Uncategorised – Page 2 – Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning

Reminder – eLearning Spring Workshops Open for Registration!

I just wanted to send a reminder to remind you to register for our eLearning Spring Workshops. We have amazing offerings at both Lansdowne and Interurban covering D2L, Articulate Storyline, Kaltura, Collaborate Ultra, Open Education, Universal Design for Learning, and a wide range of topics around teaching with educational technology.

Before I give you the links to the spring workshop information, I also wanted to let you know that we have another workshop running on Tuesday, March 17th called Top 10 Digital Learning Skills Strategies for Your Students. You can find out more, and register on our website, but here is a bit more information: “Are you looking for strategies to support your students who are learning to use digital resources? Whether you are using D2L to support your face-to-face teaching, teaching blended, or completely online, we have some tips and resources for you!”

And now, follow the links to our eLearning Spring Workshops at Lansdowne and our eLearning Spring Workshops at Interurban to register for our May/June offerings!

eLearning May/June Workshops – Interurban

Interurban Workshops

To register for Interurban Workshops, visit our Registration Form. Questions about Interurban Workshops? Contact Monique Brewer or Meghan Campbell.

Getting Started with D2L (New Instructors)

Day/Time: Friday, May 1, 9:30-11:30am
Room: LACC 251J
Register

This workshop will provide you with an overview of the essential teaching tools available in our learning management system, D2L. Whether you are looking to supplement your face-to-face classes, transition from using a basic course website or simply want to learn more about how to enhance your current teaching methodologies with using D2L, this workshop has a little something for everyone. Come explore the tools and the possibilities!

Enhancing Your Courses with Video

Day/Time: Tuesday, May 5, 10:00am-12:00pm
Room: LACC 251J
Register

Kaltura is Camosun College’s streaming media service that offers easy-to-use video management and creation tools that integrate directly into D2L. Think of it as Camosun’s own YouTube service. This means faculty and students now have a place to create, edit, and house their course-related videos from one central location. This hands-on workshop will provide you with a high level overview of the Kaltura tools and get you started with using them in one of your courses. The workshop will be more meaningful if you come with a video to work with.

Course Spring Cleaning

Day/Time: Tuesday, May 5, 1:30-3:00pm
Room: LACC 251J
Register

Do you have a development site or a course offering that is need of clean up? Question libraries that need tweaking or manage files that need organization? This hands-on workshop will cover key best practices surrounding course maintenance and efficiencies in how to manage release dates associated with your course from one central location in D2L (saving you time!).

Designing for Inclusion with the Help of a New Ally!

Day/Time: Wednesday, May 6, 10:30-11:15am
Room: LACC 251J
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To support Camosun’s commitment to a more inclusive student experience, the eLearning team is introducing a new tool within D2L that will help all of us to prepare course content that meets Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and automatically generate alternative formats of the content for students. The tool comes from the Blackboard company and is called “Ally”.

Ally doesn’t change how anything works in your course, and won’t affect your course files. It provides you guidance on how to correct technical accessibility issues with your digital course content, which means your learning materials will work better on mobile phones and tablets as well as with assistive technologies.

Your students will also be able to download “alternative formats” of your files by clicking the dropdown icon next to the file name, and choosing a version of the file most appropriate for their device and need.

Attend this info session to learn more about how Ally can support accessibility in your D2L courses.

Articulate 360: An Overview

Day/Time: Wednesday, May 6, 1:00-3:00pm
Room: LACC 251J
Register

Come explore ways to increase interactivity, learner engagement and satisfaction within online learning environments. A series of multi-disciplinary templates have been developed to address instructional challenges and support interactive and authentic online learning experiences in 3 key areas including: content management, quiz games and scenario-based learning (choose your own adventure). This workshop will provide an overview of the templates and for those interested in creating their own learning objects can get a sense of what is involved.

Working with Master Courses

Day/Time: Friday, May 8, 10:00-11:30am
Room: LACC 251J
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Master courses are an excellent way to ensure consistency in course delivery across multiple sections and increase workload efficiencies for instructors. However, master courses also require annual review and maintenance in order to reap their benefits. This hands-on workshop will help course owners assess the current state of their master courses and develop a strategy to ensure the courses are ready to go for September. Come to the session with any questions and concerns you have about your course. Course participants may want to book a follow-up one-on-one session with an instructional designer for individual training and support.

