For the very first time, Northern Illinois University offered a fully-online teaching effectiveness institute in January 2013 utilizing a combination of Blackboard Learn, Blackboard Collaborate, and Blackboard Mobile platforms. This cross-platform approach has proven to be very successful and provides a model for faculty to incorporate an integrated approach for implementing all three platforms in their teaching. In this session led by Jason Rhode and Jeff Geronimo at the 2013 Blackboard Never Stop Learning Tour in Chicago we shared NIU’s cross-platform strategy, practices, and lessons learned that can be applied to any online professional development initiative. | slides

How do rollouts of new Blackboard releases impact institutions? What steps are institutions taking to prepare faculty, teaching staff, and students for the changes brought about by Blackboard upgrades? During this presentation at the 2013 Blackboard Product Development Offsite on May 15, 2013, Northern Illinois University shared its comprehensive faculty development strategy for supporting faculty and preparing the campus community for new upgrades. Specific steps taken to prepare faculty and staff for each service pack were shared, including the initiatives underway in conjunction with NIU’s upgrade from Learn 9.1 SP8 to SP11 in June 2013. Walk away with practical examples of how an institution is compiling and integrating available support documentation and resources from Blackboard to share with its campus as well as the wider Blackboard user community! Slides are available here | mobile-friendly slides

During this panel presentation at Sloan Consortium’s 6th Annual International Symposium on Emerging Technologies for Online Learning on Tue, 4/10, 2:30PM (Wilshire A), learn how three faculty from different institutions use podcasts, eBooks, online courses, and Google+ Hangouts to reinvent “faculty development” into a community of learning.

Slides are available here.

Maria H. Anderson, Ph.D.
Director of Learning & Research, Instructure
maria@instructure.com
@busynessgirl

Canvas Network: http://canvas.net
Many of us have experience with SPOCs = Small Private Online Courses
Recommendations: 2-4 hrs/wk, 3-6 weeks

Considerations for Teaching MOOCs

- Assessments
- Resources provided
- Required materials
- Length
- Access to resources

Samples

Social Media MOOC – http://learn.canvas.net/courses/1
Request student access to SoMe – http://bit.ly/sloancmooc

Recommendations from Maria

Resources Provided

• Wherever possible, provide resources that are freely accessible in most of the world
• Consider your role to be the curator of the millions of resources on the Internet

Assessments

• The assessments should provide another opportunity for learning (ex: design a quiz that is designed for students to fail unless they read the readings, then let students go back and take quiz again after failing first time and then completing the readings)

Activities

• The activities should provide a chance to apply what you’re learning in the real world
• Activities should provide a way for students to share and delight in what they are learning

Discussions

• Discussions provide a place to truly leverage the diversity and life experiences of your participants.
• Discussions don’t have to be required unless the purpose of participating will be valuable to every student individually

Length of Course

• MOOC students want to spend fewer hours per week and commit to less weeks
• This doesn’t mean you teach a less rigorous version of the same course. It means you teach a different course. It might mean you teach three courses instead of one.

My Takeaways

• MOOCs (massive open online courses) are fundamentally different from SPOCs (specialized private online courses)
• student-created content are some of the most interesting and valuable components of MOOCs
• MOOCs can be great venue for experimenting with new learning opportunities for students
• MOOCs can be considered “service to the community” and are a great way to showcase the institution
• motivation for offering MOOCs still must be identified
• “enroll has become the new like button”
• ongoing availability adds a unique dimension

Similar steps could be followed to add other streams of #et4online social media to Flipboard…give it a try!

I look forward to accepting the “challenge” of sharing my experience and takeaways of the conference. My blog here will be the primary home for my shared notes and social media, more to follow on my plan to knit my social media tools together to here on my blog and to “mob log” my experiences using just my iPhone.

Let the sharing begin! You’ll find me sharing my et4online experience at the following social media locations.

This video, found thanks to Graham Attwell, highlights the role of the teacher in creating and sustaining a learning community, developing presence and fostering engagement.

What additional tips might you offer faculty seeking to develop a sense of “presence” in their online teaching?

On Friday, 3/29/13, I will be giving a keynote presentation from 12:45-1:45PM CDT entitled, Social Teaching Strategies for Engaging Today’s Active Learner at the Annual Western Illinois University Symposium on Teaching, Research and Creative Activities.

