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 May, 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 Eli Collins-Brown | Jun 30, 2020 | Bb Collaborate, Bb How To, Blackboard, Blog
by Eli Collins-Brown | Jun 21, 2020 | Blog, Faculty Development Workshop, Pedagogy
It’s not too early to start working on your fall courses, particularly this year as we work within the requirements that the pandemic has imposed on us. Social Distancing will drastically reduce the number of students in your classrooms and labs requiring the need to rethink how you will teach. You may be moving totally online or using one of the suggested modalities in the Fall Instruction Plan from the Provost’s office. Without exception, you will not be teaching the way you taught last fall.
This three day online workshop offered by the Coulter Faculty Commons will guide you through a process using the goals and outcomes for your course to design learning experiences that work for both for you and the students. By using best practices in hybrid course design and facilitation, you will discover creative ways to engage your students online. You will also learn which activities and content can be put online for asynchronous access and prioritize what needs to happen in that very precious face-to-face or synchronous online time (Zoom). The goal of this workshop is to provide you with a streamlined process for converting your courses to a hybrid modality.
Each workshop will run from Tuesday through Thursday. We are offering the workshop three times this summer, starting this week.
For more information on the workshop and how to register, see The Fall Blend page on the CFC website, https://affiliate.wcu.edu/cfc/events/fallblend/.
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 Eli Collins-Brown | May 6, 2020 | Blog
As we wrap up the Spring semester, we are thinking of Summer and Fall and how the pandemic has changed how we are going to facilitate student learning. The Coulter Faculty Commons is offering numerous workshops to support all instructors through this change process. Two of the summer workshops require registration or application and approval by the deans and department heads, and the deadline is approaching quickly!
Moving Rapidly to Remote Instruction starts on Monday, May 11. This is for instructors who will be teaching summer courses online. See Details and Register!
Fast-Track Online Course Design starts on May 18 and runs through the end of June. This is for Fall online course planning. See Details and Apply!
by John Hawes | Mar 20, 2020 | active learning, Bb Collaborate, Bb How To, Blackboard, Blog, Educational Development, Educational Technology, emergency instruction plan, Faculty Development Workshop, Learn, Online Learning (Blackboard), Pedagogy, student engagement, Teaching and Learning
Open Help Sessions for All Instructors
The CFC is hosting additional open sessions for all instructors to learn how to effectively facilitate online learning and engage students using Blackboard and its general suite of tools. We will be offering these sessions through the following video-conferencing link:
https://us.bbcollab.com/guest/da120265dc4b4471a96d1bbd8b388946
Dates and times are as follows:
Monday, March 23 – March 25
1:30 – 3:00 p.m.
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