This year's theme is Designing Equitable Foundations for Open Knowledge. Xavier has events for faculty, staff and students all week. Please refer to the schedule for more information. RSVP for Wednesday's Faculty Lecture: knichola@xula.edu.
The Xavier Experience and the New Orleans Experience
This year Xavier rolls out a new core curriculum designed to give students more options to pursue their interests and to explore the breadth of a liberal arts education. While the overall core curriculum hours have been reduced, several new categories of core classes have given faculty an opportunity to create exciting new courses, several of which employ engaged pedagogy, civic-engagement outcomes, and service-learning.
At the 1000 level, two new categories, the Xavier Experience and the New Orleans Experience, offer students unique opportunities to explore themes of Xavier's historic mission within the context of New Orleans and the particular social and economic histories of the communities that make up the city. While the categories are distinct in that one focuses on concepts of social justice and the other on reading New Orleans as text, they also overlap in that both ask students to think critically about connections between their education, their professional goals, and their communities. Xavier and its purpose as a place of learning for many future doctors and scientists, many from historically underserved populations, are not separate from, but rather are a part of, New Orleans and its history of socioeconomic segregation and oppression. It's impossible to think of the history and success of Xavier without the context of the bitter struggle to integrate New Orleans schools in the 1950s and '60s, and the lasting effects of redlining and selective economic neglect that mark the city's poorest neighborhoods today. While Xavier has been noted as an engine of socioeconomic mobility, as in this study from 2017, New Orleans as a whole remains a hub of multigenerational poverty, as revealed in this 2018 report on "income diversity" in which New Orleans ranked 51st out of 60 large cities.
These courses in and of themselves may do little to close this gap, as I've written in the past about the limits of service-learning. But while many of the students will go on to live and work in other communities, many others will live and work in New Orleans, and in this regard, these courses can absolutely make a difference. For some of the students, addressing the city's needs in health care, education, housing, and employment will become their life's work. And these students may look back on the connections drawn in these courses between their education and their community as a major step stone along their path, if not their starting block.
Below are titles and descriptions of some of these courses:
FREEDOM DREAMS: SOCIAL JUSTICE IN THE AFRICAN
AMERICAN IMAGINATION
Social justice in the African American imagination looks at the historical, ideological, and literary expressions of black liberation throughout their history in the US. We will seek to answer the question: How have people of African descent expressed their dreams for freedom, justice, and equality throughout their history in the US? We will answer this question by examining themes and movements, such as: African American acts of resistance, Black Christianity, African American emancipation, black anticolonialism and Negritude, black feminism, Black Power, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the historically black college and university.
COMMUNICATING SOCIAL JUSTICE
Communicating Social Justice examines selected social justice issues (theme to vary
each semester) in relation to communication activism. Using interdisciplinary
approaches, students will analyze the history, theory, and practice of communication activism. Students participate in a series of communication-based activities. Whenever possible, the course incorporates a service-learning project that directly engages students in a communication activism campaign.
PRODUCTION AND CONSUMPTION OF MARDI GRAS
Students will get hands-on and go behind the scenes to develop a deeper
understanding of diverse Mardi Gras practices and the corporations, cottage industries, professional and amateur artists, and clubs, krewes, gangs, and tribes that produce the Mardi Gras events that help New Orleanians celebrate traditions as well as drawing tourists from all over the world. In this context, students will conduct their own interview research to explore questions of Mardi Gras and parading culture participants' understanding of their roles as artists, producers, and consumers.
HOMELESSNESS IN NEW ORLEANS
New Orleans is one of many cities featuring a significant and visible homeless
population. Working from the premise that homelessness represents both a personal “trouble” and a public “issue”, this service- learning course will give students the opportunity to study the multi-faceted causes and consequences of homelessness in New Orleans. We will work to understand homelessness as not only a condition, but as a social concept and process, including its meaning in other U.S. and global contexts. Through service, reflection, discussion, selected readings, data analysis, and guest speakers, students will learn about and reflect upon a range of individual and collective choices and actions that might reduce homelessness. Students enrolled in this course should be prepared for trips off campus outside class time and be eager to serve and to engage in a respectful manner individuals at service learning sites.
