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Published on Leave a comment on Brightspace Tip #240: New VoiceThread Assignments

ICYMI, VoiceThread (VT) announced their transition plan to move to new VoiceThread assignments. The new VoiceThread assignments are a major overhaul and redesign of the entire experience. VoiceThread has added lots of new features, tightened the integration with our learning management system, and streamlined workflows to better guide everyone through the assignments process.

October 2020 through June 2021 is the official transition period for the new VT assignments. During this time institutions and instructors can adopt the new assignments. All courses and institutions that have not yet adopted new assignments will be automatically upgraded at 11:59pm Eastern Time on June 30, 2021.

new interface for the three VoiceThread Assignment types
The new interface for the VoiceThread Assignment types

Instructors can transition to the new VT assignments now. What happens when you update? First and foremost, none of your past assignments will break! You and your students will start seeing the upgraded interfaces described in the videos below, but no work will be lost, and everyone can continue completing and grading existing assignments without interruption. Just keep in mind that old assignments will retain old features and policies. To take advantage of all new policies and features, instructors will need to build a new assignment. Once you update, the new assignments you create will use all new features.

Updates to Assignment Setup - For Instructors

Updates to Student Submission

Updates to Grading - For Instructors

If you are ready to transition to new assignments before the automatic upgrade that will occur on June 30th, you should enable the option to start using the new features for the course on your course's VT Home Page. You have to enable the option for each course that you want to start using the new assignment feature. Watch this video for instructions.

Want more information?

Transition plan for new VT assignments
How to transition
Enable new VT assignments feature video [8:09]
How to use new VT assignments
Submitting new VT assignments - Students

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call Janice Florent: (504) 520-7418.

Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.

Published on Leave a comment on Gratitude

The opportunity to work at CAT-FD as the Faculty in Residence for new faculty support was really exciting.  That is partly because I had experienced the friendly and caring atmosphere around CAT-FD for a long time myself.  At the beginning, I attended CAT-FD workshops only if I thought I really lacked the knowhow that a workshop would provide and I knew that I badly needed what I would learn there to teach or work with students.  But later, my purpose of coming to CAT-FD was a mix of the drive to learn something new and also the desire to meet and get to know the CAT-FD staff and attendees during those events.  I think the understanding that I will always have a good time at CAT-FD got progressively stronger as my time at Xavier went by.  I am so grateful for the relaxed and mind-clearing experience that the CAT-FD staff impart to me all the time.  CAT-FD welcomes everyone all the time and you will find it home too.  I especially hope that the new faculty would start working with CAT closely from the beginning of their time here.

Leave a comment on Conversation #104: Pamela Waldron-Moore on Teaching a Just Transition (Part 1)

A conversation between Pamela Waldron-Moore (Xavier University of Louisiana) and Bart Everson (CAT+FD) on teaching, learning, and a just transition.

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Pamela Waldron-Moore is Professor of Political Science at Xavier University of Louisiana, where she has taught since 1998. She also has the distinction of being named the Leslie R. Jacobs Endowed Professor in Liberal Arts Education at her institution. She holds a Ph.D. in political science with specialization in comparative politics and international relations. She has taught a range of courses at the university level in the Caribbean and the United States. Her teaching and research expertise lies in exploration of themes related to the political economy of development, industrialized democracies; international political economy, international law and politics, gender inequality, climate justice, knowledge economics, democratization, global citizenship and African feminisms. The idiographic breadth of her focus includes Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America; Eastern Europe, and the Southern United States. Empirically, race, ethnicity, gender, class and culture are at the intersections of her analyses on perceptions of environmental risk, economic insecurity, gender inequity and strategies for reimagining an international economic order in pursuit of global social justice. She is published in several peer reviewed journals and is an annual contributor to discourses on transformative pedagogy. She is trained in the implementation of mental health practices and approaches to restorative justice within the academy. Growing up in Georgetown, Guyana, she has served as a career diplomat representing her homeland at the United Nations and the Court of St. James, London. Her hobbies are global travel, poetry, elocution, and exercise with Zumba. She has received Keynote Speaker awards for invited addresses to women’s leadership organizations and won the prestigious 2018 Jewel and James Prestage Mentorship Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.

Bart Everson is a media artist and creative generalist at Xavier University's Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Faculty Development. His recent work draws on integrative learning, activism, critical perspectives on technology, and Earth-based spiritual paths.

