Happy Thanksgiving

For all you do in teaching online classes, HCTC is thankful for each and everyone of you. Have a Blessed and Happy Thanksgiving! We hope your days are spent relaxing and sharing time with your family!

DL Tip of Week - Reflecting on Your Online Class

This week is thanksgiving week and with the DL Tip of the Week this week, I would like you to take time and reflect about you online class. Ask yourself a few questions: Am I really engaging my students and providing dialog and mechanisms to engage my students? Are my assignments getting to the end result of what I want them to learn in the course (based on the competencies of the course)? What can I do different to make sure my class is relating the information that it should?

There are probably many more questions you can ask yourself. Below is a compilation of various videos and websites to help you think about how you can make your online class a better experience for your students and ensure they are learning the material.Additionally, start now by going ahead and documenting the changes you would want to make. If you are utilizing a Master Shell, you can go ahead and be working on the changes for the next time you teach the course, now while your reflection is fresh.

Videos/Websites:

Best Practices in Designing Online Courses

Tips, Tricks, and Trends - Part 1
Tips, Tricks, and Trends - Part 2
How can I use technology to improve the quality of my courses?

Specific to Engagement:
10 ways to Engage Students in an Online Course
6 Keys to engaging Students Online
Top 10 Secrets of Successful Online Educators
A Study: Strategies to Engage Online Students and Reduce Attrition Rates

If for any reason the links appear broken, or if you have an idea for a DL Tip of the Week, please email us at HCTC-DL@kctcs.edu.

Remember if you need assistance, please let a member of the DL Team know.

• Brad Roberts, DL Specialist (Faculty/Student Support) – Lees
• Paul Currie, DL Specialist (Faculty Support) – Hazard, Knott, Leslie, Tech
• Wendy Davidson, LoD Program Coordinator (LoD support and Student Support) 

Tips for Humanizing Your Online Course

Taking an online course can be an isolating experience, but it doesn't have to be. There are several key techniques you can employ to humanize your online courses and thus improve the learning experience as well as success and retention rates.

Create an inviting space 
Humanizing an online course means making connections so that students feel a relationship to the course, fellow students, and the instructor. Jim Marteney, distance education trainer at Los Angeles Valley College, likens this idea to the concept of the third place—a place other than home and work where people come together to interact and build community. Read more...

Students, Studying, and Multiple-Choice Questions

Multiple-choice questions are not the pariah of all test questions. They can make students think and measure their mastery of material. But they can also do little more than measure mastery of memorization. Memorizing is usually an easier option than thinking and truly understanding.

Biologist Kathrin Stanger-Hall wondered what would happen if she changed the exam format in her large introductory biology courses. Would a change in format, specifically the inclusion of short-answer questions, affect how students studied? Would having to construct responses improve scores on the final exam? And, perhaps most important, would it improve performance on multiple-choice questions that tested higher-level thinking skills? Read more...

DL Tip of the Week - PowerPoint and Word to PDFs (compressing images and ALT text)

This week’s tip is about "How to save your PowerPoint and Word Documents as PDFs" and compressing images and using ALT Text for ADA purposes. 

When creating documents for online classes it is important to consider the file format and the file size. In this weeks' tip, you will learn how to save your PowerPoint and Word documents as PDFs, but also how to compress your image files to reduce size and how to add ALT text to images for ADA purposes. The future will begin to change how we can provide universal access to online content.

How-to Video

Handout
*Remember you will be prompted to log in to view the video and handout. 

If for any reason the links appear broken, or if you have an idea for a DL Tip of the Week, please email us at HCTC-DL@kctcs.edu.

Remember if you need assistance, please let a member of the DL Team know.

• Brad Roberts, DL Specialist (Faculty/Student Support) – Lees
• Paul Currie, DL Specialist (Faculty Support) – Hazard, Knott, Leslie, Tech
• Wendy Davidson, LoD Program Coordinator (LoD support and Student Support) 

SoftChalk MOOC - Rapid Book Publishing for Educators

Don't miss the Open Doors Group, free Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) starting on Monday, November 18 and running through Sunday, December 29, 2013. ODG's newest MOOC, "Rapid Book Publishing for Educators," is designed for busy educators who want to learn how to write and publish a book while teaching a full load, how to have a self-authored book on the shelves—or better yet on iPhones—in less than one month, and to learn the pros and cons of peer reviews. Participants will create a book during this course. Each of the four modules for this course will include course materials and two live, online sessions with exposure to industry experts.

Module topics include:

• How a 21st Century book can boost your career without putting your life on hold.
• How you can write a book in 20-60 hours.
• How you can market your book... and yourself.
• Should you follow or circumvent the peer review process in academic publishing?

