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A Lesson Plan is a planning tool that can be created for the instructor’s use (for example, as an organizing or planning tool), or for presenting content to students. Simply put, a lesson plan is a container for content similar to a learning module or folder that can hold and organize course items. You can create lesson plans within your course to hold lesson profiles, instructional objectives, and the content items students need to complete a lesson.


lesson plan
Example of a student view of a lesson plan: A - lesson profile and instructional objectives; B - content

Adding lesson plans to a course can benefit students in several ways. You have the option of adding information for students to view alongside of the content to help them understand the objectives and intended result of their learning. You can provide students with information on how their knowledge will be measured, the needed materials, the duration of the instruction, and what they should have learned after the instruction. The more information students have at the start of the lesson, the more prepared they are for the content ahead.

Follow these steps to do it.

To create a Lesson Plan:

  1. Turn Edit Mode ON.
  2. Access a content area, learning module, or folder that you want to add the new lesson plan to.
  3. On the menu bar, roll your mouse over [Build Content] then click on [Lesson Plan].
  4. Lesson Plans are created in two steps based on the two tabs appearing on the Create Lesson Plan page:
lesson plan

Content Information: This tab contains general information about the instructor and objectives. This information appears at the top of the lesson plan in a gray box when students access the lesson plan or when you view it with Edit Mode turned OFF.

Curriculum Resources: This tab contains the lesson plan’s content items. You can create all content types in a lesson plan just as you can in a content area, learning module, or folder.

Want more information?

About Lesson Plans
How to create a lesson plan (video)
Content Folders, Lesson Plans, and Learning Modules Compared
Explore Blackboard’s On Demand Learning Center.
Try these Blackboard How-To documents.
Visit the Blackboard FAQs for additional blackboard information
or schedule a one-on-one session, email, or
call Janice Florent: (504) 520-7418.

A Learning Module is a collection of content items focused on a specific subject that students can navigate at their own pace. For example, a Learning Module about the solar system can include lecture notes, links to websites with pictures and information for all the planets, as well as assignments.

A Learning Module organizes information using a table of contents that lists everything contained within the module. Instructors can create a structured path for progressing through the items. The path can be set so that students must view content sequentially, or set to permit users to view the content in any order.


learning modules
Components of a Learning Module: A – table of contents; B – content frame; C – navigation; D – current content page being viewed

Follow these steps to do it.

To create a Learning Module:

  1. Turn Edit Mode ON.
  2. Access a content area, learning module, lesson plan, or folder that you want to add the new learning module to.
  3. On the menu bar, roll your mouse over [Build Content] then click on [Learning Module].
  4. On the Create Learning Module page, enter a Name for the Learning Module.
  5. Optionally, type a description in the Text box.
  6. Select the options for Availability, View, and Table of Contents.
  7. Click [Submit].

Note: A newly created Learning Module will be empty. Any type of content, including text, audio, video, assignments, or even a Mashup may be included in a Learning Module. Click the link for the Learning Module in the content area to access it. Files are added or edited in a Learning Module in the same manner as they are in any content area.

Want more information?

About Learning Modules
About Content Folders
Best Practices: Content Folder vs Learning Module
Explore Blackboard’s On Demand Learning Center.
Try these Blackboard How-To documents.
Visit the Blackboard FAQs for additional blackboard information
or schedule a one-on-one session, email, or
call Janice Florent: (504) 520-7418.

1

Folders are useful for organizing and structuring content in a course content area. Folders are intended to hold collections of items. For example, you may add folders for each chapter, each module, or each week of the course to a content area. You can use folders to organize the content area by content-type (e.g. Assignments, Assessments, Group Projects).

folders

Once a folder is created, you can add content and "subfolders" to it. All of the content types available in content areas may be added to a folder.

Additionally, having too many subfolders can make your course difficult to navigate. As a general rule, if it takes more than three mouse clicks to access the course material, reconsider how you have that part of your course organized.

Follow these steps to do it.

To create a new folder:

  1. Turn Edit Mode ON.
  2. Access the content area, module, lesson plan, or folder you want to add the new folder to.
  3. On the menu bar, roll your mouse over [Build Content] then click on [Content Folder].
  4. Enter a Name for the folder.
  5. Select your folder options.
  6. Click [Submit].

Note: Your course is created with default content areas. You can customize the course menu if you would like to add a folder that is not listed by default to the course menu. Refer to Bb tip #117 for instructions on customizing the course menu.

Want more information?

How to create a content folder
Explore Blackboard’s On Demand Learning Center.
Try these Blackboard How-To documents.
Visit the Blackboard FAQs for additional blackboard information
or schedule a one-on-one session, email, or
call Janice Florent: (504) 520-7418.