Brightspace Tip #64: Grade Book – Search
Have you ever met with a student and wanted to review that student’s grades with the student, but couldn’t because the Grade Book shows the grades of all the other students? This isn't a problem in Brightspace. You can use the Grade Book search to temporarily hide the grades of all the other students and only show the grades for a single student.
Follow these steps to do it.
To display one row in the Grade Book:
- On the NavBar, click Grades.
- On the Enter Grades page, enter the first and last name of the desired student in the Search For field and then click on search icon.
- When done, you should only see the selected student.
Note: If you have more than one student with the same name, you can enter the 900 # of the desired student in the Search For field. Ultimately, your search results should yield the row with the desired student's record.
To display all rows in the Grade Book:
- On the Enter Grades page, click on the Clear Search link.
Want more information?
Brightspace Tip #63: Grade Book
Grades Tool Training Recap
View all the Brightspace training recaps
Brightspace Known Issues
Continuous Delivery release notes
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.
Brightspace Tip #63: Grade Book
The Brightspace Grades Tool is useful for providing students with up-to-date information about their current standing in the course. For instructors, it’s useful for assigning and keeping track of student grades. Students can view grade entries and monitor their progress throughout the course.
As an instructor, you can determine how to set up your Grade Book to best reflect your approach to evaluation, including the grading system and grade scheme that is most appropriate for your course. You can select how grades display to learners, how they update in the Grade Book, and how you want to deal with ungraded items. You can create grade items for projects, assignments, discussions, quizzes, etc. to include in your Grade Book, and even associate them with other tools (e.g. Assignments, Quizzes, Discussions).
Follow these steps to do it.
Listed below are links to how-to documents to help you to use the Grades Tool:
- Grades Tool Quick Reference Guide (pdf)
- Create a Grading System
- Create a Grade Scheme (video)
- Create a Grade Book Category (video)
- Create a Grade Item (video)
- Bonus Points
- Extra Credit
- Associate an Activity with a Grade Item (video)
- Enter Grades (video)
- Create Grade Exemptions (video)
- Delete Grade Items with Associations (video)
- Troubleshoot Final Grades (video)
- Export Grades (video)
- Adjust Final Grades
- Release Final Grades
- Scenario: Final calculated grade using Weighted system
- Grades FAQ
- Final Grades FAQ
Want more information?
Grades Tool Training Recap
View all the Brightspace training recaps
Brightspace Known Issues
Continuous Delivery release notes
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.
Photo Credit: Grade book by David Mulder | CC BY-SA 2.0
Just Encryption: Introduction
In honor of National Cyber Security Awareness Month, I'm launching a series of posts on the subject of encryption in service of social justice.
I've long been fascinated with encryption. As a kid, I thought codes were cool. As an adult, I see the value encryption offers for keeping my personal data secure.
But what, if anything, does encryption have to do with social justice?
Plenty.
I got my first inkling in 2016, just after the election of Donald Trump to the highest office in the land. Under the prior administration, the apparatus of the surveillance state was developed to levels previously unimaginable. Obama handed that system to Trump.
Of course, if you're not concerned about our own government spying on us, perhaps you're concerned about foreign powers. There's no denying that international cyberwarfare is real. There are also hackers and straight-up cyber criminals. Not to mention those big corporations.
Whoever's doing the snooping, the harm is felt disproportionately by marginalized communities — as is typically the case when power relations are manifestly unequal.
Rights must be understood and exercised in order to afford us any protection. That holds as true for privacy rights in the digital realm as it did in the analog era of the civil rights movement.
