the CFC sample syllabus.
by Jonathan Wade | Jun 15, 2020 | Bb How To, Blackboard, Blog, Educational Development, Educational Technology, emergency instruction plan, Faculty Development Workshop, Online Learning (Blackboard), Pedagogy, Teaching and Learning
If you have been in your Blackboard courses in June, you may have noticed that there are additional icons that appear in the instructor view and in the student view. We’ve added a tool called “Ally” to Blackboard Learn. This tool gives two different sorts of assistance: one for students; and one for instructors. The instructors can also see and access the student tool. These new tools help us to meet our legal and moral obligations to our students with learning differences.
If you create items natively in Blackboard (with the exceptions of some specialized HTML coding) all of the content is compatible with national and international standards for accessibility and universal design for learning and compliant with the provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act. If, however, you choose to add items like PowerPoint decks, Word documents, PDFs and videos, it is the responsibility of the instructor, in normal circumstances, to make the additional materials compliant.
We recognize that many of our courses have content that has evolved over time, and so this tool will give instructors the opportunity to review their course content with a new set of “eyes” and to review their current content by today’s accessibility standards. It will also allow students to have a digital assistant that can attempt to correct a number of issues without instructor intervention and in so doing, keep more students on track.
Student View:
Students do not see the instructor indicators and do not have access to an accessibility report. They only get an indicator beside each item for which Ally can assist, that will give them access to a tool which may be able to help them move forward and have some level of access to the content. If the instructor has also made the recommendations the tool recommends, the student’s options will be significant. If the instructor hasn’t done anything, the tool may still be able to remediate the content to an accessible alternative.
Instructor View:
Ally gives instructors tools to audit all added content except audio and video and to see to what degree the documents, presentations, and images in your course are considered compatible by current accessibility standards.
As an instructor, you can work on your course content in two ways, by using the indicators in the course content, and by running your full accessibility report from “Course Tools.”
The indicators give you a fairly intuitive workflow with scoring that is based not on how “bad the problem is” or even how fixable the issue may be but on how a screen reader or other assistive device will encounter, and importantly, navigate, what you’ve given the students.
When you are in your course, you click the symbol and Ally will launch an assistant tool that will give you recommendations and remedies for making the file more accessible. The CFC can help you walk through any confusion or difficulties you have with the tool or you can review our current help document on the tool, watch this short video introduction, or review this use guide.
If you are interested in seeing the status of your whole course you can go to the Course Tools and run an Instructor’s Accessibility Report. You may even take some delight in running the report both before and after you do the work to make it more accessible for more learners.
Three recommendations as a teaching colleague: 1) Don’t be too hard on yourself if you get the red gauge, in many cases it will be a case of a document that you haven’t “tagged” and the tool can assist you by doing the tagging directly from your Word or PowerPoint original; 2) Fix the easy things first; 3) Remember that this is an act of compassion and empathy in addition to helping us meet our legal requirements.
Together we can continue to work to design our Fall 2020 semester so that every learner can succeed in an environment that values equity and difference.
by Jonathan Wade | Apr 15, 2020 | Blackboard, CFC Insider, Educational Development, Educational Technology, emergency instruction plan, Online Learning (Blackboard), Pitfalls
The LMS Team have had several requests to launch online proctoring tools. We researched the issue and presented the options to the LMS Governance Committee. The committee, after consideration of the market leader, Respondus, put forward the following recommendations related to proctoring tools.
After discussing the advantages and disadvantages of these products and remote proctoring at large, the LMS Governance Committee voted unanimously to not adopt the Respondus Lock-down Browser and Respondus Monitor with the following justification:
Respondus Lock-Down Browser is a custom browser that locks down the testing environment within a learning management system. It is used for securing online exams in classrooms and proctored environments.
Analysis and Conclusions
- Not an appropriate solution for online exams given at a distance as it only locks down the browser on one device.
- Does not prevent using multiple devices to look up information and collaborate with others using another device.
- Does not encourage authentic assessment.
Respondus Monitor uses a student’s webcam to video them taking the exam.
Analysis and Conclusions
- More resource-intensive to implement – The LMS team will not be able to have this in place immediately.
- Will create duplicative work – will need to pay for the continued license and will have to go through the implementation again with the new LMS.
- Student privacy concerns – Students did not ask to go online or agree to video themselves. There are ethical concerns about student privacy.
- Bandwidth resources concerns – We are already hearing of students having bandwidth issues and issues of exams being submitted as incomplete when students are using their phones to take exams in Blackboard; this will increase when they are also recording themselves.
- No budget to extend usage – Respondus is offering their tools for free only through July of 2020.
- Ignores Academic Integrity Task Force recommendation.
- Does not encourage authentic assessment.
The LMS Governance Committee also voted unanimously on March 27, 2020 to deliver the following message concerning any type of video remote proctoring:
The LMS Governance Committee strongly advises all faculty to NOT require that any students record themselves taking any assessment. This includes not using Zoom, Panopto, Youtube or Blackboard Collaborate for recording. The Coulter Faculty Commons is assembling resources on how to create alternative assessments that can be used in various disciplines.
LMS Governance Committee
Jonathan Wade – Senior Educational Technologist, Chair
Amy Davis – LMS Analyst
Annette Littrell – Associate Chief Information Officer / Academic Engagement & IT Governance
Eli Collins-Brown – Director, Coulter Faculty Commons
Jon Marvel – School Director EMPM/Professor
Kenneth Chapman – Tech Support Specialist
Lee Nickels – Director Assessment & Instruction Technology, CEAP
Scott Barlowe – Associate Professor
Siham Lekchiri – Assistant Professor
by Jonathan Wade | Mar 16, 2020 | Educational Technology
Surveying Your Students: WCU Supported Software
Option #1: Blackboard
Don’t forget that Blackboard’s Test tool also allows for surveys that don’t add to grades and that links to those surveys can be added to announcements and emails from Blackboard. More information on Surveys in Blackboard. This is a best option if you are only surveying one course.
Option 1b: Blackboard Collaborate Polling
If you are running an online synchronous course in Collaborate, you can drop a live poll into your Collaborate session. Collaborate is the Zoom-like synchronous meeting platform built into every Blackboard course. You can find out about how to use the polling functions in Collaborate here. Collaborate can also take attendance.
Option #2: Microsoft Forms
For easily copied and shared polls, check out Microsoft Forms. If you haven’t clicked the “Waffle of Power” (apps launcher) in your email portal for Office365 (email.wcu.edu), then you may not have found all of the magical wonder hidden in O365. One of those is Microsoft Forms. Forms is basically the Microsoft version of Google Sheets, and it is very easy to use and distribute.
Option #3: Qualtrics
All WCU employees can log into Qualtrics and create surveys. You can get to Qualtrics by going to myWCU and clicking the SURVEYS button in the quick links, or you can type in wcu.qualtrics.com into your browser and it will take you to the log in page. The learning curve for Qualtrics is a bit steeper than Forms.
Option #4: Poll Everywhere
PollEverywhere is already a part of many of your class experiences. Remember that PollEverywhere is not really designed as a survey tool but rather as a live polling tool. It will really only be useful to you in an online environment if you couple it with your synchronous virtual classroom tool (Zoom, Collaborate, or Teams) and from our point of view, it may be more difficult to be running the virtual meeting tool and Poll everywhere than to use the more limited polling tools already available in those environments. If you have a number of existing PE polls, however, it might be a good option for you. We are not advising PollEverywhere as a solution during the emergency online period in Spring of 2020.
For all of these, call or email ITHelp first and they should be able to get you started.
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