Blackboard SP13 Upgrade Completed

The update to 9.1 Service Pack 13 was completed over the holiday. If you encounter any problems with Blackboard Learn please log a ticket with the Blackboard Helpdesk so the issue may be investigated. If you need access to a list of what’s new in Service Pack 13, a subtab is available under the eCourses tab which contains descriptions of the new features and links to help documents and videos.

Short Courses from SoftChalk in January 2014

SoftChalk Short Courses are now available!
Do you want to learn more about specific features of SoftChalk Cloud and Create? Then these Short Courses are perfect for you! These live, one-hour webinars include a presentation and examples, as well as an opportunity for you to ask questions and receive assistance from the instructor. Click here to register!


Upcoming Short Courses in January

• An Overview of SoftChalk Cloud
• An Overview of SoftChalk Create
• TextPoppers, Images and Hyperlinks
• Navigation Features and Sidebars
• Embedded Media
• Quizzes and Quiz Groups
• Interactive Learning Activities: The Presentation Group
• Interactive Learning Activities: The Scoring Group

New Year - New Opportunities

Show your best SoftChalk lessons in the 2014 SoftChalk Challenge!

1. Use your SoftChalk Cloud account or create one for free
2. Make sure your lesson is public and published to the SoftChalk Cloud
3. Submit your Lesson to the 2014 SoftChalk Lesson Challenge!

DON'T DELAY! The submission deadline is Monday, February 24, 11:59pm EDT.

For full details on entering the 2014 Lesson Challenge and to see the winning lessons from previous years, visit the official SoftChalk Lesson Challenge site. 

Promoting Student Learning: NSSE 2012 Annual Report

Since 2000, Nessie (National Survey of Student Engagement), as the survey is known, has collected wide-ranging data to help colleges develop effective educational practices and promote engagement. Students are asked, for instance, how much time they spend studying, how often they have discussions with people of a different race or ethnicity, and how they interact with their professors and peers.

One of the findings of the survey indicated that "Freshmen reported spending, on average, 14 hours a week preparing for class, including studying, reading, writing, and doing homework or lab work. For seniors, the average was 15 hours. The exception in this year's Nessie survey was students who took all of their courses online. They spent slightly more time studying and reading relative to those who took no online classes. And online-only seniors were assigned substantially more writing over the course of the year, an average of 107 pages, compared with 75 pages for students who took courses only in person. Online students also had more favorable views of the quality of their interactions with a range of people—faculty members, academic advisers, student-services staff members—who had a hand in their learning." (Source: Chronicle of Higher Education)

For the full report: Promoting Student Learning and Institutional Improvement:Lessons from NSSE at 13 (pdf)

Article: The Impact of Online Learning on Students' Course Outcomes

The Impact of Online Learning on Students' Course Outcomes: Evidence From a Large Community and Technical College System
By: Di Xu & Shanna Smith Jaggars—Economics of Education Review, December 2013
Using an instrumental variable technique, the authors estimate the impact of online versus face-to-face course delivery on student course performance, as indicated by course persistence and final course grade. Click here for the link to the working paper.

Free Webinars from EdTechTeacher

EdTechTeacher offers free, live webinars throughout the school year aimed at helping educators integrate technology effectively in the classroom. This is a great opportunity learn something new as well as to network with other teachers from across the country and around the world.
Click on the link, EDTEchTeachers October Webinars, to register for one of the many professional development opportunities this month. The web page also provides links to archived sessions. Although many of the sessions are centered on K-12, the technology used in the classroom can certainly be applied to community colleges.

Blackboard's Inline Grading Tool for Assignments

What is Inline Assignment Grading?

Instead of requiring instructors to download student-submitted ‘assignment’ files to view or edit those submissions, instructors are now be able to view student-submitted files “inline,” i.e. in the web browser, without requiring any plugins, applets, or client-side applications. Annotation tools are included with the inline viewer, enabling you to provide feedback including comments, highlights, and even drawings/annotations directly on the inline view of the document. Supported document types that can be converted are Word (DOC, DOCX), PowerPoint (PPT, PPTX), Excel (XLS, XLSX), and PDF (PDF).

Known Issues: 1) Students cannot annotate documents, 2) This does not work with SafeAssign, and 3) Annotation sessions expires after an hour, so if an instructor takes longer than an hour to annotate a document, annotations made after that session expiration may not be saved.

 

For more information:

• Video: Inline Assignment Grading
• PDF: Inline Grading for Assignments

When Students Can't Compute

Interesting article by Dian Schaffhauser, and published by Campus Technology, about the technical barriers many community college students face that prevent them from being successful in online education. The article discusses access issues, availability of computer labs, broadband issues, and students who are digital non-natives.

