New For Online Courses: Grade BBS Posts

Faculty and TAs have occasionally told us that it would be really convenient to be able to grade BBS posts in their online courses. Often, courses have graded exercises or activities which require students to post in the BBS. Until now, faculty and TAs have had to switch between the BBS and another view (most often the Gradebook) to view a student post in BBS and then grade it on another page, or in another application.

We're pleased to let you know that you can now set up BBS catgories in online courses which are linked to the Gradebook. Here's how you do it:

1. Set up an activity in the Gradebook that's linked to a BBS category. You have all the Gradebook options available to you (ie; points, percentage, letter grade, etc.).
2. When students post a message in a BBS category that's linked to the Gradebook, a grading box appears under each of their posts. You can enter a grade (matching the setup selected in the Gradebook) and a comment, or just a grade, or just a comment!
3. As soon as you enter the grade or comment, it is transferred to the Gradebook.

Posted by Brian Klaas at 11:48 AM - Categories: Course Tools | Online Courses

Office Hours for Instructional Technology

Would you like to learn more about how to use the tools in the Online Course System or CoursePlus?

Have you heard of other faculty using new technology - such as VoiceThread or PollEverywhere - but you don't know what they are or how to use them?

You're in luck!  The Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) has started offering Drop-In, Hands-On Technology sessions several times each month.  These are essentially office hours for teaching technologies.  If you have a quick question,  want a brief tutorial on one of the technology tools we use in teaching at JHSPH, or want to brainstorm how to use technology to solve a teaching dilemma, stop in for a hands-on tutorial with one of the CTL Instructional Designers.

Drop-In Sessions are open to Faculty and TAs. 

Our next drop-in sessions:

Wednesday, October 24

10:00am – 12:00pm in E2618 Office hours - stop by any time!

Thursday, October 25

1:30pm – 3:30pm in E2618 Office hours - stop by any time!

Posted by Tracy Thompson at 11:19 AM - Categories: Course Tools | CoursePlus | Online Courses | Tech Tools

CTL Fall Teaching Toolkit Events

The Instructional Design team at the JHSPH Center for Teaching and Learning is pleased to announce our fall schedule of workshops and drop-in hands-on sessions for faculty and TA's to discuss, learn about and practice the finer points of teaching, learning, and technology. In order to accommodate those who have conflicts with Wednesday at lunchtime, we have added duplicate events on Thursday afternoons for most workshops as well as drop-in sessions at various other times. All workshops will be available both in person at JHSPH or online via Adobe Connect.

To RSVP, please visit our new events calendar here: http://tinyurl.com/jhsph-ctl-events  and click the any session to register.

We look forward to your participation!

Posted by Clark Shah-Nelson at 11:32 AM - Categories: Course Tools | CoursePlus | Distance Learning | General | Online Courses | Teaching Tips | Tech Tools

New Drop Box Feature: Submit Files for a Group!

A long-requested feature has arrived in the Drop Box in online courses: the ability for a student to submit a file on behalf of a group. Here's how this works:

• When setting up a Drop Box, you can specify that students can turn in a file for a group in the Drop Box. Note that students have to be assigned to groups in the Course Groups tool in order to use this feature.
• When a student submits a file to a group-enabled Drop Box, the student sees a drop-down list of all the course groups to which she is assigned. If the student is turning in a file for the group, she selects the appropriate course group from the list.
• When a student submits a file, all group members get an email confirmation of file submission.
• If a student in the group goes to the Drop Box page, it shows that the file was submitted by the other student and provides a link to the file.
• On the faculty/TA side of the Drop Box, all group members are shown as having turned in the file, and that the file was turned in by the person who submitted the file to the Drop Box.
• When the file is downloaded from the Drop Box, it shows the group name instead of the student name, and flags the file as being downloaded for each member of the group.
• If you upload a group-submitted file from the Drop Box to the Gradebook, all students in the group get a copy of the uploaded group file. You have to assgin grades individually to each student in the group, though, because our research found that individual students in a group usually get different grades based on contributions and performance.

We hope you find this feature useful. This feature will be coming to the Drop Box in CoursePlus around the start of second term, so it will be available for all courses at the School.

Posted by Brian Klaas at 8:20 AM - Categories: Course Tools | Online Courses

New Syllabus Tool Coming to Online Courses (and CoursePlus)

Early last year, the School began a process of coming up with a standardized course syllabus template that would, eventually, be used for all courses at the School. Late last year, the standardized course syllabus template was approved by individual academic departments and the School's academic deans.

This month, online courses will get a new version of the Syllabus Builder tool which meets the requirements of and encourages faculty to work within this new syllabus template. At the end of the year, this new Syllabus Builder tool will launch inside CoursePlus, bringing the same tooling and features to all courses offered by the School.

