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Author: Karen Nichols

Published on Leave a comment on ICYMI–You’re invited to join ETC: Educational Technology Community

You’re invited to join ETC: Educational Technology Community

CAT is forming a Special Interest Group (SIG) for faculty interested in Educational Technology. The Educational Technology Community (ETC) is an interactive component of CAT’s Online Faculty Resource Center in Blackboard and will provide access to research and discussions on this topic. To join, simply email a request to Karen Nichols (knichola@xula.edu).

Once there, you’ll see resources not only for faculty who are designing and teaching online and hybrid courses, but information for adding content to Blackboard for your face to face courses, accessibility resources, etc. In addition, there will be a Discussion section for posting questions and comments as well as an Announcements area where you will receive information on the latest innovations in ed tech, recommendations by your colleagues and other items of interest.

In addition, virtual meetings will be set up using Blackboard Collaborate where we can meet to share and discuss any ideas or perhaps get advice on challenges.

So if you’re interested in Educational Technology, please feel free to join us. The first virtual meeting of ETC will take place on Thursday, February 6 from 2:30pm-3:30pm using Blackboard Collaborate. The link and instructions will be posted in the Announcements section of CAT’s Online Faculty Resource Center. To join ETC, simply email a request to Karen Nichols (knichola@xula.edu). This will be a great opportunity for you to experience how Bb Collaborate works and to start sharing ideas!

Published on Leave a comment on Advantages of Teaching Online

Teaching online has several positive aspects. Here are a few taken from the Teaching and Learning Online:  Communication, Community and Assessment, a handbook for UMass faculty published by the University of Massachusetts:

Teaching online courses can

  • Offer the opportunity to think about teaching in new ways:  Online teaching can allow you to experiment with techniques only available in online environments, such as threaded discussions and webliographies
  • Provide ideas and techniques to implement in traditional courses:  Online email discussions, a frequently-used practice in online learning, can be incorporated into traditional courses to facilitate group work.  Other techniques, such as web-based course calendars and sample papers posted on the internet (with student permission) can easily be incorporated into a traditional course.
  • Expand the reach of the curriculum:  Online teaching can expand existing curriculum to students on a regional, national, and international level.
  • Professional satisfaction:  Teaching online can be a enormously rewarding experience for teachers.  Teachers often cite the diversity of students in online courses as one of the most rewarding aspects of teaching online.
  • Instructor convenience:  Teaching online can offer teachers conveniences not available in traditional classroom settings; for example, at-home office hours and flexible work schedules.

I would like to add to the above advantages that teaching online can provide research and collaboration opportunities.  In addition, the online faculty at Xavier is a very collegiate and congenial group and working with them is another source of satisfaction!

It's interesting to read more of the University of Massachusetts' Teaching and Learning Online Handbook.

Published on Leave a comment on Gadgets and Apps for our New Year’s Resolutions

Happy New Year!
Some of us at this time resolve to live healthier lives during this upcoming year. I thought I would share with you a couple of amusing gadgets available to help us keep our New Year's resolutions as well as a few apps that you may actually find useful and/or interesting.

TechCrunch has created the Happifork. The Happifork monitors how you're eating--speed and amount of food you are trying to eat at one time. If you have too much food on the Happifork, it will shake off the food until it reaches a more optimal amount for you to eat in one bite. I surely wouldn't want to use this gadget at a public place!

Have you heard about Google's talking shoe? Based on your movement (or non-movement) these shoes have attitude and aren't afraid to let you know what they're "thinking." While they can be "encouraging" during a brisk walk or workout, they seem to me to be more of a novelty than a real help to people who are trying to stay on task and move more in the new year. Decide for yourself:

Finally, Molly Kimball, a registered dietician who posts for nola.com, has made a few recommendations that you may find useful in your quest for a healthier lifestyle.
Find Me Gluten-Free, Map My Run and My Fitness Pal are among the ones she suggests. Check out her article and see all of them.

I have a few New Year's resolutions for 2014 and among them are to do a better job of buying locally and to actively be more compassionate. I've found a few sites to help me keep them. Good Eggs not only allows you to place your orders online, but will deliver your groceries to you either to a central meeting place or actually to your home. Most of our locally-grown produce is from the Northshore area and so delivery into New Orleans is usually twice a week. I've also become very interested in the Charter for Compassion as well as Sister Jane Remson's blog "Think About It-Pray About It-Act on It" which gives you the opportunity to be active by contacting your senator about an important issue for example.

Have you made any resolutions for the new year? If so, please share what you're doing and if you've found an app or gadget that is helping you.

Published on Leave a comment on Technology That Gives Back

In this season of gift-giving, I thought it would be a good idea to introduce you to a couple of gadgets that can positively impact people who are in emergency situations such as the recent typhoon in the Philippines.