Articulate 360: Content Management

Day/Time: Monday, May 11, 10:00am-12:00pm
Rom: LACC 251J
Register

Description: A challenge faculty face is how to present complex and in many cases “heavy” content in more interactive and engaging manner while also accommodating learning styles and preferences. Many report wanting to move beyond text and images to enable learners to interact with course materials in different ways and provide more options for learners to choose how they achieve the learning outcomes. Come learn how content can be transformed through various visuals, menus, tabs and navigational elements and considers different ways to engage with the content. Learners will be able to take away a template to get started.

Articulate 360: Creating Quiz Games

Day/Time: Monday, May 11, 2:00-4:00pm
Room: LACC 251J
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Increasing engagement often equates to contextualizing the content, assessment and activities for the learner in creative ways. Whether it be gamifying a simple multiple choice quiz or developing a way to provide real-time feedback for learners, come learn how to incorporate “fun” back into the teaching and learning experience while improving participation, motivation and in some cases mastery of skills, knowledge or concepts. Learners will be able to take away a template to get started.

Articulate 360: Choose Your Own Adventure

Day/Time: Wednesday, May 13, 10:00pm-12:00pm
Room: LACC 251J
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Providing learners with the ability to “choose their own adventure” and make key decisions within a safe educational environment can have a significant and lasting impact. Come learn how to put your learners in the drivers’ seat – by incorporating authentic scenarios, integrated rich content and coaching opportunities which enables them to make decisions and realize the consequences and impact. Learners will be able to take away a template to get started.

Designing for Engagement: Moving beyond Text and Images

Day/Time: Thursday, May 14, 10:00-11:30am
Room: LACC 251J
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Come learn how to transform your content to accommodate a variety of learning styles and abilities. We’ll begin with an overview of the content tool and its functionality to get you started with building content. We’ll then explore how you can transform various types of content including (but not limited to): PDFs, PPT and Word documents to a web-accessible format that improves the teaching and learning experience.

Setting up Your Gradebook

Day/Time: Tuesday, May 19, 10:30 am-12:00pm
Room: LACC 251J
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This hands-on workshop will focus on setting up your D2L Gradebook from start to finish. Please bring your course outline (or a breakdown of your assessment items) to the workshop if you wish to build your own Gradebook.

First Steps in Creating Accessible Course Content

Day/Time: Thursday, May 21, 10:30am -12:00 pm
Room: LACC 251J
Register

Take the first steps to make your digital course content more accessible to a diverse population of students.

Improving the technical accessibility of your course content will not only help students with disability-related challenges to access your materials, it will also improve course content access for students who use mobile devices, need ESL assistance, want options for engaging with content during long commutes, or have unreliable Internet access off-campus. When you prepare D2L content to meet the technical standards defined by Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), you give your students meaningful options for accessing content how and when they need it.

With the help of a new tool in D2L called “Ally”, this hands-on session will help you assess the current accessibility status your own D2L content. In addition, this session will guide you through some key steps you can take when creating Word documents, PDFs, PowerPoints, and web pages to ensure they are as technically accessible as possible.

Quizzes & Leveraging Course Analytics in D2L

Day/Time: Friday, May 22, 10:00-11:30am
Room: LACC 251J
Register

This workshop will begin with an overview of how to create, customize and grade quizzes. Participants will also learn how to take advantage of the D2L’s robust analytics to enhance the learner experience and identify redesign opportunities.

Using Rubrics to Streamline Your Assessment Process

Day/Time: Tuesday, May 26, 10:00-11:30am
Location: LACC 251J
Register

Is there a specific assignment or project you struggle to assess? Rubrics may the answer for you. Rubrics help to clarify expectations for students as well as build in quality assurance measures and reduce manual marking for instructors. This workshop will provide an overview of what rubrics are and how you can use them within D2L. There will also be opportunity to share your assessment challenge and start to build or refine a rubric to address that challenge. Course participants may want to book a follow-up one-on-one session with an instructional designer to finalize and test their rubric.

Text-to-Speech Support for Students: An Orientation to ReadSpeaker in Your D2L Course

Day/Time: Wednesday, May 27, 9:30-11:00am
Room: LACC 251J
Register

If you use D2L to share content files with your students, you have probably noticed the presence of the “webReader” and “docReader” tools at the top and/or bottom of the content-display pages. These tools (from the ReadSpeaker company) are designed to convert text into speech, without requiring students to download and install additional software.

Text-to-speech technology is especially valuable to students who have learning disabilities, reduced vision, or who are coming to English-as-a-second-language. The ReadSpeaker tools that we have integrated into our D2L system will read text aloud while simultaneously highlighting it so that readers can easily follow along.

