Have you ever had printed (on old school paper) data in a table that you needed to get into Excel? And did you dread adding it manually by typing it in?
Well, Matty McTech has found a quick and easy way to do it that could save you a ton of time. And I'm sure the University will be happy to hear you are getting more done in less time. That's solid gold resume material if you ask me.
Among the changes are the option for the syllabus template, previously configured for online classes, to be utilized for any course modality (face-to-face, blended/hybrid, or online). Another major update is the removal of the University policies, guidance language, and student support information from the syllabus ...
How Can I Ensure Regular and Substantive Interaction in Distance Education Courses?
Regular and Substantive Interaction (RSI) is the distinguishing feature that the US Department of Education uses to differentiate correspondence education from distance education. Correspondence education courses are mainly driven by student-initiated interactions triggered by completion of assignments. Distance education (or online courses) are driven by frequent instructor-initiated interactions w...
The Cascade CMS features a robust publishing engine designed to render and publish content to one or more environments. Once content is published, it's completely decoupled from the CMS, allowing it to operate as a standalone entity on the University web server.
When a user tries to send content to the live web server, it's not that unusual for them to think that "SUBMIT" will publish their content to the web server.
For those of you who use Cascade (SIUE's website content management system) to update and maintain your department's website, you probably do a fair amount of copying text and pasting it into a page in Cascade.
Did you know there is a RIGHT and a WRONG way to do this? And that pasting text the WRONG way into Cascade can cause some serious problems with your web page?
Sometimes, when you copy text from somewhere, you're also copying the formatting that goes along with that text, ...
What assignment tool to use for my courses? Blackboard assignment or Turnitin?
Blackboard (Bb) assignments and Turnitin assignments are both used to collect and grade a student’s paper. However, there are some differences between the two tools, which can make one a better choice than the other for certain types of assignments.
Bb assignments are a good choice for assignments that do not require plagiarism detection, such as:
We all use PDF's at work and at home. But besides opening a pdf in Reader or Acrobat to read a pdf, or to save/print a word doc as a PDF, most people aren't Acrobat acrobats and aren't sure how to do other things.
To make things somewhat easier in terms of working with a pdf file, the website https://www.pdftool.org has a number of free tools that will allow you to do some very useful things. Such as Encrypting PDF's to protect secure documents, Decrypting PDF's, optimzing (...
As we hit our stride in weeks three and four of the fall semester, it’s important to review your course organization and make sure it's working as intended for your students. By now, some work has been submitted and graded and you are providing feedback for your students.
The Blackboard Grade Center can be a confusing grid of columns, and it is especially challenging when you import content from a previous course. Transparency is important for you and your students. The e...
As a new semester approaches, the following tips may be useful for faculty.
Blackboard and Course Management:
If you are teaching multiple sections of the same course and want them to be in one Blackboard shell, please request that your sections be merged prior to starting work in your Blackboard courses.
Scheduling meetings can be a time-consuming and frustrating process, especially when you're trying to find a time that works for multiple people with busy schedules. Many of us have utilized Doodle or When2Meet to help with this tedious task, but they aren’t the most efficient options.
That's where FindTime comes in. FindTime is a free, easy to use, scheduling assistant tool in Microsoft Outlook that helps you find the best time for a meeting by polling your attendees. Because ...
Turnitin will flag any instances of an unusual character within a paper. These flags will identify when a character has been replaced and unusual hidden characters.
Replaced Characters
Some fonts and characters look similar to the naked eye and are difficult to detect in a paper. This technique is used to “fool” the Similarity Report when text is copied and pasted from an outside source. Go to this example at Turnitin: https://help.turnitin.com/feedback-studio/f...
Do you create videos for your courses? Want to use those videos to help students learn even better? Consider adding quizzes or reflective pauses to your videos in YuJa. In 1988, John Sweller developed the Cognitive Load Theory which “suggests that our working memory is only able to hold a small amount of information at any one time and that instructional methods should avoid overloading it in order to maximize learning.”* In adding questions or pauses in videos, we can hel...
Occasionally, YuJa, your internet, or your computer can have a hiccup which can cause a video not to upload to your media library. Luckily, the file is stored locally on your device. Once the file is found, you can run it through a program called Handbrake and then upload the video manually. Follow the steps in this ITS KnowledgeBase article on how to recover the video file, run it through Handbrake, and upload it to YuJa.
Blackboard Offers Testing Pool Options to Increase your Online Test Integrity
Summer can be an opportunity to revamp assessments for courses, but no matter what time of year you dedicate to reviewing your assessment strategy, objective tests and test integrity are always in need of our attention.