Links for this episode:

Transcript:

Coming soon!

Published on Leave a comment on Assessments in a Virtual Environment

clipart of laptop screen with online assessment document

A common question in online learning is “How do we keep students from cheating in online exams?” A shift from traditional means of assessment (quizzes, tests, exams) to authentic and alternative assessments is critical in virtual settings.

If faculty try to assess their students the same way they did in a face-to-face setting, they will most likely find themselves frustrated, as well as frustrating their students.

In a recent Faculty Focus article, Laura McLaughlin, EdD, and Joanne Ricevuto, EdD, provided some recommendations to improve the use of assessments in virtual environments and decrease concerns regarding cheating. Their recommendations are:

  1. Allow choice in assessments: Let students decide how they will demonstrate their learning.
  2. Authentic and stackable assessments: Students should be told why they are assigned a particular assessment, and why it is relevant to their learning.
  3. Trust students: Provide alternative assessments (not quizzes and tests) where the concern of cheating is off the table.
  4. Frequent feedback and communication: Provide feedback that helps learners improve their learning.

Teaching in a virtual environment creates an opportunity to rethink your practices, try something new, and embrace deeper and more engaging ways of assessing students without using lockdown browsers or worrying about students cheating.

If this has piqued your interest, you can read more in this Assessments in a Virtual Environment: You Won’t need that Lockdown Browser! article.

Did you miss our (Re)Thinking Exams workshop? If you want to learn about ways you can challenge your students to demonstrate what they've learned while teaching in an online environment, watch this (Re)Thinking Exams workshop recording. In this workshop, Dr. Elizabeth Yost Hammer and Dr. Jay Todd discussed and demonstrated ways that focused active learning activities can be used in place of more traditional methods of assessment like quizzes and tests.

The sudden shift to remote learning has led to concerns about new opportunities for students to engage in unauthorized shortcuts. Last spring, three academic integrity and STEM professionals from the University of Maryland Global Campus, a primarily online institution, shared research on academic integrity in online courses, strategies for promoting integrity in remote learning environments, and examples of how content learning is achieved in any setting designed for online education. ICYMI, here's a link to the Proactive Approaches for Academic Integrity in Remote and Online Learning workshop recording.

Image credit: image by mohamed_hassan from Pixabay

Published on Leave a comment on ICYMI: Student Engagement in Synchronous Zoom Class Sessions

person in white long sleeve shirt using MacBook Pro

Many faculty are teaching remotely as a result of the pandemic. One topic related to teaching remotely that comes up often is student engagement during Zoom class meetings. Instructors who meet their students synchronously through Zoom want to know that the students are paying attention and are engaged during the class session. Some instructors feel that for student engagement in a synchronous class they should force the students to turn their cameras on during the class meetings. This article by Karen Costa, a Faculty Development Facilitator, explains why it is a really bad idea to force students to turn their cameras on from a trauma-awareness and equity perspective.

Are you looking for ideas for student engagement in Zoom sessions that do not require you to force your students to turn their cameras on? In an article posted on LinkedIn, Karen Costa provides some practical strategies that can help you to engage your students in a Zoom session. A few of her strategies are:

  • Encourage students to use non-verbal feedback including raise/lower virtual hand, answer yes/no to questions, speed up/slow down, and emoji reactions (clapping hands, thumbs up).
  • Ask informal questions throughout the session and encourage students to use the chat to engage with you and their peers.
  • Use formal and/or informal polls.
  • Embrace the pause. Pause during the class session to give students time to think and answer.
  • Invite students to share out via audio and or audio/video in addition to answering in the chat.
  • Teach students how to be on-camera in a Zoom session (e.g., lighting, background, virtual background, mute/unmute microphone).
  • Normalize the fear of being on-camera.
  • Try using breakout rooms.
  • Make the chat the heart of your session.
  • Set the tone for engagement from moment one.

If this has piqued your interest, you can read more about these strategies in Karen’s Making Shapes in Zoom article.

Also, we have Zoom how-to resources on our CAT FooD blog. You can find links for the Zoom how-to resources here:

Photo credit: Photo by Good Faces from Unsplash

Published on Leave a comment on Brightspace Tip #239: Work To Do Widget

The “Work To Do” widget is a new feature implemented in our May Continuous Delivery Update. The Work To Do widget was designed for learners and it displays all their overdue and upcoming learning activities across courses or within a course. This widget can help learners to keep track of assignments and activities that are due.