In addition to the two readers that are automatically available in D2L Content, we have a third tool in our ReadSpeaker collection: TextAid. This tool has been in limited pilots to date but is available for any instructor to add to their D2L courses. In addition to providing text-to-speech support for external websites and students’ own documents, TextAid also has potential to support students with their own written composition work.

In this hands-on session we will look at webReader, docReader and TextAid in our D2L environment, sample the readability of current course content in participants’ courses, and explore the writing-support possibilities of TextAid.

Taking a Closer Look at Communication & Collaboration in D2L

Day/Time: Thursday, May 29, 10:00-11:30am
Room: LACC 251J
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Whether you want bring guest speakers into your class virtually or create opportunities for students to collaborate with each other in real time outside of class using technology, D2L has tools to support you. This workshop will take a closer look at how instructors can use communication tools to connect with students and support collaborative learning experiences. Learn alongside an instructor who has been integrating a number of tools and techniques to increase learner collaboration in her online course.

Going Deeper with Videos and Kaltura

Day/Time: Thursday, June 4, 10:00am-12:00pm
Room: LACC 251J
Register

If you have dabbled with Kaltura this year, you may be ready to learn more about the service’s capability. This hands-on session will cover advanced Kaltura topics, including video editing and chaptering, editing closed captions, creating video quizzes and linking video quizzes to the gradebook. To get the most of out the session, come prepared with some videos ready to edit and/or develop into a quiz.

Creative Applications in eLearning

Day/Time: Friday, June 5, 10:00-11:30am
Room: LACC 251J
Register

This workshop will showcase some creative ways to deliver content, engage learners and put a twist on some of the common teaching tools in D2L.

UDL Guidelines from CAST

Want to dive a bit deeper into Universal Design for Learning? Well, aside from coming and visiting our own Sue Doner or her website, there are some amazing resources you can check out online. One I am going to highlight today is CAST – the Centre for Applied Special Technology, which just released an updated version of their UDL Guidelines.

“The UDL Guidelines are a tool used in the implementation of Universal Design for Learning, a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn. Learn more about the Universal Design for Learning framework from CAST. The UDL Guidelines can be used by educators, curriculum developers, researchers, parents, and anyone else who wants to implement the UDL framework in a learning environment. These guidelines offer a set of concrete suggestions that can be applied to any discipline or domain to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities.”

Find out more by visiting The UDL Guidelines.

Kaltura Tip: Adding YouTube Videos to My Media with Workaround for Chrome issue

Did you know you can add YouTube videos to your My Media area in Kaltura? This doesn’t mean you are copying the actual video, but you can add links to YouTube videos so that those videos appear as part of your My Media area, meaning you can then embed them in a Content page (through Insert Stuff in the HTML editor). Why pull them in to My Media when you can embed YouTube videos directly through Insert Stuff? Well, if you add them to My Media, you can add them to Playlists in the Course Media gallery area, but most importantly, if you add YouTube videos to My Media, when you embed them in the HTML editor, Kaltura will strip out that annoying final screen in YouTube videos which tempt students to click on another video.

How do you do this? This tutorial will show you how, and in addition, will show you how to embed the videos to avoid the current issue with viewing embedded YouTube videos in Chrome. There are several steps, so please contact desupport@camosun.ca if you encounter difficulties.

This tutorial is designed for faculty who have previous experience using D2L and My Media in D2L and will cover the steps involved when you wish to add a YouTube video to your My Media space in D2L and embedding it in the HTML editor (for example, in a Content page). Note that this is a workaround as viewing a Kaltura YouTube video is not currently working in Chrome (Jan. 2020).

