(for thought)
by Bart Everson
Xavier faculty certainly do a lot to advance the University's mission.
That's why here at CAT we are excited to be expanding the scope of our support for Xavier's faculty. Our newly revised mission is focused on "the development of faculty across all career stages and areas of professional responsibility."
Read our complete statement of Mission, Vision & Values.
Photo credit: "Spirostar I" by Heartlover1717
Somewhere along the way, our podcast fell off the listing of podcasts in the iTunes store. But we're back!
by Janice Florent
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). This law was enacted to make sure that people with disabilities have the same rights and opportunities as everyone else.
It is extremely important for students with disabilities to have access to accessible course content. Statistics show that 12.9% of students have a disability. One in twenty-five incoming freshmen have some form of cognitive disability. These students have neurological challenges processing information. *
Forty to sixty percent of undergrads and nine percent of graduate students choose not to report their disability and will just struggle through their courses.*
Chances are you will have a student enrolled in one of your courses that has a disability and has chosen not to disclose that information to you.
The Blackboard Learning Management System (LMS) was designed with accessibility in mind. While Blackboard is accessible to persons with disabilities, uploaded content may not be.
Instructors should make a conscious effort to make sure content is accessible. Even though you may not have a student with a disability currently enrolled in your course, there are a few things you can do when creating content that will save you time later when you do have a student with a disability. This is not wasted time as you will find some students without disabilities will take advantage of accessible content as well. Additionally, if you usually copy content from one course to another you will be one step ahead because your copied course content will already be accessible.
Also for cognitive disabilities it’s important to build flexibility into your courses. This is done by using many modes of information and creating a clutter-free learning environment.
In an upcoming series of blog posts I will provide information on things you can routinely do when you create content and setup your courses to make it accessible.
*Source: https://help.blackboard.com/en-us/Accessibility/Accessibility_in_Education
by Karen Nichols
I know that a few of us in CAT have already posted suggestions and hints for success in using discussion boards. But I just have to share this guide with you from the Teaching Effectiveness Program produced by the Center on Teaching and Learning at the University of Oregon. Licensed to share through Creative Commons Generating and Facilitating Engaging and Effective Online Discussions (choose the discussionboard.pdf) is an 11 page how-to document that is chock-full of information, resources, research and examples. It is the best attempt I've seen yet that successfully pulls together the myriad pieces of what makes discussion boards work. A bit overwhelmed when I saw "11 pages," I soon discovered that it's actually an easy read. I would love some feedback from you to see if you find this resource as wonderful as I do.
by Janice Florent
Blended courses (also known as hybrid courses) are courses where a portion of the traditional face-to-face instruction is replaced by web-based online learning. For blended learning to work well it entails more than simply replacing class time with online course elements.
In a Faculty Focus article, Rob Kelly writes,
When the online and face-to-face components complement each other as integrated activities in each setting, there is a clear purpose and students understand the relevance of both modes.
In the article, Rob goes on to give the following recommendations for how to successfully integrate the online and face-to-face modes of a blended course:
Creating a blended learning course may not be appropriate for all courses or all instructors. The biggest benefit to a well-designed blended course could be a much improved teaching and learning experience.
You can read more about blended learning strategies in "Blended Learning: Integrating Online and Face-to-Face Courses" and "Strategies for Teaching Blended Learning Courses, Maybe You (and Your Students) Can Have It All" articles.
Image credit: "blended learning graphic overview" by jodieinblack licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
by Karen Nichols
Sue Frantz just posted two items in her Technology for Academics blog that you may find useful in a variety of settings The first post offers up a great way to foster student collaboration no matter what modality you're using to deliver your course. Dropbox has a new feature that allows others to deposit files into your Dropbox account via a URL. Sue Franz does a great job explaining the how-to part in the blog, so let's think of ways we can use this feature called File Requests. If you give your students a group project and they are each responsible for a part of the project, they can then deposit their contribution into the Dropbox of their other group members. Once complete, the group can in turn deposit their final project into your designated Dropbox. I can also see applications for this feature when collaborating with colleagues at a distance.
Sue Frantz' second post centers on engagement. In this instance, ParticiPoll works in a face-to-face setting when you want to use polls and embed the polls in your Power Point presentations. How cool is that? Again, the Technology for Academics blog post explains the how-to. In addition to using it in class, wouldn't this be a useful feature to add engagement in a conference presentation? I've just attended two conferences back to back plus a virtual one this week and the polling attempts were not 100% successful. I want to experiment with this polling app myself for an upcoming conference, but also to see if we can adapt it to be used virtually or at least via Blackboard Collaborate.
So if you find you have a little free time on your hands this summer, I recommend checking out Dropbox File Request and Participoll. Let us know if you do and what you think of these two tools.