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.