Steps

Go to your course in D2L.
Go to My media (through the link on your Navbar, or in your My Tools drop-down menu, or in a draft Topic in the Content tool).
Click Add New and select YouTube.
Open another tab in your Browser and go to YouTube. Find the YouTube video you want to add and click Share. Then select the video’s URL and click Copy.
Go back to your D2L course, and paste the copied URL into the Video Page Link box. Click Preview.
It will take a few minutes for the YouTube video to completely be pulled into My Media – the longer the video, the longer it will take. If the video appears to be taking a longer time to load than you think it should, pull the play bar across for a little bit and the video information editing area will appear in the main window. If this does not work, wait a little longer (it may take upwards of 20 minutes) and try again.
Edit and add details as needed. We highly recommend adding information to all the listed fields to help you filter/sort media files as you build your collection, and to help your students search for specific media files. Note that you do NOT need to Publish the video for it to be available for use in your course. Click Save. The YouTube video will now appear in your My Media space.
To allow students to see the YouTube video you just set up in My Media, you will now need to embed it in the HTML editor, in whichever tool you are using. In this scenario, we will embed it into a Content page. So, first go back to My Media and click the title of the YouTube video you want to embed.
Scroll down below the video, and click the Share tab.
This next step is the first part of the workaround for embedding YouTube videos in your Content pages. This will require that you have added the Course Media link to your NavBar. Once you have done that, click Course Media, then click Add Media.
Click the select box next to your YouTube video ad click Publish.
Click the Channel Actions menu (top right) and select Edit.
Click Playlists.
Click Create New and select Manual Playlist.
Give your Playlist a Title – for this scenarios, we will use the title of the YouTube video we are going to embed. Then click Add Media.
Click Add next to your YouTube video. Then click Save.
Click Embed.
Copy the Embed code in the Embed Playlist pop-up box (you will paste it into the HTML editor later in the following steps).
Now, go to the Content tool in your course and click on the title of the Module you want to add your video to. Click New and select Create a File.
Give your Topic a Title. Then click in the HTML editor box and add some text to provide a context for the video you will be embedding. For example, explain to your students what the video is about and what they should be watching/listening for. Make sure to hit your Enter key so your cursor appears below the text you just typed in, otherwise your video may not appear where you want it to! Click on the Insert Stuff icon at the top left of the HTML editor.
In the Insert Stuff pop-up, click Enter Embed Code.
Paste the Embed code you copied from the My Media area into the Embed Code box, and click Next.
Once the video appears in the Preview area, click Insert.
Your video will now appear in your Content Topic page, and you can click Save and Close to publish your Topic page. Your Topic will now appear with the embedded video in it.

Things to Remember

When you embed a YouTube video you have added to your My Media space into a D2L page, the video will not show advertising or additional videos as it does when embedding it from YouTube directly.

This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence.Icons by the Noun Project.

Creative Commons comes to Work

And now, my 5th assignment for the Creative Commons Certificate!

Adapt, not Assimilate!

And here is my fourth assignment from the Creative Commons Certificate!

Complex Images and Accessibility – Portland Community College Website

When adding images to your documents or web pages/WordPress pages, to meet best practices around accessibility you need to add appropriate descriptive text to your images so that learners who can not see the images have an alternate way to access the images. But adding text to images can be tricky when you are dealing with more complex images like graphs, maps, diagrams, charts, etc.

This Complex image Accessibility site (which opens in a new tab or window) from Portland Community College has some excellent guidelines for how to make complex images accessible to all.

Reminder of where to get help to get ready for January

Looking for help with setting up your final grades, etc.? Getting ready to set up your courses for the Winter term? eLearning is here to help.

We have drop-in times at Interurban in LACC251J on Fridays from 11:30am-12:30pm and in December, on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10:00am-12:00pm. And don’t forget, you can also schedule one-on -one consults with an instructional designer at either campus.

Email desupport@camosun.ca to book an appointment today!!

License to Creative Commoning

Here is my assignment 3 for the Creative Commons certificate: The Law that we call Copyright!

Managing Attendees in Blackboard Collaborate Ultra (D2L) – Blackboard Collaborate Ultra Tutorial

This tutorial is designed for faculty who have previous experience using D2L and Blackboard Collaborate Ultra, and will cover how you can manage Blackboard Collaborate Ultra (BBCU) session attendees. Information on how to use individual feature is contained in relevant tutorial documents. For further information, please contact desupport@camosun.ca for assistance.

Steps

Go to the location in your D2L course site where you have linked to your Blackboard Collaborate Ultra room (for example, in the Content tool), click on your Blackboard Collaborate Ultra session and enter your session.
Open the Collaborate panel (the bottom right icon).
Click the Attendees icon.
To manage an attendee’s settings, click the Attendee controls icon (the three dots) to the left of their name.
From here you can:
1. Send a private chat message to that attendee.
2. Change the role of that attendee, for example (as shown here) promoting a Participant to Moderator, Presenter, or Captioner status.
3. Mute the attendee’s microphone.
4. Remove the attendee from the session/room.
You can also view an attendee’s Internet and audio connection by clicking the Attendee connection icon (to the left of the Attendee controls).
Finally, you can set the Attendee panel to stay open to make it easier to manage your attendees. Click the More Options icon (the three dots at the top of the Attendees panel) to:
1. Find an attendee (especially useful if you have a large group).
2. Detach the Attendee panel completely to keep it open.
3. Mute all attendees at once.

Things to Remember

It’s a good idea to recommend to attendees/participants that they mute their microphones upon entering the session, and to remind them they will need to unmute them to talk. That way you don’t have to worry about distractions from a lot of background noise.

This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence.Icons by the Noun Project.