Tests containing objective questions can concern faculty because students can more easily share answers. It is often best to assume that your students will approach online asynchronous and sy...
SIUE currently provides access to Adobe Creative Cloud applications to all faculty and staff members. (for instructions on how to install Adobe Creative Cloud apps, please see here: https://www.siue.edu/its/fac_staff/adobe-creative-cloud.shtml)
On May 8, ITS updated Blackboard to Ultra Base Navigation . The upgrade affects only the Blackboard landing page. No changes have been made to existing course shells or tools used by faculty and students.
All users logging into Blackboard will see the Institution Page, containing resources for faculty and students, important updates, and information about SIUE’s learning technologies. Courses are accessible from the Courses module in the navigation menu.
Recording a Lecture? What is the best software to use?
Several software capture tools are available on campus for faculty, staff, and students to record lectures, audio/video announcements, projects, etc. But which one is the best to use? Well, it depends…
YuJa Software Capture Tool
The YuJa Software Capture Tool is an app installed directly on your work or home computer. The recording is automatically uploaded to your YuJa account. This may not be the best option if you are us...
ITS will update Blackboard to Ultra Base Navigation on May 8, 2023. The Ultra Base Navigation upgrade will not update or change existing course shells or tools used by faculty and students.
The Institution Page is the area that opens when users log into Ultra Base Navigation. The modules on the Institution Page contain links to important teaching and learning systems and services. A user’s role as faculty/staff or student will determine what modules can be seen. While the main fa...
Looking for a way to spend less time grading and providing students with feedback? Finding students are unclear on the expectations for an assignment? Rubrics might be just what your course needs to provide students with clear expectations and a more efficient way to provide consistent grading and feedback. Rubrics can be created in Blackboard for assignments, discussion forums, and assessments. Turnitin also has the option to attach a rubric for writing assignments to allow stude...
In the second half of the semester, students are often preparing presentations as final projects but collecting large video files of those submissions is a hassle. Adding specific expectations for your students to share a link of their video recordings rather than accepting attached files will streamline your workflow. It’s also beneficial if you ask students to share their work in a discussion forum and interact with their peers’ presentations. YuJa ensures that you wonR...
Everyone learns differently and by adding transcripts along with course videos, faculty can create more inclusive and engaging learning environments. The Multiple Means of Representation guideline from the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework encourages faculty to provide course content in a variety of formats to meet the diverse students in their courses. CAST, the organization that developed and maintains the UDL framework, describes the principle of multimodal representati...
ITS will update Blackboard to Ultra Base Navigation on May 8, 2023. The Ultra Base Navigation upgrade will not update or change existing course shells or tools used by faculty and students.
Blackboard’s Ultra Base Navigation is a modern, intuitive navigation menu that lives outside of courses, providing quick access to the most critical information consolidated from the institution and users’ courses. An overview of the features of Ultra Base Navigation is available in the...
ITS will update SIUE’s Blackboard LMS to Ultra Base Navigation on May 8, 2023. This is part of an overall and long-term upgrade to Bb Learn Ultra, the newest version of Blackboard’s learning management system. The Ultra Base Navigation upgrade will not update or change existing course shells or tools used by faculty and students.
ITS will provide regular updates to the campus community about the scheduled Bb Ultra Base Navigation upgrade. Imag...
If you are still using Zoom to record your lectures, you and your students are missing some notable features that YuJa offers. The YuJa Software Capture (PC and Mac) records your webcam and your screen share as separate streams. This allows you to edit each video separately in case you need to plug in a new slide or screen share. The separate streams also allow students to change which picture they see larger, the scr...
As a new semester approaches, the following tips may be useful for faculty.
Blackboard and Course Management:
If you are teaching multiple sections of the same course and want them to be in one Blackboard shell, please request that your sections be merged prior to starting work in your Blackboard courses.
As a reminder, the Office of Online Services and Educational Outreach provides a service for caption editing with a 3-5 business day turnaround. Through this service, student workers will edit the speech-to-text captions on videos that are stored in YuJa.
Video captions are a necessity for accessibility, and they support multi-modal learning for improved retention of information. Also, closed captions allow students to view video material without sound if they are watc...
What does it mean to share a video? Sharing a video allows other to see a video in your YuJa library. Sharing does not give them a copy of the video; however, users may have to option to create a copy your video depending upon the access level you choose.
If you are someone who exports and imports your Blackboard course each term, does it feel like it takes longer each time to manage this? That’s because it does. Your course grows with files and links each time you teach it. Here are some tips to help speed up your next export/import and how to have a left navigation you and your students will appreciate.
Clean up left navigation. When importing an old course, it will also bri...