Furthermore, scholars have a special interest in freedom of inquiry, germane to all those working in the field of education. Educating on these issues is aligned with Xavier's mission, and it's vitally important that our faculty and staff understand what's at stake.
As noted in a recent United Nations report, encryption is emerging as a keystone for human rights in the 21st century:
Encryption and anonymity, today's leading vehicles for online security, provide individuals with a means to protect their privacy, empowering them to browse, read, develop and share opinions and information without interference and enabling journalists, civil society organizations, members of ethnic or religious groups, those persecuted because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, activists, scholars, artists and others to exercise the rights to freedom of opinion and expression.
Encryption is simply the practice of putting your data into a secret code so other people can't read it. It's an important tool for maintaining privacy and security online. Before the 2016 election, writing for TechCrunch, Steven Renderos and Mark Tseng Putterman observed that "for activists and people of color, strong encryption is essential."
In the days and weeks ahead, I'll be publishing a series of simple tips to help you get started using encryption more frequently. I'm far from expert myself, so I'll be learning as I go. If you have any questions or suggestions, don't hesitate to let me know.
Next up: Using Signal for secure text messaging.
Brightspace Tip #62: Simplify Assignment Collection
Use the Assignments tool to help you set and manage deadlines, unclutter your inbox, and save trees.
The Assignments tool is an efficient way to manage and collect your student's individual and group assignments digitally. Brightspace's Assignments Tool allows instructors to create a secure location for students to submit class assignments.
The Assignments tool allows instructors to set up a place for students to submit their assignments digitally, with the ability to:
- Control the window for submission
- Facilitate individual submissions or group submissions (provided the groups have been set up using the Groups tool first)
- Collect and assess submissions (with a connection to the Grades tool, if needed)
- Enable plagiarism detection through Turnitin
Follow these steps to do it.
To create an assignment submission folder:
- On the NavBar (of the course you want to create a submission folder), click Activities and then choose Assignments from the drop-down menu.
- Click New Submission Folder.
- Enter a Name for your submission folder.
- Select a Folder Type.
- Do any of the following:
- Select a Category or click New Category to organize your assignment submission folders.
- Select a Grade Item, or click New Grade Item.
- To assign a score, enter a value in the Out Of field.
- To associate a rubric to the folder, click Add Rubric, or Create Rubric in New Window.
- Enter instructions in the Instructions field.
- Add attachments in the Attached Files area.
- Expand Show Submission Options and select the appropriate settings.
- Enter your email address in the Notification Email field to receive an email message when a new submission is uploaded to this folder.
- Click Save.
Note: You can add the Turnitin plagiarism detection feature to the assignment submission folder using the options in the Turnitin tab. Follow these instructions to enable Turnitin for the assignment submission folder.
Want More Information?
Assignments:
- Assignments Tool Quick Reference Guide (pdf)
- Create an assignment
- View assignment submissions
- Evaluate assignment submissions
- Email students who haven't submitted an assignment
- Allow special access for assignments
- Assignments FAQ
- How to submit Assignments video [1:59]
- Learner FAQ - Assignments
- Learner FAQ - Assignment - Errors
Turnitin:
- Enable Turnitin Feedback Studio® for assignments
- Turnitin Feedback Studio - Instructor
- Quick Tips for Mastering Feedback Studio
- Turnitin Feedback Studio - Student
- Students - View your Turnitin assignment feedback
Assignments Tool Training Recap
View all the Brightspace training recaps
Brightspace Known Issues
Continuous Delivery release notes
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.
Conversation #72: Curtis Wright on Student Affairs
A conversation with Curtis Wright about Student Affairs.
Links for this episode:
- Story from Biz New Orleans
- Liberal Education, a publication from the American Association of Colleges & Universities
- National Association of Student Personnel Administrators
Transcript:
Coming soon!
Brightspace Tip #61: September Continuous Delivery Updates
D2L (the company that owns Brightspace) uses Continuous Delivery to update our Brightspace system. The Continuous Delivery model gives us regular monthly updates allowing for incremental and easily integrated changes with no downtime required for our Brightspace system.
