One area in which we receive a lot of questions by instructors-to-be of fully online and hybrid courses is about communication in online courses. How much should you communicate? What will students expect? How often should I log into my course? These are great questions! When we’re thinking about instructional design, we call this “social presence”. It’s part of a… Read more →
We know that there are benefits to harnessing certain elements of games in learning, and we know that there are more and less ideal ways to implement games in the classroom. We also know that there are two common terms for this implementation: gamifying and gameful learning. So, what’s the difference between the two? Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, and Nacke attempted… Read more →
Gamifying learning and its young, hip child gameful learning are interesting ideas, often executed poorly. We know that the point of including game-like elements (or games themselves) in the classroom is a way to increase motivation and utilize implicit learning skills. What are the basic do’s and don’ts of incorporating these ideas? Do: Use games the way you would assigned… Read more →
If you’re a TechSmith Relay user, you received an email from ITS to let you know that we recently upgraded the software. This is exciting news: this upgrade carries with it a slew of new features, as well as performance improvements on the features you were accustomed to! That email provided a link to TechSmith’s extensive tutorial library for Relay,… Read more →
The ability for students to benchmark their performance against that of their peers can lead to greater self-awareness, increased effort, and personal achievement. A Blackboard Blog post highlights the use of a tool developed by the University of Maryland Baltimore County. The tool, called Check My Activity, is intended to encourage students’ personal responsibility for learning by allowing them to… Read more →
Increasingly, studies are being released that suggest that video captions help more than just D/deaf or hard of hearing students.* I recently watched a webinar on the “e-accessibility” movement at the University of Cincinnati that focused heavily on captioning and made captions the first step to a universal design environment for students. So how can captions help all types of… Read more →
Today’s students seek ubiquity in their learning environment. That is, they desire flexibility and easy access regardless of time or location. At Saint Rose, we know that our students utilize mobile access to our learning tools. As educators, it is important we consider the changing behaviors and learning styles of our students in order to adapt our techniques to better meet their… Read more →
The VoiceThread mobile app is a great tool to keep up with your classes’ work on VoiceThread, but it lacks the ability to make changes to settings and to grade the work in Blackboard. Still — many instructors will tell you that keeping up with discussions is the hardest part, so don’t dismiss it out of hand! Plan to use… Read more →
In this article, I provide some evidence that our students are consuming online course content on their mobile devices, and suggest that we consider this a reality when designing courses. Blackboard Mobile Learning Blackboard’s mobile apps have gone through a few iterations over the years. They have recently re-named Bb Student to Blackboard and have built an better instructor app named Blackboard Instructor.… Read more →
First, two introductory videos. Then…the good stuff! Blackboard’s first mobile app, Mobile Learn, was intended to provide instructors and students easy access to their course material on. Since its birth, Blackboard has moved to a persona-based approach in order to provide more specific and useful functionality to users with different roles, so they can accomplish more tasks on the… Read more →