Gravity Light (from Deciwatt.org) generates light from gravity. Using a sandbag for three seconds gives 25 minutes of light and the procedure can be repeated over and over. Imagine the uses during the nights after a severe storm when one knows electricity will not be available for days or weeks.

Another fun and practical solution is SOCCKET, a useable soccer ball that is a portable generator. You build power by playing with the ball and then you use it as a light source. So kids affected by the typhoon can enjoy a few moments of being a child again while storing up light for the family to see by.

If you know of any other projects of this type, please feel free to share and I wish everyone a very Happy New Year!

P.S. Thanks to lesliefisher.com for the great sessions at LACUE, including one on gadgets. More to follow. KNN

Published on Leave a comment on 3 Interesting Mobile Apps to Engage Students

This past Monday, my friend, colleague and full-time online instructor, Dr. Teresa Canganelli, came to CAT to present 3 mobile apps. For anyone who was unable to attend, I thought I would share them with you.

Tellagami is a free app that allows you to create avatars and record a message for your students up to 30 seconds in length. What a fun and engaging way to reach your students to remind them of an upcoming test or answer a question many of them were asking.

Audioboo is not only an easy and free way to record a message up to 3 minutes long, but it houses a vast library of recordings from around the world on myriad topics.  The site has been flooded with comments and recordings concerning yesterday's passing of Nelson Mandela.  Here is one from the Nelson Mandela Institution.

listen to ‘"Deep gratitude" for #Madiba, says @NOIweala, chairman of Nelson #Mandela Institution, Q&A:’ on Audioboo

Evernote is a wonderful way to manage files, lecture notes, documents , share them, store them and edit them. In addition, Evernote has numerous add-ons, some of which are free as well.  Teresa highly recommended Evernote Clipper which allows you to clip and save web pages.  This feature is great since websites may change or pages may be removed.

If you decide to look into any of these apps and have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me and I’ll be happy to assist. x7692 Karen Nichols

Published on Leave a comment on Help Students Research on the Internet

In an attempt to make students start working on a research project long before 24 hours from the due date, as well as discuss plagiarism and the pitfalls of research on the internet, I've been researching the internet myself.

I checked into Google Alerts.  I've been experimenting with setting up the searches and verifying the results.  It's quite easy to begin using immediately.  So I suggest that at the beginning of the course when discussing the syllabus, instructors take about 5 minutes to have the students set up a Google Alert on their mobile devices for each possible research topic they may wish to explore.

For Google Alerts, there is very little to fill out and you can specify how often to receive notification that matches to your search have been found:

Google Alerts is fast and simple to use
Google Alerts is fast and simple to use.

By having the students set up weekly alerts and seeing that they can limit their searches instead of being overwhelmed with a million hits, it is hoped that at least once a week (or however often they have set up the alert), they will be thinking about their research project throughout the semester rather than at the last minute.  Happy searching!

Published on Leave a comment on National Distance Learning Week

Next week (Nov 11-15) is National Distance Learning Week.

What does that mean for us at XULA Online? Annual events afford us the opportunity to see how far we’ve come and make sure we’re on the right track to get where we want to go. On a national level, we are also part of a larger community of learners, all striving for similar goals.

So, let’s start by looking back. This time last year (November 2012) Xavier had just offered 8 online summer sections in the College of Arts and Sciences and we were gearing up to offer more for the following summer. The FaCTS topic of “Engaging Students in Online Courses” had just been announced and the E Learning Committee had been formed and was meeting to analyze what challenges must be overcome if Xavier were going to make a push to increase online/hybrid course offerings.

Now, in November 2013, Xavier has just offered 28 online/hybrid sections this past summer with an enrollment of over 450 students, and that from very minimal promotion of these courses. The students found the courses because the demand was there. This fall, our FaCTS panel discussed their online experiences to a filled seminar room. The E Learning Committee has been morphed into the XULA Online Advisory Board and tasked to work on Faculty and Student Handbooks among other things. In addition, a respectable number of online/hybrid courses is being offered this fall and in the spring plus plans are being made for an even larger selection of summer courses.

We’re making available to instructors the CAT Online Faculty Resource Center very shortly, have conducted several Blackboard Collaborate training sessions, and have met with individual faculty members and department representatives to discuss future offerings and how to prepare instructors. To celebrate National Distance Learning Week, Quality Matters is offering special workshops and if you’ve already taken the first Quality Matters course, you’re eligible for one of these workshops as well. (If you didn’t receive the email and may be interested, just contact me at x7692.)

Services are being considered for ensuring academic honesty in online test-taking (Respondus Monitor, student readiness to succeed in online classes (SmarterMeasure) and a much-needed 24/7 student technical support service (Blackboard Student Services).  In addition, XULA Online is now part of social media:  xulaonline@xula.edu is our email address; www.xula.edu/xulaonline is our website, and we're on Facebook, Twitter and Linked In.