Now, all quizzes, assignments, checklists, etc., with due or end dates in the near future or past appear in one place on the learner’s My homepage in the “Work To Do” widget. Overdue work appears at the top of the list, and upcoming items appear below.

Example of the Work To Do widget
Example of the Work To Do widget

Learners will see the “Work To Do” widget on their My Home page as well as their course homepages. The learner will be able to see overdue and upcoming learning activities for each course where the default course homepage is being used.

Example of the Work To Do widget with no activities due
Example of the Work To Do widget showing no activities due

The Work To Do widget can be seen by users with the role of student. Instructors will see the Work To Do widget when they view the course as a student.

Note: Instructors who have opted to customize their course homepage and want their students to be able to see the Work To Do widget on their customized course homepage, will have to add the widget to the course homepage.

For additional information and frequently asked questions about the Work To Do widget, see the following article in the Brightspace Community: Introducing the Work To Do Widget.

Want more information?

Brightspace Tip #50: Customize Your Course Homepage
Homepages and Widgets
Design a Course Homepage with Widgets (pdf)

View all the Brightspace training recaps
Instructors Quick Start Tutorial
Continuous Delivery release notes
Brightspace Known Issues
Request a sandbox course
Sign-up for Brightspace training sessions
You can find Brightspace help at D2L's website.
Join the Brightspace Community.
Try these Brightspace How-To documents.
Visit our Brightspace FAQs for additional Brightspace information
or schedule a one-on-one session, email, or
call Janice Florent: (504) 520-7418.

Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.

Published on Leave a comment on ICYMI: Distracted Minds

African American using laptop and mobile phone at the same time

James M. Lang has written a series of articles for the Chronicle of Higher Education on distraction and attention in higher education. The articles draw from his new book, Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It. In his book he makes a compelling argument that rather than thinking about how to ban distractions you should focus on creating learning environments that support and sustain attention. If this has piqued your interest, you can find his series of articles on distracted minds at these links:

Photo Credit: #WOCinTech Chat / CC BY 2.0

Published on Leave a comment on Brightspace Tip #238: Intelligent Agents

Would you like to congratulate your students for a job well done or give them a nudge when they might need to work harder -- without having to do a lot of extra work to make it happen? The Brightspace Intelligent Agents tool can help automate this process for you.

security camera

Intelligent Agents allow instructors to delegate some of the course communication and notification tasks to the system, based on specific triggering activities in the course. Intelligent Agents can be used to both recognize student achievement and warn of potential problems. For example, you can use Intelligent Agents to:

  • Check for users that have not logged into the course
  • Check for users that have not logged in within a specific number of days
  • Notify users with grades below a certain level
  • Congratulate users with grades above a certain level
  • Check for users that view a specific content topic

The automatic notifications that are generated when specified course performance criteria are met can be sent to instructors, advisors, and/or students.

Repetitive emails may lose their effectiveness, so use Intelligent Agents sparingly. Consider using Intelligent Agents when there isn't a better way of communicating. Ask yourself,

  • Would an announcement work better?
  • Would a personally crafted email work better?
  • Would a discussion board posting work better?

If the answer is no, then consider using an Intelligent Agent!

Follow these steps to do it.

To create an Intelligent Agent:

Want more information?

Intelligent Uses of Intelligent Agents
Intelligent Agents Tool Quick Reference Guide (pdf)
Create an Intelligent Agent (video)
View and Edit the Schedule of an Intelligent Agent (video)
Delete and Restore Intelligent Agents (video)
Perform a Practice Run for an Intelligent Agent (video)
Manually Run an Intelligent Agent (video)
Brightspace Tip #237: Release Conditions

View all the Brightspace training recaps
Instructors Quick Start Tutorial
Continuous Delivery release notes
Brightspace Known Issues
Request a sandbox course
Sign-up for Brightspace training sessions
You can find Brightspace help at D2L's website.
Join the Brightspace Community.
Try these Brightspace How-To documents.
Visit our Brightspace FAQs for additional Brightspace information
or schedule a one-on-one session, email, or
call Janice Florent: (504) 520-7418.

Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.

Image credit: image by stanvpetersen from Pixabay

Published on Leave a comment on Brightspace Tip #237: Release Conditions

signal lights

Release conditions allow instructors to create a custom learning path through the materials in their course. When a release condition is attached to an item, users cannot see that item until they meet the associated condition.

