Competency-Based Education + Badges BITS Webinar Competency-Based Learning

You're Invited!

Blackboard Innovative Teaching Series: Competency Based Learning and Badges 

When: Thursday, May 29th 1:00 pm EST

Where: Web Conferencing via Blackboard Collaborate

Track: Assessing Learners

Presenter: Deb Everhart, Blackboard

Competency-based learning is an emerging model that is gaining traction and can offer learners an efficient, less costly path to a college credential, employability, and enhanced professional skills. This is particularly the case for those 36 million Americans who have achieved significant prior learning and/or some college education but have not completed a degree. Find out more during this hour-long interactive session! 

See you online! 

DL Tip of the Week - Managing the Course List and Making Your Course Unavailable

This week's DL Tip of the Week is about Managing Your Course List and Making Your Course Unavailable. Another step at the end of the semester is to clean up your course list and make your course unavailable.

It is good habit to make courses that have ended unavailable. This will keep students from accessing and completing additional work after you have submitted grades. However, if you have incomplete students, you would not want to make the course unavailable. If you want to disable users, please refer to a prior blog about disabling users. 

Additionally, each semester your courses keep getting added to your course list. There is a way to manage your course list and hide old courses that are not active (and include no incomplete students). This can be accomplished through the Manage Your Course Settings on the portal page in Blackboard.

How-to Video
How-to Instructions on Managing Your Course List
How-to instructions on Making Your Course Unavailable

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)

Using Technology to Improve Student Learning: The Flipped Classroom A FREE, 3-week, online mirco-course for educators Virtually unknown a few years ago, flipped learning is now gaining attention at the secondary and university levels. Many educators are flipping their classes by having students watch their lectures at home (traditionally done in class) and having students do their homework (traditionally done at home) in class. To learn more on how flipped learning has changed the way educators present information, attend this 3-week online course to help you get started in flipping your lessons. The instructional lessons are multi-media rich and contain graded questions and interactive learning games. This is an online, non-credit course which will take place June 16 - July 7, 2014. Two different versions of the course are being offered: A) Free of charge: This is a reduced version of the course and B) Complete course ($35.00): All course work with the final project included. Learn more about this course by reading the latest post on the SoftChalk Talk Blog. June 16 - July 7, 2014 Register Now!

For more information, please contact:

Joseph Zisk, Ed.D.
Professor/Director of Teaching and Learning Center
Department of Secondary Education and Administrative Leadership, Box 75
250 University Ave
California University of Pennsylvania
California PA 15419
zisk@calu.edu

DL News Update from DL Peer Meeting in April 2014

I wanted to take this time to update you on a couple of items. The KCTCS DL Peer Team met a couple of weeks ago and I wanted to make you aware of a couple of things that have or will occur due to that meeting.

• State Authorization and Student Identity are increasingly becoming important. For State Authorization, KCTCS will have to work with other regions to obtain permission to do business in states in which we have students. For the Student Identity, within the next couple of years, student identity software will most likely be purchased and implemented across KCTCS. 
• As you may know when a new course is created with a Blackboard Component, an automatic template is loaded with generic buttons (this is NOT the same template that we have created here at HCTC and require in all online courses), one menu option will now be added – Starfish. Within the full implementation of Starfish a majority of the colleges wanted this added to the template. We do have Starfish built in as well, but it has more items such as the student guide and information about Starfish.
• ADA will become more of a focus in 2014-2015. When you create videos or audios, close captioning and transcripts will need to accompanying the video/audio. If you link to sites that have video/audio, you will need to have the close captioning and/or transcripts. Additionally, when you are working with publishers on content, you will now need to tell that all video/audio will need to be close captioning and transcribed before you can use it. The good thing is, is that most publishers are working in that direction. 
• For those that do Test Proctoring, the Additional Documents area on thePoint will be removed and will not be able available anymore beginning May 15, 2014. The team site will be moving over to the new SharePoint site over the summer. If you require Documents that need to be printed out for the testing center, you will have to place these in your Blackboard course and require students to print them out prior to going to the testing center. Remember if you are doing test proctoring, you are limited to one proctored test, you can have two with rationale or justification. 

Other news include some changes will be coming down for Learn on Demand in the fall and Direct 2 Degree is getting closer to launch. It was stressed that time is fixed and learning is variable in that all students learn at different levels and courses should be designed in a way to support how students learn. We all know some students may catch on quicker and need the ability to move on while other students may need additional time on content. This also depend on the content/subject matter.

DL Tip of The Week - End of Course/Start of Course Preparation - Refresher

For closing out this semesters class and preparing for summer (or fall), I will refer you back to a previous tip http://hctconline.blogspot.com/2013/12/dl-tip-of-week-end-of-semester-checklist.html:

This week's tip is meant to help you end your current term and prepare for the next term.

First is completing the end of semester check list. To end the term in each of your online classes you need to:

1. You need to download your gradebook from the Grade Center
2. Archive your course (and download the archive)*
3. Export your course (and download the export)*
4. Make your course unavailable (Under Control Panel, Click Customization > Properties > Select No on Set Availability, and click Submit). If you have incomplete grades, do not make your course unavailable. If you want to disable users, please refer to a prior blog about disabling users.

*After you download your Archive or Export, please remember to delete the Archive or Export from your course as this will add to your course storage size.

Preparing for next term:

Take the time now to copy or export/import. Refer to the prior blogs below to help you get started.

Course Copy and Export/Import

Set up an Early Bird Welcome 

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 - Achievements (Badges)

This week’s tip is about Blackboard Achievements (or Badges). The achievements tool allows instructors to create opportunities for students to earn recognition for their accomplishments. These opportunities are called achievements and are delivered in the form of badges and certificates. Instructors designate criteria for issuing rewards to students in the form of both badges and certificates. Mozilla has an OpenBadge Project where students can share the badges they earn the OpenBadge Back Pack. Learn more about the Blackboard Achievements (Badges) and Mozilla's OpenBadge Project by clicking of the resources listed below.

Blackboard Learn Quick Hit Video - Achievements
Blackboard Achievements Website
Creating a Custom Achievement in Blackboard Video
Setting Up OpenBadges Video
Mozilla OpenBadges Website
The Mozilla Blog for the OpenBadges Project

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)