2

course menu

The Course Menu appears on the left side of your course window and contains links to materials and tools within the course. All Blackboard courses are created with a default course menu (e.g. text links on a blue background and default content areas.) You can structure your course menu to fit your needs. You can personalize your course menu with your own wording, order, colors and styles.

Follow these steps to do it.

To create a link on the course menu:

  1. Turn Edit Mode ON.
  2. Roll your mouse over the plus sign above the course menu. The Add Menu Item drop-down list appears.
  3. Select the type of content to create.
  4. Type a Name for the link. Complete any other required text boxes, such as URL for Web Link.
  5. Select the Available to Users check box to enable users to see the link on the course menu. You can create content ahead of time, make it unavailable, and then make it available at the appropriate time.
  6. Click [Submit].
  7. A link to the new content appears at the bottom of the course menu. You can drag-and-drop the link into a new position by rolling your mouse over the link and then clicking on the cross arrow on the left of the link and drag-and-drop the link into a new position.

To remove, show/hide, or delete a course menu item:

  1. Turn Edit Mode to ON.
  2. Roll your mouse over the link and then click on the dropdown arrow on the right of the item.
  3. Click on [Rename] to change the link title. Select [Hide Link] to make it unavailable to students. Click [Show Link] to make it available to students. Select [Delete] to permanently remove the item.

To change the color and style of the course menu:

  1. Goto the [Control Panel] for the course and click on [Customization] to expand it.
  2. Click on [Teaching Style].
  3. Choose your menu style, layout, and content appearance settings.
  4. Click [Submit].

Want more information?

Understanding the Course Menu
Course Style Options
Explore Blackboard’s On Demand Learning Center.
Try these Blackboard How-To documents.
Visit the Blackboard FAQs for additional blackboard information
or schedule a one-on-one session, email, or
call Janice Florent: (504) 520-7418.

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by Karen Nichols
A few of our veteran online instructors recently had a panel on the positives of teaching online and hybrid courses. At the last minute, we decided to record the discussion. It worked out very well and we created and disseminated it as a podcast which was helpful to instructors who were unable to attend. Thanks to Bart Everson for helping us at the last minute but having forgotten this option in the beginning really gave me pause.

There are myriad programs and apps to produce amazing visuals and videos which we frequently present and write about. After the above incident, I thought I'd also provide information for the auditory side. eLearning Industry just published an article yesterday, "Audio in eLearning: Top 10 Tips For eLearning Professionals" which contains several best practices.  I've chosen three here to give you a sampling of their recommendations:

  • Have your students show their knowledge by creating and submitting an audio presentation.  I have had my French students record themselves reciting a French poem and then discussing certain aspects of it.
  • Provide audio instructions for assignments, especially the more complicated ones.  I have actually included audio files in which I read the instructions for my students.  They will hear me in French as they are reading along.
  • Include a "player" for each sound file so that your students can replay it as often as necessary and also adjust the volume and other aspects of the recording.

How are you using auditory files in your courses?  Do you narrate your power points?  Please share your best practices.  Meanwhile, in celebration of the season, here is an AUDIO FILE for you to enjoy--The Night Before Christmas as read by Louis Armstrong.  Happy Holidays Everyone!

A webinar with David Sable, Religious Studies, Saint Mary's University
Tuesday, December 16, 2014, 2:30-3:30pm CST
Free and open to the public

REGISTER

In this interactive presentation, participants will be introduced to a set of mindfulness-based reflective practices for the classroom that were the subject of mixed methods research with university students over five years. The practices apply basic mindfulness principles and guided instruction for individual contemplation, journal writing, listening, inquiry, and dialogue in a student-centered learning format.

Taken together, this set of practices becomes reflective interaction; however the elements are also useful individually or in any combination. These practices and the results of the research were described in the first issue of The Journal of Contemplative Inquiry, published by the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society.

The same set of practices will be applied in this interactive webinar to help you develop indicators for what matters most in introducing any contemplative practices in your teaching. Participants will explore their intentions, including what matters most to them as the instructor, what matters most to their students, and how they can know if contemplative pedagogy is effective. Results will be shared online and documented by the recording.

Note: This webinar is being offered by the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education.

As you prepare for the start of the semester, it is a good time to get started setting up your Blackboard courses. Blackboard courses are automatically created using the course information in Banner a few weeks before the start of the semester. You can post your syllabus, course documents, and announcements to your Blackboard courses. You can also customize your course menu and/or add a course banner.

If you teach a course that is cross listed you will have a Blackboard course for each cross listing. You can combine the cross listed courses into one Blackboard course so that you can post course materials and grades to one combined Blackboard course. Combining courses may also work for you if you are teaching different sections of the same course and would like to have the different sections combined into one Blackboard course so that you can post course documents and grades in the one combined course. The beginning of the semester is the best time to combine your Blackboard courses before you add course material or grades to the courses.

