By Pamela D. Williams/IDLT for Spotlight, November 2024
Discussion boards, like online courses, are here to stay, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be an engaging and lively component of your course. Here are 3 tips to help invigorate your discussion boards.
Consider using multimedia in your prompts. A song, music video, cartoon, or brief interview can help spark students’ interest and evoke deeper responses to course...
During FY25, ITS will lead SIUE’s transition from Zoom to Microsoft Teams and YuJa for all video and web conferencing needs. Starting July 1, Microsoft Teams will become SIUE’s primary platform for meetings, instruction, and collaboration, while YuJa will serve as our video storage and lecture capture solution. This change is designed to streamline services, enhance collaboration, and reduce costs by optimizing our existing softwa...
Join the Accessibility Challenge: Enhance Your Course and Earn a Digital Badge!
Are your class materials, activities, and assessments designed so they are usable for all students? ITS-Instructional Design & Learning Technologies invites you to participate in our Accessibility Challenge! This is an exciting opportunity to enhance the accessibility of your courses, making them more inclusive for all students while also earning professional recognition for your efforts to maintain...
Poll Everywhere – A Campus-Wide Solution for Engagement
Did you know the University has a campus-wide license for Poll Everywhere ? We mostly focus on how the tool can be used for faculty in their classrooms, but it is also versatile to be used in events, meetings, workshops, and beyond. It’s a powerful tool that can be used to foster engagement, gather feedback, and promote collaboration in any setting.
by IDLT
For Faculty and Courses: Poll Everywhere can be used to q...
Transform Your Course Design with IDLT's Updated Course Planning Grid
Elevate your course development with IDLT’s updated course planning grid. This document will help you organize your content, align learning objectives with assessments, plan regular and substantive interaction, and create a cohesive learning journey for your students.
Access the course planning grid template and other helpful resources in the IDLT Teaching Toolkit .
Transform Your Course Design with IDLT's Updated Course Planning Grid
Elevate your course development with IDLT’s updated course planning grid. This document will help you organize your content, align learning objectives with assessments, plan regular and substantive interaction, and create a cohesive learning journey for your students.
Access the course planning grid template and other helpful resources in the IDLT Teaching Toolkit .
Using Grade Center Smart Views for More Efficient Grading
Have you used the “Tests” or “Assignments” links available under the Full Grade Center in your course management menu? Those are default Smart Views included in every shell template, and you can create your own! A Smart View is a focused look at the Grade Center. It shows only the columns that match a set of criteria, and the view is saved for continued use. As an instructor, creating custom smart...
Things Faculty Can Do to Prepare for the Fall Semester
As faculty prepare for the Fall semester, summer is a great time to review parts of the course for updating, improving, and just looking at the course with fresh eyes.
Syllabus
The syllabus is the first introduction and road map for what students can expect from your course. Take this summer to review and update your syllabus. IDLT provides a syllabus template to make it easier for you to include all the necessary...
Information Technology Services (ITS) administers and maintains the Cascade CMS, which is Southern Illinois University's website content management system. Cascade allows for departments to maintain the content on their departmental websites without needing to know how to code a web page.
Since SIUE started using Cascade years ago, it has been hosted locally within ITS on it's servers that it owns and maintains, but that is about to change.
Video content is a powerful educational tool in your course or training resource. To ensure your videos reach their intended audience effectively and make the desired impact, it's essential to follow some best practices.
Consider the following best practices when sharing your YuJa videos to ensure a smooth learning experience for your students.
Share direct links. Direct links to videos in emails, training resources, discussion...
Microsoft Teams is a collaboration platform available to SIUE Faculty, Staff and Students that can help you and your department improve communication, productivity, and more.
Since its launch, Microsoft Teams has become the fastest growing app in Microsoft’s history with more than 330,000 companies worldwide using it.
Collaboration
Teams allows users to share files, work on them simultaneously, and collaborate in real time. It also integrates with oth...