Quite important for me is that I was fortunate enough to have been chosen as the not so new now Distance Education Coordinator and I’m just thrilled to be learning so much from my CAT colleagues and meeting with faculty and student!. I am doing my best to listen and respond to your suggestions, needs and challenges.

Moving ahead amid the flurry of so much activity in so many different arenas, it’s important to always, always remember that STUDENT LEARNING is our goal for XULA Online. After all, it is called National Distance LEARNING Week! I’m looking forward to November 2014 and excited and curious to see what I’ll have to report then.

David Powell

David Powell explains his recipe for success in Spanish 1020 online.

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Published on 1 Comment on Enhance your (online) classes with virtual tours

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could take our students on a world-wide tour of the greatest museums or laboratories so that they can see original artwork or DNA research being carried out firsthand? With the latest technological advances in 3-D and other apps now so readily available, these same museums and labs have developed and posted online, virtual tours of their treasures. Including these in your online classes or even as a project or enrichment assignment in your face to face classes, can greatly enhance the students' learning experience and have them googling for more.

ABPI (The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry) has actually developed an entire site of tours and activities designed specifically for schools and the virtual tours are user-friendly.

For museums, one of my favorite series of interactive tours is on the site of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. It doesn't hurt that the tour allows you to choose a painting or other piece of art and email it as an ecard to someone. I love to send ecards and what better choice than a specially-chosen work of art for the recipient?

So if you'd like to share with your students a best-loved museum (for me, Musée PIcasso, Antibes) or give them a new and different experience (Alpine Astrovillage AAV Lue-Stailas), spend a few minutes searching the internet and you'll soon find numerous virtual tours that, for a moment, will make your students feel they're on the Riviera or looking up at the stars in the Swiss Alps.

Published on Leave a comment on Quality Matters Conference: Fun and Informative!

I had planned to submit my blog post while at the conference but I was so busy learning and networking that I'm back in the office now.  So here's a quick summary of my experiences.  The Quality Matters organization is comprised of many dedicated professionals and the member institutions are equally concerned with developing and teaching quality online or hybrid courses (QM uses "blended"; we at Xavier use "hybrid") in order to have positive student outcomes. They're also big on "takeaways" so I have literally hundreds of resources now, and will be posting several key ones to CAT's Online Faculty Resource Center (debuting soon). For your information, here are a number of the actual presentations that were posted as well.

My takeaways from the conference are

  1. we can offer workshops for faculty on actually teaching online, which is entirely separate from developing the course
  2. we need to do more to make our courses accessible from the beginning rather than create accommodations after the fact (I also learned that numbers are better than bullets for screen readers so I'll be using numbers from now on)
  3. we don't need to reinvent the wheel--we can partner with other institutions to offer more for our students
  4. size does matter, especially in online language courses
  5. faculty preparation and skills are necessary components for SACS approval of online and hybrid courses/programs

and I could continue, but I think having begun and ended with faculty concerns really shows how important they are to student success and therefore why CAT is dedicated to assisting our faculty in developing and teaching online and hybrid courses for our students at Xavier.

Published on Leave a comment on I just tweeted @FlorenceNightingale

I have to admit that I’ve been skeptical about using Twitter for students. I know all of the research is saying to make use of the social media services that they’re already using if you want to reach them and have good student participation but I've been hesitant to try Twitter.

Well I found out about one project that actually seems to work well!  Twitter sites have been set up for historical figures and characters. You can have your students follow people like William Shakespeare, Florence Nightingale, Benjamin Franklin or King Henry VIII, sites that are already in place. You can also set up your own historical figure on Twitter. (See how to be a historical figure on Twitter.)

Ben Franklin & Friends, pre-Twitter era (iClipart)
Ben Franklin & Friends, pre-Twitter era (iClipart)

The idea of having the students tweet questions and comments to @KingArthur would probably not find favor with the Society for Creative Anachronism, but why not? I can see where the students could become fully engaged in tweeting @BenFranklin (after he’s had a few beers and would be in a happy mood of course). Setting up a Twitter account like this could have uses in several disciplines other than history. As a French instructor, I can certainly see the value in setting these up for famous writers and historical figures we were studying, and then having the students tweet en français.

Remember the party game of explaining your “Last Supper” list of people with whom you’d like to share a meal once you get to heaven? Well, here’s a way to converse with your dream list via Twitter! Let’s see, I need to look for a Twitter account for @BobMarley, @CocoChanel, @ElinorofAquitaine, @LéopoldSédarSenghor and @MahatmaGandhi for starters. Who’s on your dream list? Happy Tweeting!

P.S.  Check out this blog post (where I read about this topic) for more ways to promote creative learning: http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2013/09/5-technologies-to-promote-creative.html