Follow these steps to do it.

Listed below are links with instructions for

  • Merging courses [Web page]
  • Hiding old courses from view [Web page]
  • Getting started with the course environment [PDF] [Video]
  • Course structures and course themes [Web page] [Video]
  • Changing the display name for your course [Web page]
  • Adding a course banner [Web page]
  • Adding items to the course menu [PDF]
  • Adding a test student to your course [Web page]
  • Posting announcements [Web page]
  • Copying content into another course [Web page]
  • Using date management to update dates after course copy [Web page]

Want more information?

Attend a drop-in session to get one-on-one help.
Explore Blackboard’s On Demand Learning Center.
Try these Blackboard How-To documents.
Visit the Blackboard FAQs for additional blackboard information
or schedule a one-on-one session, email, or
call Janice Florent: (504) 520-7418.

by Bart Everson

CAT's XX anniversary newsletter contains an article by yours truly which traces the origin of the word "sustainability" to just around 1980. I came to that conclusion by using the Google Books Ngram Viewer, an online phrase-usage graphing tool.

Sustainability Ngram

I stand by that minor feat of scholarly inquiry. (It took me less than five minutes.) However, I was a little puzzled by these results. Surely the concept is much older than that?

My method had obvious limitations. I was looking at the history of a word, not the idea behind the word.

New research by Jeremy L. Caradonna suggests the roots of the idea go back to late 17th- and early 18th-century Europe, when people started cutting down too much forest and endangering their own way of life. Caradonna points to one Hans Carl von Carlowitz as the one who coined the word "sustainability" in 1713.

How did I miss that? The twist is that since von Carlowitz was German he called it Nachhaltigkeit.

Indeed, the Ngram Viewer yields quite different results when searching for this term in the corpus of German texts. There's still a major spike in usage over the last several decades, but it doesn't spring out of nowhere.

The spike is evidence of our contemporary sustainability movement. It's an expression of burgeoning concern, but it's also cause for concern in and of itself. As Caradonna notes in a recent interview for the Boston Globe, "If you have a sustainability movement, you know you have a problem." Hans Carl von Carlowitz started writing about Nachhaltigkeit because of a problem he saw with deforestation. The huge spike in writing about this topic in recent years, in English and German and other languages, is an indication of an even deeper problem.

Sustainability is about coming to terms with our limits — living within our means — and in the modern industrialized West, we have pretended for some time that there are no such limits. This illusion is becoming more difficult to maintain, which is why sustainability is becoming ever more prominent in our discourse, including the college curriculum. Thanks to Caradonna's research, the history of our current concerns is a little clearer.

Jeremy L. Caradonna's new book is Sustainability: A History.

Download Conversation #28

Jeremy Tuman

A conversation with Jeremy Tuman of Xavier University of Louisiana on teaching, learning and service learning.

Ultimately I think a transformative experience is one in which students internalize the idea that reality is not fixed — that all of these social problems are products, by-products, results of social structures that we as people create. We create them, and we can change them.

Jeremy Tuman teaches composition and literature with an emphasis on bringing basic writers into the larger academic curriculum. His scholarship on the pedagogy of basic writing is influenced by Mike Rose and David Bartholomae, who argue that basic writers must fully engage in exercises of critical thought regardless of their grammatical or mechanical competency. To this approach he incorporates the added charge of Xavier and other HBCUs and Catholic schools to teach a moral and social imperative for critical thought.

Jeremy has designed and led service-learning initiatives with community partners involved in literacy outreach and in post-Katrina rebuilding. Jeremy is a 2012-2013 Mellon FaCTS Fellow, a fellowship to promote social justice and civic engagement in the classroom, and currently serves as Faculty-in-Residence for Service Learning at the Center for the Advancement of Teaching.

Links for this episode:

by Janice Florent

Course delivery is vulnerable to unplanned events. Potential interruptions to class activities include but are not limited to natural disasters, widespread illness, acts of violence, planned or unexpected construction-related closures, severe weather conditions, and medical emergencies. Whatever the event, an instructional continuity plan will help you to be ready to continue teaching with minimal interruption.

As you begin preparing for Spring 2015, consider developing an instructional continuity plan for your courses.

For those who missed our workshop and for those who want to learn more about instructional continuity you will find a link to the PowerPoint presentation above. Also, please visit our Instructional Continuity web page, where you will find planning guides, resources, and a recording of the workshop presentation.

Do you have a plan? If so, we would like to hear about it. If you had a classroom disruption and found a way for students to continue to make progress in your course, we encourage you to share it with your colleagues. Please email a brief description of what you did along with your reflections on how it worked for you, and we will post it to our Instructional Continuity web page.