Our Continuous Delivery update occurs on the 4th Thursday of each month. D2L provides release notes to help users stay up-to-date with the changes.
Here are a few updates in the September 2018/10.8.5 release that were added to our system this month:
1) Content – Print/Download Function added to Overview
Users can now download and print an uploaded syllabus from the Course Overview area of Content.
2) Discussions – Create groups and section threads in existing topics
Instructors can now associate existing discussion topics to a new group or section during the group or section creation process. In addition, users can associate existing discussion topics to groups or sections not associated with any other discussion topic.
3) Groups and Sections – Differentiate between similar learner names in groups and sections
Instructors can now differentiate between duplicate learner names by displaying the username or Org Defined Id beside a learner's name.
4) HTML Editor - Add quicklinks to content modules, submodules and course overview
Users can now link directly to content modules, submodules, and course overviews directly from the Insert Quicklink option in the HTML editor. This change allows users to insert quicklinks directly to specific portions of course content within any tool with the HTML Editor. Previously, only a link to the Content tool was available from the Insert Quicklink option in the HTML editor.
5) HTML Editor - Chemistry equation writing function available in the equation editor
A chemistry equation writing function is now available in the HTML Editor. Users can select this feature directly within the equation editor.
6) Import/Export/Copy Components - Copy awards between courses
When copying components between courses, instructors can now choose to include awards and their release conditions. This allows instructors to reuse awards across different courses and sections in Brightspace.
7) Release Conditions - Released final grade score condition type
The "Released final grade score" is a new release condition type. Instructors can now release items such as content and awards to learners either based on the learner’s final grade being marked as released or based on their final grade being marked as released and the grade meeting a set threshold. For example, a course survey could be released to a learner once their final grade is released or an award could be released to a learner once their final grade is released and they have received a certain grade. This can be completed everywhere a user can create and attach release conditions.
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. Instructors can now use intelligent agents to complete certain tasks based on a learner’s final grade. For example, with the released final grade score condition type, an intelligent agent can now identify students whose final grade did not meet a set threshold and automatically send a notification to interested parties.
If you are interested in getting more information about these and all the September Continuous Delivery updates, refer to the Brightspace Platform September 2018/10.8.5 Release Notes.
Additonally, refer to the Brightspace Release Notes for Continuous Delivery Releases, for details about current, past, and to preview upcoming continuous delivery updates.
Want more information?
View current, past, and preview upcoming Continuous Delivery release notes
View all the Brightspace training recaps
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.
Attitude Adjustment
Writing in the Journal of Service Learning in Higher Education in January of 2018, Dr. T. Andrew Carswell of Gannon University, a Catholic university in Erie, Pennsylvania, describes a research project undertaken to discover the capacity of service-learning courses to change student attitudes about poverty. His premise is that we know through other research that Americans are as likely to attribute poverty to lack of effort among the poor as to circumstances beyond their control. Attitudes of attribution also affect views of social programs to address poverty.
Meanwhile service-learning courses have been shown through research to improve student outcomes for citizenship, empathy, compassion, and understanding of social problems. Students are more likely to exhibit greater "efficacy to make the world a better place" (Carswell). Though this type of goal makes sense for a course at a Catholic university such as Gannon, or Xavier, and many liberal arts schools do include such goals in their missions, traditional-classroom courses often bypass such goals in favor of more academically assessable outcomes.
Students in Dr. Carswell's upper-level capstone psychology class engaged in 30 hours of community service working alongside underprivileged people, while studying poverty in the classroom. One of the outcomes of the course was that students would have a more positive view of people living in poverty, and Dr. Carswell set out to measure whether this was achieved.
