by Terry Pollard | Jul 16, 2020 | Blog, Educational Development, Educational Technology, Faculty Development Workshop, Teaching and Learning
The Coulter Faculty Commons is offering three new sections of its Fall Planning Workshop (“Fall Blend”), intended to help faculty walk through design, delivery, and technology considerations for fall teaching. A workshop will be offered each week until the beginning of fall courses, following a Tuesday – Thursday format:
- July 28 – 30
- August 4 – 6
- August 11 – 13
Faculty will begin each day in a Zoom session with other participating faculty, prior to joining their small cohorts in breakout style sessions. In the breakout groups, emphasis will be provided on helping faculty work through their own unique teaching challenges and situations. Daily goals will be set by the faculty member, with a check-in late in the day. An educational technology or educational developer from the CFC will facilitate each group, bringing unity to common themes and concerns. Faculty will spend independent time between the two Zoom sessions, developing a holistic plan or working on digitizing lessons. Two live technology sessions will be hosted by the Educational Technology team in the CFC late in the week.
Faculty may sign up through an Office365 registration form.
Note: the total time commitment requires 4-5 hours each day.
Faculty will receive the following information the week prior to their workshop start date:
- A digital workbook on blended learning
- “Save the Date” times for the daily live sessions
- Dates for the live “technology and course design” sessions with CFC educational technology staff
- Video content showing how to digitize and deliver instructional content in Panopto and the LMS
- Organizational/planning sheets to facilitate transfer of F2F teaching to digital teaching
by Eli Collins-Brown | Apr 21, 2020 | Educational Development, Educational Technology, emergency instruction plan, Faculty Development Workshop, Online Learning, Pedagogy, Teaching and Learning
We want to give a huge shout out to all instructors who made the shift to remote instruction with lightning speed so we could finish out the spring semester! As the parent of a graduating senior, I am so appreciative of everything you are doing so all of our students can complete this term. Has it been easy? No! Has it been comfortable? No! Are you making it work? Yes! If you’d had more time to make this move are there some things you would have done differently? Absolutely!
Guess what? We DO have more time to prepare our summer courses that were going to be offered in person, but now need to be moved to remote instruction. And we DO have the workshop to help you do just that!
Moving Rapidly to Remote Instruction (MRRI) will help you rapidly develop your face-to-face course for remote instruction for this summer’s semesters. If you are planning on teaching a summer 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 and experienced WCU online faculty in designing and facilitating remote instruction. This is not the full Online Course Design Institute, which is for online courses that will be taught next Spring. Instead, we have more time to prepare for the summer courses and design them to be more enjoyable by you and your students.
Dates: May 11 – May 31
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 Jonathan Wade | Apr 15, 2020 | CFC Insider, Educational Development, Educational Technology, emergency instruction plan, Pitfalls, Teaching with Technology
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 in the LMS; 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
Eli Collins-Brown – Director, Coulter Faculty Commons, Chair
Amy Davis – LMS Analyst
Annette Littrell – Associate Chief Information Officer / Academic Engagement & IT Governance
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 Eli Collins-Brown | Mar 27, 2020 | Collaborative Learning, Educational Development, Educational Technology, emergency instruction plan, O365, Online Learning, Other Resources, Teaching with Technology
As more schools begin to make the transition to distance learning and online classrooms, we want to help. Microsoft has created resources, training, and how-to guides that we hope will help educators and their classrooms make this transition.
To help support you during this time, we’ve created a support page for O365 with the information Microsoft has provided.
Microsoft Education is committed to helping all teachers, students, and staff stay engaged and focused on learning. Creating an online classroom is an important step in moving to a remote learning experience. Free for schools, Microsoft Teams, provides a secure online classroom that brings together classroom management features, collaborative workspaces like OneNote Class Notebook, and virtual face-to-face connections in a single digital hub that keeps students engaged.
Information included are Microsoft’s top resources on distance learning, Web Pages with tools to connect remotely, Microsoft Teams quick start guide for EDU (PDF). Webinars designed for educators, Blog posts, and Free Training,
These resources have been provided by the Microsoft Corporation and are included in this post for the convenience of WCU faculty who want to use Office 365 to facilitate online learning.
(more…)
by Eli Collins-Brown | Mar 18, 2020 | Educational Development, emergency instruction plan, Student Engagement
We encourage maximizing asynchronous communication for almost everything. There are many great ways to use Zoom or other sychronous tools for limited real-time communication. Here are some standard best practices (tried and true from more than 20 years of online teaching) to get you started and hopefully help you manage your and your students’ stress!
General best practices modified for this situation:
- Use announcements in the LMS to send a message to the entire class. I suggest one per day with reminders and encouragement. Be sure to select the email option so each student will get an email with the announcement that will prompt them to access the course.
- Email your students from within the LMS because they are already enrolled and you won’t miss anyone.
- To save yourself from feeling like you are chained to your laptop and answering a million emails, create a “Questions” discussion forum and encourage students to post and read/respond in that forum. Tell them not to email you unless it is personal nature, but all course questions are to be posted in the forum. Encourage them to answer other students’ questions to get the peer to peer collaboration going. If the answer is wrong or not quite right, you can post an encouraging and tactful correction. Check this Questions forum multiple times during the day.
- Also, set specific ‘office hours’. If possible schedule these at the same time each day. Post the days & times in an announcement. Use Zoom for these real-time, synchronous sessions.
- Use Zoom to hold real-time, one-on-one tutorial sessions with any student who aren’t able to ‘attend’ office hours. Keep these short – 15 minutes max. When using Zoom, be sure to post the link in your course in the announcements or Questions discussion forum.
by Terry Pollard | Mar 18, 2020 | Activity, Blog, Educational Development, emergency instruction plan, Online Learning, Pedagogy, Pitfalls
The Coulter Faculty Commons has developed a planning organizer for faculty use for the remaining spring 2020 term.
The simple Word document contains weekly dates and boxes for each week remaining in the term. Faculty can use the document to notate “before” activities and “now” activities–to help them reflect on prior activities and chart a path forward, now that instruction is moving online.
Faculty can download the documents below. It comes in two forms–for a single course, and for a five-load course.
Single Course Template
5 Course Planning Template
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