"Online education promises learning opportunities for all, but too many community college students lack the tech skills--and the access-to take advantage of those resources."

Read the full article: When Students Can't Compute

SoftChalk Short Courses in October

Do you want to learn more about specific features of SoftChalk Create? Then these Short Courses are perfect for you! These live, one-hour webinars include a presentation and examples, as well as an opportunity for you to ask questions and receive assistance from the instructor.

Interactive Learning Activities - The Presentation Group: Monday, October 14, 1:30 - 2:30 PM EDT
Learn how to create and modify presentation learning activities in SoftChalk Create. Both text and graphics-based activities will be shown. Activities that will be covered include the Charts activity, Did You Know activity, Timeline activity and many more. You will also learn a method to place a PowerPoint slide deck as a slideshow activity within SoftChalk Create and how to “Import” a PowerPoint slide deck into a SoftChalk Create slideshow. Click here to register.

Interactive, Scorable Learning Activities: Monday, October 21, 1:30 - 2:30 PM EDT           

Learn how to create and modify the scoring learning activities in SoftChalk. Crosswords, Drag-N-Drop are only a few of what will be covered. Click here to register.

Creating, Importing and Modifying Tables: Tuesday, October 22, 1:30 - 2:30 PM EDT      
Learn how to create and modify tables in SoftChalk Create including how to import and modify a table from Excel or Word. Click here to register.

The StyleBuilder and eCourseBuilder: Thursday, October 24, 1:30 - 2:30 PM EDT              

Learn how to use the SoftChalk Create StyleBuilder tool to create your own personal “Style” including how to import and export your style and apply it to your lesson. You will also learn how to create an e-Course using the SoftChalk Create eCourseBuilder tool. Click here to register.

More Short Courses will be scheduled soon so keep checking their full Short Course schedule.

The National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) is pleased to announce that it will be offering three FREE webinars on course redesign in the coming months.

 Fall 2013 Webinar Series

 Each hour-long webinar features an NCAT Redesign Scholar, the project leader of a highly successful course redesign, describing the redesign project with a particular focus on its distinguishing characteristics. After a presentation, the lead faculty member is available to answer questions and provide additional specifics about the redesign. Each hour-long webinar will occur at 1 pm eastern time:

• October 8, 2013: Redesigning American History and European History at the State University of New York at Potsdam presented by Jim German, featuring the effective use of undergraduate learning assistants.
• November 19, 2013: Redesigning Principles of Chemistry at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore presented by Jennifer Hearne, featuring active engagement in science education at a historically black institution. 
• December 10, 2013: Redesigning statistics at Niagara County Community College presented by Dan Miller, featuring the transferability of a statistics redesign to developmental math.

Registration is required, but there is no registration fee. To register, go to http://www.theNCAT.org/Webinars/2013Webinars.html.

Videos of prior webinars may be accessed at http://www.theNCAT.org/Webinars/2013Webinars.html.

• Redesigning General Psychology at Frostburg State University
• Redesigning Computing and Information Literacy at Arizona State University 
• Redesigning developmental math at Cleveland State Community College, Chattanooga State Community College and Northwest-Shoals Community College.

NOTE: You will need to register before viewing each webinar.

SoftChalk Professional Development Opportunities

SoftChalk Short Courses now available!

Do you want to learn more about specific features of SoftChalk Cloud and Create? Then these Short Courses are perfect for you! These live, one-hour webinars include a presentation and examples, as well as an opportunity for you to ask questions and receive assistance from the instructor.

 Textpoppers, Images and Hyperlinks in SoftChalk Create

In this one-hour Short Course you will learn how to insert and modify pop up text annotations. You will also learn how to insert, optimize and modify images within a lesson page and within a text popper. You will also learn how to create and modify hyperlinks on a lesson page and within a text popper. You will see how easy it is to use the Media Search tool to look for and insert graphics, and you will see how to insert a graphic stored in the SoftChalk Cloud.

Monday, September 16                12:30 - 1:30 PM EDT         Click here to register.

Navigation Features and Sidebars in SoftChalk Create

Learn how navigation works within SoftChalk Create, including how to make a topic part of the navigation, how to change the appearance of the on-page navigation, create a table of contents and create new pages. You will also learn how to create a sidebar and place internal navigation within the sidebar

Wednesday, September 18         12:30 - 1:30 PM EDT   Click here to register.          

 
 More Short Courses will be scheduled soon so keep checking our full Short Course schedule.

Conference on Distance Education in Bowling Green

Western Kentucky University Distance Learning and the Association for Distance Education and Independent Learning (ADEIL) are proud to announce ADEIL 2013:

 "Committed to the Race" - October 10 - 12, 2013-Bowling Green, KY

Meet us in Bowling Green, KY, home of the Corvette, for the annual ADEIL conference at the Knicely Conference Center. Take advantage of the opportunity to discuss topics and issues relevant to the realm of distance education and interact with other education professionals to gain new concepts or share your own.