During the presentation, we’ll consider how students today are using social media in their daily lives and explore together how social media can be used to actively engage students in the learning process, both in and outside the classroom. A social teaching framework will be shared as well as principles and best practices for leveraging social media in teaching and learning.

I’ve begun drafting a interactive online handout that will contain presentation slides and resources that I will share. In addition, as I’m always willing to try something new in my presentations, I plan to incorporate for the first time into one of my faculty presentations several interactive pieces that will provide further opportunities for faculty participants to interact live using their mobile devices as well as extend the presentation beyond the “physical walls” of WIU.

Live-Tweeting & Twitter Backchannel

I’ve selected the hashtag #socialteaching and will be using it extensively over the coming days in sharing resources prior-to, as well as during my presentation. Join the conversation or share additional resources on Twitter related to use of social media in teaching and learning using hashtag #socialteaching.

Thanks to the instructions I initially stumbled across from Alan Levine and step-by-step video from Adam Bellow, I plan to live-tweet during my presentation using Keynote Tweet 2 on my Mac. Watch for the #socialteaching Twitter stream on Friday, 3/29 and join the conversation!

Mobile/Web-based Polling using PollEverywhere

As I’ve been informed that the majority of the faculty who will be attending live will have either a smart phone or tablet, I plan to incorporate numerous polling questions before and during the presentation using PollEverywhere. I’ve signed-up for a presenter plan for 1-month for the sake of this presentation and will be using the PollEverywhere Mac Presenter App to embed live polls in my Keynote slides as well as live-tweeting the polls, with responses able to be received by web, text, or Twitter. Please feel free to respond to the polling questions when you see them become available!

Texting Backchannel using Celly

I’ve been intrigued for sometime now with the applications for use of text messaging in teaching and have been exploring various text messaging tools. I recently setup a free account with Cel.ly and have created a Celly group @socialteaching that I will be inviting participants (live and virtual) to join and try as another backchannel option before, during, and after the presentation. Whereas the Twitter stream is public and open, the texting backchannel can be made private and has different applications for within a class setting. During the presentation, I plan to send out a couple of different polls that participants can respond to directly via text message. Participants can also share a comment or give other feedback directly via text message.

Again, this is another experiment on my behalf and would love to have anyone interested in seeing in action to join the texting group and give it a try! To join, simply text @socialteaching to 23559 or join at cel.ly/c/socialteaching.

Google+ Hangout on Air

I’m also toying with the idea of doing a Google+ Hangout on Air and live-stream the video of the presentation. I’ve not decided yet if I will try pulling this off, chiefly because I will be relying on a wi-fi connection during the presentation. If my connection seems solid and I can pull off the technical details, announce the live stream on my Twitter and Google+ and the live stream of the video (and later the recording) will be on my YouTube channel.

Your Participation is Invited!

I’d love for you to participate “virtually” via social media in this presentation! In summary, here again are the ways you can get involved:

• Join conversation on Twitter, hashtag #socialteaching
• Respond to polling questions, as they are live-tweeted (will have prefix hashtag #poll for easy identification)
• Join the texting group to participate in private backchannel and share your insights via text message

One more request I will throw out…What suggestions or strategies would you share for faculty who are considering incorporating social media into their teaching? I’d love to include tips as part of the presentation! Feel free to leave a comment here on my blog to tweet using hashtag #socialteaching

For years, the Announcements page was the default entry point in Blackboard. With the release of Blackboard Learn 9, the Home Page was added which includes various information modules for the user, such as: Needs Attention, What’s New, My Tasks, Alerts, etc.

While the Home Page tool was a step in the right direction, it is still very restricted and falls short in allowing faculty to customize at the level in which it can be a true “Communication Dashboard” for the course. I’ve shared this feedback with Blackboard product developers at BbWorld and the Blackboard Idea Exchange over the past nearly 2 years, but since I’ve yet to see my suggestions implemented, I’m sharing them here as well so that perhaps others can echo the value of such a feature enhancement.

What follows is my rationale for why I’ve desired a more instructor-customizable communication dashboard as the entry point for a Blackboard course as well as a sample of my “homemade” solution. In future posts, I’ll then share more specifics for how to create a customized communication dashboard in Blackboard and incorporate a variety of different information sources within the dashboard.