For example, instructors can setup release conditions to:

  • Require students to complete an activity (e.g. Syllabus Quiz, Introduce Yourself discussion forum) before accessing course content.
  • Require students to obtain a certain percentage on an activity (e.g. 100% on Syllabus Quiz) to access content items.
  • Require students to complete a non-graded activity before accessing a graded activity.
  • Release an answer key to students who completed the assignment.
  • Require students to view a content topic before gaining access to a quiz.
  • Require students to post to a discussion topic before they can see a content module.
  • Release content based on a student's group enrollment to customize the content each group receives.
  • Require students to acknowledge they have read and agree to an honor pledge before releasing a quiz.

Release conditions can also be added to Intelligent Agents to create email notifications for users. For example, instructors can create an Intelligent Agent that would automatically send a reminder email to users who have not yet completed a required quiz or assignment in the course.

release conditions example
Example of multiple Release Conditions applied to a module

If you attach multiple conditions to an item, users must meet all conditions before they can access the item. For example, you could require users to visit the first three content topics in a unit before gaining access to an associated quiz.

NOTE: Once a user meets a release condition, the condition is cleared for that user and cannot be reset. For example, if you attach a release condition to a discussion topic requiring users to achieve more than 60% on a quiz before they can access that topic, and one of your participants receives 72% on the quiz but you adjust their grade to 55% they will be able to access the topic because they did meet the requirement at some point.

Want more information?

Getting Started with Release Conditions (pdf)
Adding Release Conditions
Create a Custom Learning Path in a Course
Customize Learning Paths Using Release Conditions (video)
Content - Attach a Release Condition (video)
Quizzes - Attach a Release Condition to a Quiz (video)
Awards - Add a Release Condition to an Award (video)
Best Practices for Setting Release Conditions
Intelligent Agents
Working with Groups

View all the Brightspace training recaps
Instructors Quick Start Tutorial
Continuous Delivery release notes
Brightspace Known Issues
Request a sandbox course
Sign-up for Brightspace training sessions
You can find Brightspace help at D2L's website.
Join the Brightspace Community.
Try these Brightspace How-To documents.
Visit our Brightspace FAQs for additional Brightspace information
or schedule a one-on-one session, email, or
call Janice Florent: (504) 520-7418.

Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.

Image Credit: image by WikimediaImages from Pixabay

Published on Leave a comment on Brightspace Tip #236: Hide Inactive Courses by Unpinning Them

push pin

The My Courses widget (on the My Home page) uses tile-based images to make finding your courses easier. Users can choose which courses they see in their My Courses widget by pinning and unpinning courses.

  • Pinning a course makes it appear in the My Courses widget.
  • Unpinning a course makes it disappear from the My Courses widget.
  • Pinning a course also makes it rise to the top of the Select a Course list and on the My Courses widget.

Search through all of your courses and manually pin and unpin courses to ensure that your most relevant courses are visible on the My Home page.

Follow these steps to do it.

To pin/unpin a course, you should:

  1. From the Minibar, click Select a course (i.e., the waffle icon).

    2. Select a Course

  2. Type the name of the course that you want to pin or find it by searching in the Search for a course field or scroll down to find the course.
  3. Click the Pin icon beside the course. The pinned course will move to the top of the Select a Course list and to the first position in the My Courses widget.

    4. pin/unpin course

  4. To unpin a course click the Pin icon beside the course.

Change the order of your pinned courses:

If you want to completely change the order in which your courses are displayed, unpin all your courses and then pin them in the reverse order of how you want them to appear in the My Courses widget. The course that is pinned last will appear first.

Want more information?

Pin courses to the top of the Select a Course list
How to Pin Courses (pdf)
How to Reorder Pinned Courses

View all the Brightspace training recaps
Instructors Quick Start Tutorial
Continuous Delivery release notes
Brightspace Known Issues
Request a sandbox course
Sign-up for Brightspace training sessions
You can find Brightspace help at D2L's website.
Join the Brightspace Community.
Try these Brightspace How-To documents.
Visit our Brightspace FAQs for additional Brightspace information
or schedule a one-on-one session, email, or
call Janice Florent: (504) 520-7418.

Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.

Image credit: Push Pin 2c by Arvin61r58 from OpenClipArt