Dr. James Selbe (KCTCS) is the keynote speaker on Friday. Click here for more information. (http://www.wku.edu/eps/adeil/index.php) 

Blackboard Innovative Teaching Series-Free Professional Development for You!

The Blackboard Innovative Teaching Series (BITS)

Did you know that Blackboard offers free weekly training opportunities for educators and instructional designers? The Blackboard Innovative Teaching Series (BITS) is a training initiative to help augment internal training efforts. Harnessing their community of Blackboard users, BITS will share the top strategies and pedagogy for both increasing educator efficiency and improving learning outcomes. You can watch past BITS’ webinars on their YouTube Playlist. To register, please go to www.blackboard.com/BITS.

Upcoming webinars include:

• Setting Up Your Course in Blackboard Learn Without a Template presented by Phoebe J. Ballard, University of Toledo on September 19th at 1pm ET
• Organizing Your Course in Blackboard Learn presented by Matt Acevedo of FIU Online on September 26th at 11am ET
• BITS Office Hours: Course Design, September 30th at 11am ET
• The Online Collaborative Experience presented by David Flora, Ericka Hollis, and Xavier Scott of Morehead State University on October 7th at 11am ET Accessibility Matters! - Part Two presented by Beth Stinson and JoAnna Hunt of Blackboard on October 17th at 11am ET

High-Tech Cheating and How to Prevent It

Great article by John K. Waters on the proliferation of high-tech cheating and what educators can do to prevent it. The focus is on the K-12 environment, but many of the recommendations apply to two-year colleges. The article also includes information on proctoring.

Click here to read the article published in the August 2013 online edition of 'the JOURNAL'.

Tools That College Students Wish Their Instructors Used More or Less

In a chart posted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, students surveyed indicated which technology and what collaborative tools they wished their instructors incorporated into their courses. for example, nearly three-quarters wished that their instructors would record lectures more often, so they could be watched later. See the full report.

Reminder: Make Your Course Available to Students

Your course will not show up to students if you have not made the course available. All our courses are web-enhanced, so all courses (full semester or 1^st bi-term) must be made available as of September 19, 2013.
To make your course available:

• Log in to Blackboard
• Log into your course (this applies to all SKYCTC courses)
• Control Panel
• Customization
• Properties
• Go to #3 Set Availability
• Make Course Available—click on Yes
• Submit

SKYCTC Blackboard Workshops in August

These training workshops supplement the learning units in the Faculty Training & Resource Center eCommunity and will be of interest to faculty new to Blackboard or have an interest in teaching an online course.

Pre-Registration is Required: Email Cindy Gaffney | cindy.gaffney@kctcs.edu | Subject Line: Enter Workshop Name | Date | Time

All workshops will be held  at the Main Campus, Building H, Room 111A

• Getting Started with Blackboard
• August 9: 9-Noon or August 12: 1-4 pm  (Register for one of these sessions.)
• SoftChalk: August 12: 9:30-11:30 am
• Creating Assignments**: August 13: 9 – 10 am
• Creating Exams**: August 13: 10:30-11:30 am                          
• Using Adaptive Release**: August 14: 12:30-1:30 pm            
• Adding Rubrics to Your Course**: August 14: 2-3 pm           

**Participants should be familiar with the Getting Started workshop concepts before attending this workshop. 

Blackboard Exemplary Course Award: How to Get Your Course Ready!

Listed below is information about an upcoming Blackboard webinar series that will prepare you to possibly submit your online course for consideration for the Blackboard Exemplary Course award.  This is a great professional development opportunity and I know many of you have terrific online courses that should be considered for this award.

Blackboard Exemplary Course Cohort: Register today!

Using the Blackboard Exemplary Course Program (ECP) Rubric as a guide, this cohort will provide both theoretical concepts and practical tools for instructors to recognize, organize, and build online courses for both blended learners and online learners. Over the course of four weeks, ECP Directors and 2013 Exemplary Course Winners will expand upon each element of the rubric. This program will be most beneficial to educators and designers who are new to online learning. Sign up!

• Summer 2013 Cohort Dates: July 22 - August 12
• Live Sessions: Held each Monday at 11am EDT
• Audience: Educators/Designers
• Registration Page: http://learn.blackboard.com/ecpcohort

Blackboard Unavailability: Summer Session

Reminder: KCTCS eLearning (Blackboard) will be unavailable Monday, July 29, at 12:01 AM EST through Thursday, August 1, at 8:00  AM EST for general maintenance and migration to Blackboard hosting.