I
know you all have been so busy and many of you have online classes that begin
on Monday; but I just wanted to update you on a couple of items.
Personnel
Some
Personnel changes in the DL unit for this academic year. Brad Roberts will
continue to support Jackson; Natasha Watts is new and will support all
campuses; and Mindy Walters is new and will support Hazard, Knott, and Leslie.
Bear with us as our new folks learn their new job responsibilities. Paul
Currie, Laura Brashear, and Wendy Davidson are in different roles and will not
be supporting DL this academic year, so please direct all questions to Brad,
Natasha, Mindy, or myself.
Course
Certifications
All
online courses will be going through the course certification process this
academic year. You will have a DL Mentor who can assist you in the design and
delivery process. A schedule of courses will be created and you will be
contacted about the process.
ADA
ADA
and Section 508 will begin to take focus this year with online classes. An ADA
checklist will be developed and shared with faculty who teach online.
Other
Reminders
Be
sure to have specific and detailed Course Calendar with due dates in your
course at the beginning. This allows your students to know exactly what is
expected and when! Review your syllabus, be sure to include course components,
grading criteria with total scores. And finally, add a final grade column to
your course and add grades a few days before you post them in PeopleSoft. This
allows for any questions to be resolved before grades are officially submitted.
Blackboard
Tips
· Copy/paste in
ANY form doesn’t work in Firefox unless you paste into Word first, then
copy/paste into FF. Copy/Paste is working in
IE but you “might” experience issues with drop down menu selection boxes when
working in Grade Center.
· When
importing, if you receive an error with a red bar across the screen, your
import really has failed. Wait a few seconds and try again.
If you receive the orange bar & the green bar, then the import has started
and you need to wait until it completes. If you receive an email that it has
failed, ignore the email. It only reports a failure because it was unable to
associate a creator username for a couple of the links in the template and
bulletin board.
· If you create
an export file, do NOT select calendar. Make sure Course Calendar is selected
(if you have that content folder) but Calendar is further down the list and may
cause numerous errors to appear in the notification email that is automatically
generated by Bb to signal that the process has completed.
SoftChalk
9 is now available!!
For
those that are interested in creating lessons for your online courses or you
have used SoftChalk in the past, SoftChalk 9 is now available. In Blackboard,
click eResources, then Software Support on the sub horizontal menu. Check out
softchalk at http://softchalk.com/
Course
Availability
Most imperative, please do not forget to make your class available before 8:00
a.m. on Monday morning. It is the instructor’s
responsibility to open the course to students. You can do this
at any time prior to the course start date. To make your course available to
students from the Control Panel within your course expand Customization then
click Properties; change the Course Availability option to Yes and submit the
page. Your course is now open to students. NOTE: You should not change the
options under Course Duration. Doing so will remove the course
from students Blackboard page. This setting should remain set as Continuous.
KCTCS
eMail
Please
remember to check your KCTCS eMail daily. The KCTCS eMail is the official
communication tool for KCTCS and when corresponding with student about official
and academic content the KCTCS eMail should be used by the instructor and by
the student.
Test
Proctoring
If
you are planning on having test proctoring in your courses, remember it is
recommended that you have only 1 test proctored, two with rationale. Make sure you
contact Ella Strong who can add you to the test repository so all your
proctoring information can be loaded.
Recertification
for Faculty
In
the next academic year a faculty recertification will be released for all
faculty to complete. This will not be as extensive as the full faculty
certification but will include updated materials, syllabus items, etc.
Technical
Issues
And
last but not least, KCTCS has installed Blackboard Analytics.
Blackboard Analytics is a tool used to report
student activity, engagement as well as inform about course design and
development. Four course reports are available for all KCTCS instructors within
the Control Panel > Evaluation > Course Analytics in your Blackboard course.
