Tips for Building Social Presence in Your Online Class

Here is another good article about how to build a social presence in your online class. With so many younger students now in our online classes, we have to develop different ways to engage and attract that student to the class and to engage them in the topic of the course to help them better learn the information they need. Read more...

Can Technology Help Deter Cheating?

The topic of cheating and academic dishonesty has been a hot topic this academic year. It is interesting to hear all the different stories of how student cheat from using a smart phone, stomping, cheat notes stuck in pens, or on the inner label of bottled drinks in on-campus courses to using Google for question searches, using books and open notes and other materials, to having other people take the test or assist in completion in online, but can technology help deter or fight cheating in online classes? If tests are setup with different options such as randomize, one question as a time, and is timed along with using authentic assessment, cheating can be a less likely threat. Other things like honor codes and letting the student know your expectation including your take on academic dishonesty can help keep students straight. Here is an interesting article to read about that talks some about how technology could be used. Read more...

HCTC Updates and End of Semester To-Do's

We are are drawing near on another Spring Learn By Term Semester. I just wanted to provide some general updates from the KCTCS DL Meeting a few weeks ago and some End of the Term To-Do's.

Online Learning Updates

Blackboard will be changing hosting services from the Center for Rural Development in Somerset to Blackboard doing our hosting. We have not been given a time frame of when migration will occur (just that it will be over the summer) or how long the process will take. As soon as I am notified, I will let you know. 

Some new features in Blackboard that were available with the update in December were covered including the Bb profile, global settings and notifications, inline grading, retention center, integrated calendar, course list reordering, test analysis, course evaluations, and course/outcome alignments. Social media is being integrated more and more within Bb. Accessible content was also a big topic and further discussions will be coming about ADA. Here is a video link about how to make your documents accessible (for online), and finally, Blackboard will be adding the Bb Analytics this summer. We will be learning more about this feature in the fall term.

End of Semester To-Do’s – Preparing for the end of term

At the end of each semester, you will Archive and Export your course for safe keeping. The Archive is a complete copy of the course with student work and grades. It is the faculty's responsibility to retain an archive of the course. The Export saves your content without the student work and grades. The Export may be used in the future to import content into a new Blackboard course shell.

Reminder: It is the instructor's responsibility to keep a record of the gradebook and any other needed material throughout the semester. You may choose to export your course and/or back up your gradebook several times throughout the semester to ensure you have a copy for disaster recovery or any other unforeseen events. Remember to delete these from the system after download. You can also make your course unavailable in the Blackboard (Customization > Properties and click No on availability and click submit). If you have incompletes, do not make the course unavailable.

Link to End of Semester Checklist

Reading and Social Media

It is very apparent that we have a different breed of students from years past. Students of today want to be able to access information when they want it. The want answers to questions at the moment they have the question. They do not like waiting. It use to be a "pull" mentality of getting students in (and to some regards it is still like that); but a trend I am seeing is that the "pull" is turning into the "push" by many of today's students. I read a recent article that talked about a couple of different studies where one study indicated that 40% of the students spend their time on social media and the hours spent on social media each week is higher than other forms of reading. Another study showed trends with the use of social media increasing. Click here to read more about the article...so my question would be is how can we leverage social media to encourage increased academic reading? I don't think outlawing technology in the classroom (for in-person) will help, we need to integrate social media and the use of social media in the classroom (including online). If you have ideas, please share.