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CETL Blog
Festival of Learning – Program and Registration
The Program for the Festival of Learning (May 11-13) is now up. Register now so you don’t miss out – it’s going to be amazing!
https://festival.bccampus.ca/
Celebrate Learning and Teaching in B.C. post-secondary education and explore the theme of Disruption and Transformation
Held every two years and welcoming 500 attendees, the Festival of Learning is B.C.’s largest conference about learning and teaching in higher education. This is a great opportunity for faculty, instructors, students, leaders, librarians, learning designers, educational technologists, and accessibility educators/professionals to network and learn together.
eLearning May/June Workshops – Lansdowne
eLearning Lansdowne Workshops
For Lansdowne workshops, click the Register link for the workshop you wish to register for. Questions about Lansdowne workshops? Contact Emily Schudel.
Blackboard Collaborate Ultra: Engaging in Real time
Day/Time: Tuesday, May 6, 2:00-4:00pm
Room: TBD
Register
Blackboard Collaborate Ultra is a synchronous classroom tool, which means that faculty now have an online tool with audio, video, chat, and whiteboard/desktop sharing capabilities to support their teaching in real-time, either from a classroom or from the comfort of your own laptop. Come find out more about Blackboard Collaborate and see it in action!
Kaltura: Streaming Media at Camosun!
Day/Time: Thursday, May 7, 9:00am-12:00pm
Room: TBD
Register
Kaltura is Camosun’s a streaming media tool (we sometimes call it Camosun’s YouTube). This means faculty and students now have a place to create, edit, and house their course-related videos. Kaltura also integrates with D2L. This half-day hands-on workshop covers the technical consideration of integrating multimedia into a D2L course using Kaltura. Time will be set aside for you to integrate and test your multimedia components in D2L. Basic familiarity with D2L is recommended for participants interested in this workshop.
Articulate 360: An Overview
Day/Time: Thursday, May 7, 10:00am-12:00pm
Room: TBD
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.
Designing for Inclusion with the Help of a New Ally!
Day/Time: Friday, May 8, 10:00-11:00am
Room: TBD
Register
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.
First Steps in Creating Accessible Course Content
Day/Time: Wednesday, May 20, 1:30-3:30pm
Room: TBD
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.
Getting Started with ePortfolio in D2L
Day/Time: Tuesday, May 26, 9:00am-12:00pm
Room: TBD
Register
Looking for options for your students to collect and share documents, assessments, presentations, etc. with other students and faculty across their Program? Come find out how ePortfolio in D2L might support you!
Flipping Out over the Flipped Classroom (Blended)
Day/Time: Wednesday, May 27, 10:00am-12:00pm. Online pre-course activities open Tuesday, May 19th. NOTE: You must complete the online activities BEFORE May 27th!
Room: TBD
Register
Wonder what all the hype is around the “flipped” classroom? Come experience one way to flip a classroom in our blended workshop. NOTE: in this flip, the online component will run first, taking 1-2 hours to complete over a week, and will be followed by a 2 hour face to face session. In this workshop, you will:
- Learn about what it means to flip a classroom
- Discuss your own ideas for flipped classroom activities with Camosun colleagues
- Learn about the pros and cons of flipping the classroom
Text-to-Speech Support for Students: An Orientation to ReadSpeaker in your D2L Course
Day/Time: Thursday, May 28, 10:00am-12:00pm
Room: TBD
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.
Integrating Informal Assessments Using D2L
Day/Time: Thursday, June 4, 10:00am-12:00pm
Room: TBD
Register
Unlike formal assessments, informal assessments allow you to observe the progress of your students regularly throughout the term of your course. In this session we will look at ways you can use D2L and other eLearning tools, to support informal assessments for your students.
Creating Community in the Online Classroom (Blended)
Day/Time: Tuesday, June 9, 10:00am-12:00pm. Online pre-course activities open Monday, June 1st. NOTE: You must complete the online activities BEFORE June 9th!
Room: TBD
Register
What does it mean to create an online community for your students? What considerations do you need to keep in mind when developing online activities to support that online community? This blended workshop will give you the opportunity to engage in online community building, and to work with your peers face-to-face to develop strategies for integrating online community-building activities into your course. NOTE: the online component will run first, taking 1-2 hours to complete over a week, and will be followed by a 2-hour face to face session.
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
Register
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
Register
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
Register
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
Register
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
Register
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
Register
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
Register
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.
Navigating the New Assignments Page View
Hot off the presses – meaning, I am posting this as a response to a question from a faculty member who just this morning came in to ask about this issue!
In our last D2L upgrade (upgrades happen monthly), you might have noticed a change in the Assignments tool table vide. Up until the upgrade, you would have had a choice to retain the old table, using an Opt-in feature, but now everyone will have to use the “New Assignments Page” view. So, let’s have a quick look and walk through the features and some of the issues that have been coming up with it.
The column headings in the new Assignment page view (image below the descriptions) are:
- Folder: the title of your Assignment)
- New: a hyperlink that directs you to all New submissions, both completely new submissions, and subsequent, additional submissions. If you hover over this link, you will see how many new submissions are “New” (FIRST submissions) or “Resubmissions” (any additional submissions to the same assignment AFTER the first one).