The new Syllabus Builder tool looks like this:

Here's a list of some of the features of this new syllabus tool:

• Select information from the JHSPH course database is pulled into the syllabus tool and can be modified from within the syllabus tool. Previously, these sections were not editable from within the syllabus tool. This includes the following sections:
  • Course Description
  • Course Learning Objectives
  • Methods of Assessment
  • Intended Audience
  • Prerequisites
  • Required Text(s)
• Numerous sections of content recommended by the committee which developed the standardized JHSPH course syllabus appear on the main editing page. These sections can easily be added by clicking a [+] button next to the section title.
• Guides for effectively writing each section of content in your syllabus have been created by the instructional design team at the Center for Teaching and Learning. These guides can help you write a better syllabus in less time.
• You can rearraange the display order of sections in your syllabus by dragging and dropping those sections on the page.
• You can flag files in the Online Library so that the files display on the syllabus.
• The syllabus is available in a printable format with one click.
• If you print the syllabus, and you use either the schedule in an online course or the sessions tool in CoursePlus, the schedule/session information is printed inline with the rest of the syllabus content.
• Classroom information is now pulled from centralize scheduling and included in the syllabus.

The instructional design team in the Center for Teaching and Learning has been offering workshops on how to create a great syllabus, and will continue to do so in the coming months.

If you have any questions about this new syllabus tool, feel free to post them here!

Posted by Brian Klaas at 9:59 AM - Categories: Online Courses | Course Tools | CoursePlus

Updates to the Online Course System for Summer Term

Although June seems like it would be a slower time at the School, with the academic year just ending, the team in the Center for Teaching and Learning has been very busy adding new features to the online course system. Listed below are the new features that have been added for the start of the summer term:

• Faculty and TAs now have access to Page Builder. Page Builder is the tool that CTL staff use to create lecture pages, activity/exercise pages, and the faculty bio page in online courses. One of the Center's goals for the next couple of years is to empower faculty and TAs to make changes and additions to their online courses in ways that they simply could not before. Giving access to Page Builder is a step towards that goal. With Page Builder, faculty and TAs in online courses have broad control over the lecture and activity pages in their online course sites, including:
  • Creation of new activity pages.
  • Editing of metadata (title, subtitle) and all sections of content on activity pages.
  • Editing of all sections of content except the "Lecture Materials" box on lecture pages.
  • Previewing any Page Builder page at any time.
  • Editing faculty/TA bios.
  • Adding, managing, and deleting faculty groups for display on the course faculty page.
  • Editing the course home page welcome text.
• Quiz Generator changes. The following new features have been added to the Quiz Generator in online courses:
  • Faculty and TAs can now select an item on the course schedule to which the start/end dates of the quiz will sync. This now enables faculty and TAs to create new versions of exams and link them to the proper item on the course schedule whenever they see fit, without having to go through their course instructional designer.
    • Note that if you adjust schedule dates from the Quiz Generator, the "Start Available Date" on the schedule will be set to the "Access beings at" date for the quiz, and the "End Available Date" and the "Due Date" on the schedule will both be set to the "Access ends at" date for the quiz.
  • If you opt to display the answer key to a quiz, you also need to provide the date on which the answer key is no longer visible to students. This change was necessitated by the sync of schedule dates to quiz begin/end dates. Once the date on which the answer key is no longer available to students has passed, the link to the quiz answer key no longer appears on the course schedule page.
  • Answers to questions are now displayed on the main quiz overview page.
  • If a question is excluded from scoring, this information appears on the main quiz overview page and on the answer key.
• Additional changes:
  • The confirmation window that appears after you delete an item in the Online Library now defaults to "OK" in the main button, instead of "Undo." An undo link has been added to the confirmation window so that you can still undo a delete.
  • If an item on the schedule becomes available at a time other than midnight (00:00 hours), the time at which the item becomes available is now included on the "Daily Course Notifications" email message.
  • Printing BBS topics using "File" -> "Print" now results in more printer-friendly pages.

Posted by Brian Klaas at 11:42 AM - Categories: Course Tools | Online Courses

25 Ways to use Twitter in Education

Edudemic Magazine has put together a handy guide of 25 ideas to incorporate Twitter into the classroom, called "The Twitter Spectrum for Educators" - from easy to most difficult. The guide ranges from "watch" to "talk" to "produce" - so that classes can ease into Twitter gradually. A great feature of the guide is that each idea starts with a verb, a la Bloom's Taxonomy - so that you can look at your course learning objectives and find good potential matches to meet your objectives. If you've been toying around with giving it a try or looking for ideas to enhance your course by immersing students into a larger (world-wide) community of learning, research, and/or practice, check out the guide, and then contact your instructional designer to plan and implement.

If you have some other ideas for using Twitter in your classes or have some info after trying some of these suggestions, please leave a comment!

Posted by Clark Shah-Nelson at 2:11 PM - Categories: Course Tools | Distance Learning | General | Online Courses | Teaching Tips | Tech Tools