Have you ever gotten frustrated searching for a password you swore you wrote down somewhere? How about frustratingly trying to resize windows so you can view two of them on the same screen? In some cases, technology doesn’t feel like a helpful tool but more like an annoying hassle. Here are 17 (because I had to stop somewhere) shortcuts to help make your daily SIUE life a little easier.
1. When All Else Fails, Reboot
It may be a rule as old as Windows 3.1, but it still wor...
Did you accidentally delete a video from your YuJa library? It happens to all of us, but don’t despair. Deleted video files remain in your recycling bin for 60 days and can be recovered by following the steps below. After 60 days, however, those files will be permanently deleted and cannot be restored, so act promptly!
Here’s how you can recover that deleted video:
Log in to YuJa and access the My Account option in the top right corner of your screen. From th...
Cascade is the website content management system used by SIUE. It allows users to make simple changes to their department's website without having to know HTML or CSS or any of the programming languages we use.
In the event that users have a question on how to do something basic within Cascade, they have the option of referencing ITS' Web Management site where some self-help options are available.
These options include, Tips & Tricks, FAQ's, Cascade & Accessibility Tutorials, a ...
A common refrain by instructors is that information must be repeated for students to know of said information. In solving for this lack of discipline or awareness, this “information must be repeated…” phrase can become a mantra for some, who then employ due dates and other notices ad nauseum. I posit that repeated information encourages students to “check out”, and that when due dates and notices are employed ad nauseum it becomes a nightmare of upkeep fo...
Most people don’t realize all they share when sending a picture in a text. Nearly every social media site strips out the metadata that reveals a photo’s little details, like when, where and how it was taken. But that information is not protected if you text a photo. Here's how to prevent that.
To stop location sharing on iPhone:
Open the image you want to send and tap the share button.
As more courses move to the online learning environment, assessments can be more challenging to maintain security. If learning in your courses cannot be assessed using alternative formats, consider some of the proctoring options and features that have been added to Respondus Monitor.
Show Your Work
Some online assessments require work to be done the old-fashioned way with paper and pencil. You can enable Respondus Monitor to allow students to...
Did you know that when you delete files, they're actually just hidden and still on the drive and not really deleted?
In the video below, Matty McTech explains how to recover/restore deleted files from a USB drive. He also shows you how to actually delete files for good so they can not be recovered.
Did you know you can be notified via email if someone posts to a Blackboard discussion forum? It’s true. Logging in and having to check each thread can be cumbersome. If you subscribe to the forum, Blackboard will send you an email when there is a new thread. Follow the instructions in this ITS KnowledgeBase article for how to subscribe to a forum. Remember you can see the message in your email, but you cannot reply from there. You must log in to Blackboard to respond.
As previously announced, there will be an upcoming change to the retention practice for Blackboard course shells.
The current retention practice for SIUE's learning management system is:
Course shells will be kept in Blackboard for 5 semesters plus the current semester (https://kb.siue.edu/128959).
Course shells that are outside of the 5 + 1 retention window will be removed from Blackboard each fall, spring, and summer semester and retained for one year.
YuJa is SIUE's video storage and management solution. SIUE previously licensed TechSmith Knowmia for video capture, editing, and storage. All videos from TechSmith Knowmia were migrated to YuJa in 2022. Some Knowmia videos were unable to be matched with users in YuJa, most commonly because the faculty, student, or staff user with content in Knowmia had left the University prior to the migration. ITS has retained the Knowmia videos in case the users needed them after Knowmia was sunset i...
Track student progress and early intervention allows faculty to help at-risk students. This in turn may help with students successfully completing courses and student retention. Blackboard’s Grade Center has several ways to assist in determining at-risk students.
Color Coding
Color Coding in the Grade Center allows faculty to select criteria, when met, will color code the student grade and identify an at-risk student. For example, yellow can be selected to identify any...
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.