- Completed: Number of students who have submitted (completed) their assignments over the total number of students in the course (here, 4 submitted assignments out of 9 students)
- Evaluated: The number of student submissions you have already evaluated (here, 0 out of 9).
- Feedback Published: The number of student submissions you have published feedback for (here 0 out of 9). This differs from Evaluated because you can evaluate a submission, but wait to publish feedback.
- Due Date
One of the confusions for faculty has been for those faculty who are in a multi-instructor site where each instructor has small groups of students (in other words, the D2L course is not a one instructor grading all the students in the course kind of situation). In courses like this, the denominator for the Completed, Evaluated, and Feedback Published columns will not feel accurate. The denominators represent the TOTAL number of students in the course, not the number of students on instructor may have in her group.
In addition, the numbers you see when you hover over the hyperlinked number in the New column can be confusing as they refer to submissions that have NOT been evaluated. If you are having students submit regular reflections, for example, and not giving them evaluation/feedback until the end of the term, you will see the hyperlinked number rise as students submit – and their first submission will be the “New” one, and all subsequent submissions will be “Resubmissions”.
While we can’t change this table, we can let D2L how the new terminology is working for our faculty. If you have comments or suggestions based on your own experience with the new Assignment page, email me (Emily Schudel) or any instructional designer in eLearning, and we will submit your comments.
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.
Open Pedagogy Notebook
Seems this week is a week for blogging about other amazing blogs out there. Today, I wanted to introduce you briefly to the Open Pedagogy Notebook, a collaboration of Rajiv Jhangiani and Robin DeRosa.
“This website is designed to serve as a resource for educators interested in learning more about Open Pedagogy.
We invite you to browse through the examples, which include both classroom-tested practices and budding ideas, and to consider contributing examples of your own experiments with open pedagogy.
This Notebook builds on the work of a great open colleague Terry Greene and The Open Faculty Patchbook, which exists in both website and book form.”
Want to know more about Open Pedagogy, read about some amazing example of it in action, and submit your own amazing examples? Check out this site!
TRUBox Digital Detox
Need to take a break from all the technology that pervades all our lives? There is still time to join in with the Digital Detox from Thompson Rivers University. Here is more from the website:
“Talking about a “detox” is loaded language, to be sure. But so much of the technology we use everyday has toxicity baked in at the design level — issues like exploitation, inaccessibility, and inequity are features, not bugs. So without getting hysterical about the state of the world (okay, maybe a little bit), we’re going to talk frankly about the problems with the way we use technology and, more often, the way technology uses us.
We want to help you think about technology and how it intersects with your learning and teaching in new and more complex ways. Many of us feel overwhelmed by technology, and ideas like data privacy and are often not contextualized. And what are you supposed to do in a world that is increasingly controlled by big technology companies, anyway? Just go live in a cave? Our jobs, social lives, and family relationships often hinge on the very technologies we know pose such problems. Unplugging is an option for very few of us. So instead, we want to provide you with another way of thinking about the challenges of technology in 2020, and hopefully empower you to make better choices.”
Sign up to be reminded, twice a week, when there are new posts to read on the Digital Detox site.
Setting Videos to Allow for Downloads through My Media in D2L
This tutorial is designed for faculty who have previous experience using D2L and who have uploaded media to My Media in D2L. It will cover the steps involved when you wish to allow students to download a video. There are two parts to this tutorial: setting a video to allow downloading, and adding it to the Course Media gallery so students can download it. For further information, please contact desupport@camosun.ca for assistance.
Steps
- Go to your course in D2L.
- Go to My Media.
- Click the Edit icon (the pencil) to the right of the video you wish to allow downloads for.
- Click Downloads.
- Click the Source select box, and click Save.
- Click the Course Media link on your Navbar (if it is not there, you will need to add it).
- In the Course Media area, click the Media tab, then click +Add Media.
- Select the video you wish students to download, and click Publish. This will add the video into the Course Media gallery.
- You and your students can then click on the video to open it up in the Course Media viewing area.
- And then click the down arrow next to Details and select Download.
- Finally, click the download icon to save the video to your device.
Things to Remember
Students will NOT be able to download your video if you have only embedded it in an HTML editor page (for example, a Content page). They can only download videos from the Course Media gallery.
This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence.Icons by the Noun Project.
D2L Student Guide – What’s this all about?
I just wanted to take a moment to remind everyone about the D2L Student Guide that is linked from the main Camosun D2L Homepage.
This guide is for students needing reminders and support (PDF tutorials) around using not only the various tools in D2L, but also for using Kaltura, and Collaborate Ultra. In addition, the guide also contains links to many of the common student services at Camosun, for example, the Library, Learning Skills and the Writing Centre, Counselling Services, etc.
Take a look to see what’s there, and make sure to remind your students about this site.
And remember, if your students need technical help with D2L, Kaltura, or Collaborate, they can also contact eLearning Support at desupport@camosun.ca.