Needs

In my teaching, I’m often introducing in-service teachers to new technology tools and practices that they can apply into K-12 classroom teaching. My students and I use 3rd party blog, sms, calendar, and other tools in addition to Blackboard and I would like to be able to provide information about accessing these tools as well as streams of information from them in a single communication portal. Basically, I’ve simply been looking for a customizable and yet visually appealing area within Blackboard where different information sources can be embedded. In particular, these are the tools that I use and want to easily share with my students:

Latest Blog Posts – During the course, my students and I each setup and post to individual 3rd party blogs. Even though my students are instructed to subscribe via RSS to my blog as well as the blogs of their classmates, I want to display clickable titles of the last several posts from my blog.

Course Calendar – While Blackboard’s Calendar is greatly improving with the release of the new Blackboard Calendar in Service Pack 11, up until this point, the built-in calendar hasn’t been acceptable and I create a Google Calendar for each class. I would like for a version of that calendar for the upcoming 7 days to be embedded and viewable by my students.

Texting List Sign-up – In my teaching, I use Remind101.com and encourage my student to opt-in to my texting news list powered by Remind101. I would like to provide the information for signing-up to join the texting list.

Course Podcast Player – I’ve setup a podcast for my course and would like to embed a player so that right from the course entry page, students can listen to the most recent episodes of the podcast. I’ve previously shared steps for how I setup my podcast using Dropbox.

Class Blogs – The students in the course each setup their own blogs and post to throughout the course. I would like to include links for each of my students’ blogs.

Instructor’s Tweets – Twitter is another important communication means used during the course. I would like at the outset of the course to include a Twitter widget displaying the latest tweets from the instructor, with the widget to be changed after Twitter is introduced to students and they begin tweeting, to display latest tweets using a course hashtag.

Dashboard

With a little HTML and CSS know-how, I’ve gone ahead and created this course communication dashboard that I now use in my Blackboard courses. It includes the communication streams and information sources that I want my students to see when they login to my Blackboard course. Students have commented on how helpful having such a communication dashboard available upon entry to the course has been and as a result, I’ve continued to include my homemade version in the courses I teach.

The dashboard is a simple html page (more details to be shared in a future post how to setup) set as the default entry point for the course. For this particular course I’ve shared, the dashboard contains the following information items:

Class Photo Roster – Students were requested to provide a digital portrait during the first week of the course. These photos are displayed along with their preferred first name to be used during the course.

Announcements – Latest several course announcements, also posted and sent via email using the Announcements tool in the course, are displayed for students.

Latest on Dr. J’s Blog – Utilizing a simple javascript RSS embed utility, Feed2JS, an embedded script that displays the latest 5 blog post titles from my blog that students can click on to go directly to those latest posts.

Course Calendar – Google Calendar I’ve setup for the course.

News & Reminders – Details for how students can sign-up to opt into our course texting group.

Course Podcast – Embeddable player using BigContact to play the latest episodes of the course podcast.

iTunes U – Details for how students can sign-up to try the iTunes U version of the course being made available as an experimental trial during the course.

Class Blogs – List of all class members’ blogs.

Tweets from Dr. J – Instructor’s tweets, to be adjusted later in the course to instead display most recent tweets using course hashtag

Ideal Solution

This “homemade” dashboard I’ve created isn’t ideal, but it is closer to my ideal course entry point than the current Home Page tool in Blackboard. It’s conceivable that Blackboard could develop a customizable dashboard, based on the Home Page tool but redesigned, which could take the information modules already in the Home Page and build in additional flexibility of the layout (2 columns, 3 columns, 1 wide column & 2 narrow columns, etc.) as well as include module types where faculty could embed various other information sources, images, scripts, or HTML.

Students could still perhaps add other personalized modules, but the instructor should have much more flexibility in how the Home Page is formatted and be able to embed other types of content or information streams. I envision this communication dashboard being much more instructor-driven than the current Home Page tool, affording the instructor the ability to develop “social presence” within the course by featuring at the login page the various communication streams for the course. I hope this solution will eventually be considered by Blackboard Product Development and I welcome any opportunity to provide further input.

What entry point do you use for your Blackboard course, the Home Page, Announcements, or something else? What features would you like to see in an ideal course entry point? Leave a comment with your suggestions!