Participants should be willing to spend three-four hours each week reviewing content and sharing ideas. There is one required book, Rapid Book Publishing, and two suggested books for this course.
Like the course and Register Today!

Rapid Book Publishing for Educators

November 18 - December 29, 2013

This course is sponsored by SoftChalk, AcademicPub and Open Doors Group.
We look forward to seeing you in the MOOC!
The SoftChalk Team
www.softchalk.com

DL Tip of the Week - Bb 9.1 SP 13 Staging Area

So that faculty will have the most up to date teaching and learning tools, eLearning Services will update KCTCS Blackboard Learn to 9.1, Service Pack 13 beginning Friday December 20 at 5:00PM EST until Sunday December 22 at 5:00PM EST. This will include many new and exciting updates to make your lives as educators more efficient and help you to keep students even more engaged! 

To get a jump on the upgrade features of Blackboard 9.11, for this week’s DL Tip of the Week, you

 are invited to access the staging area of SP 13 and try the new version out. 

Video

Read About the New Features

Faculty Tutorials

Additional Info

Please log in and access the KCTCS staging environment to check out some of the new features: https://kctcs-stage.blackboard.com

If for any reason the links appear broken, or if you have an idea for a DL Tip of the Week, please email us at HCTC-DL@kctcs.edu.

Remember if you need assistance; please let a member of the DL Team know.

• Brad Roberts, DL Specialist (Faculty/Student Support) – Lees
• Paul Currie, DL Specialist (Faculty Support) – Hazard, Knott, Leslie, Tech
• Wendy Davidson, LoD Program Coordinator (LoD support and Student Support) 

DL Tip of the Week - Inline Grading

This week’s tip is about Inline Grading.

With the future of online learning becoming increasingly paperless, it will be important for faculty to explore different ways to leverage technology to support a more paperless teaching and learning environment. In fact, a few of us have already been taking advantage of technologies found in Blackboard to accept and grade assignments and other work electronically.

In an effort to provide faculty a more efficient means of grading and communication in their online courses, Blackboard recently released a new Inline Grading feature. Inline Grading actually serves as an enhancement to the current Assignment feature already in Blackboard. For many faculty who are already used to accepting and grading work electronically, the typical grading workflow in Blackboard was to create assignment submission links to which students submit their work. Faculty would then later download the submitted work and provide comments and feedback in a variety of ways (the most common way is using the Track Changes and commenting features in Microsoft Word). Faculty would then save and upload the corrected work back to Blackboard, assign a grade, and repeat the same process for other students.

Now, instead of requiring faculty to download student-submitted files to view or edit those submissions, they will be able to take advantage of the new Inline Grading feature to view student-submitted files “inline” directly in the web browser without requiring any special plugins. Faculty can view, comment, and grade these assignments without ever leaving the grading page. This new Inline Grading feature also features annotation tools which allows faculty to provide feedback including comments, highlights, and even drawings/annotations directly on the document without needing to download and open the document in a separate program. Currently, this new feature supports the inline viewing of the following document types: Word (DOC, DOCX), PowerPoint (PPT, PPTX), Excel (XLS, XLSX), and PDF.  If students upload files in unsupported formats, faculty will be prompted to download and view the file. Students will not be able to add/edit faculty annotations on their work, but they will see their work in an inline viewer after submitting them.

Currently, there is a known issue where bulleted lists and some other general document formatting may be lost when using Inline Grading.  If a student’s work relies heavily on these general formatting tools, you may consider using your usual means of file submission and grading.  Your HCTC DL Department has submitted a help desk ticket concerning this “bug” that has been escalated to the next tier of support.  We will provide you with further updates as more information becomes available to us. 

If you’re interested in learning more about Inline Grading, take a moment and view the YouTube videos below when you have a chance.  The first video provides a general overview of Inline Grading; the second provides a more detailed look at the features available to you.  We’ve also included a PDF file that contains some very useful information.

Video 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3X9Rerz0VX0

Video 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T69nU7FykUs

Inline Grading Tips

If for any reason the links appear broken, or if you have an idea for a DL Tip of the Week, please email us at HCTC-DL@kctcs.edu.

Remember if you need assistance; please let a member of the DL Team know.

• Brad Roberts, DL Specialist (Faculty/Student Support) – Lees
• Paul Currie, DL Specialist (Faculty Support) – Hazard, Knott, Leslie, Tech
• Wendy Davidson, LoD Program Coordinator (LoD support and Student Support) 

Submitted by Brad Roberts

Virtual Summit - November 12

Full Agenda - Click Here Register Now - Click Here