Students in the course chose from four community groups to work with, including an after-school program, a food bank, a group that worked with immigrants and refugees, and a group that worked with recently released criminal offenders. The option let students decide what type of work they wanted to do, and many worked with more than one group. Classroom contact hours were reduced, (perhaps a luxury of a senior capstone course) and writing assignments asked students to draw connections between scholarly articles on poverty and experiences at the sites. Attitudes were gauged using pre and post-course completion of what's called the Undergraduate Perceptions of Poverty Tacking Survey.
Dr. Carswell found that student attitudes improved toward social welfare programs, and toward their own willingness to take action to help those in poverty. Student belief that people in poverty have limited access to valuable resources also increased. However, there was no real change in student attitudes toward perceived differences between the poor and non-poor. Nor was there an increase in belief in rights to basic necessities. Dr. Carswell discusses several possible reasons for the non-change in perceptions of in-group/out-group differences, including research that suggests this type of intergroup contact best affects intergroup attitudes when the groups are of equal status and the contact is cooperative in nature.
This last point relates to the ongoing movement within service-learning to effect meaningful change and to avoid perpetuating a classist, "service"-based hierarchy. This broad goal may prove service-learning's most elusive. (See my interview with Dr. Randy Stoecker on this problem http://cat.xula.edu/food/conversation-63/.) And we should also keep in mind that Dr. Carswell's sample was 18 students in one class. Yet, his results are encouraging when we consider the degree to which misperceptions about the poor permeate our society and drive public policy. Dr. Carswell's students and many others who complete courses like these will go on to shape policy and help shift perceptions as they move into professional society.
Though there is much work to be done, examples like these affirm the vital work of service-learning and higher education.
Brightspace Tip #60: ePortfolios
An electronic portfolio (also known as an eportfolio) is a collection of electronic evidence (artifacts) assembled and managed by a user, usually on the Web. Such electronic evidence may include electronic files, images, multimedia, blog entries, and hyperlinks. If the ePortfolio is online, users can maintain it dynamically over time.
The American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) recently published a study on "Fulfilling the American Dream: Liberal Education and the Future of Work." In it, they report:
78% of executives and 81% of hiring managers find ePortfolios useful when evaluating recent graduates, versus 51% of executives and 48% of hiring managers who find college transcripts useful.
Students gain a number of benefits from incorporating portfolios in their learning. Here are a few benefits from an Educational Technology and Mobile Learning article:
- Portfolios enable students to record their learning and document their growth over a period of time.
- They provide students with a venue through which they can showcase their learning.
- They can be used as a tool for self-assessment, self-reflection and personal development.
- They help students focus on the process of learning rather than the end product.
- They promote deeper learning as students actively engage in the learning process.
- They develop students metacognitive skills (reflective practices) and help them take control of their learning.
- They empower students' voice.
- They are a ‘method of self-discovery and confidence building’.
- They help students develop personal and academic identities.
- They assist students in locating their strengths and weaknesses and plan for future improvement.
- They invite teachers' feedback and input from peers.
- They help students develop their writing skills.
- A portfolio presents concrete evidence of the learner's work and achievements to prospective employers.
A good ePortfolio is both about being a product (a digital collection of artifacts) and a process (of reflecting on those artifacts and what they represent).
Our Brightspace system includes an ePortfolio tool that is available to all users. The Brightspace ePortfolio tool is typically used by learners to collect samples of their work ("artifacts"), write about experiences they have ("reflections") and then choose whether to share them with others (like peers, instructors, or even potential employers).
We’ve prepared this ePortfolio FAQ to provide you with answers to questions about the Brightspace ePortfolio tool.
Additionally, if you're interested in learning more about Brightspace's ePortfolio tool or if you want to learn more about ePortfolios in general, you should attend the upcoming CCE: Introducing ePortfolios workshop.
Want More Information?
ePortfolio Introduction video [3:28]
About ePortfolio
ePortfolio FAQ
ePortfolio how-to documents
View all the Brightspace training recaps
Brightspace Known Issues
Continuous Delivery release notes
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.