Publish videos to your course with Kaltura Mediaspace
In this Teaching Tip we introduce Kaltura Mediaspace, a new option that gives UAF instructors a lot of control over how a video is presented in their course and how students interact with it.
Tag Blackboard
Adapt your course for Blackboard Mobile Learn
More and more students are using mobile devices and an app called Blackboard Mobile Learn to access course content on the go. While students shouldn’t solely rely on smartphones to complete course requirements, there are steps instructors can take to make it a better experience, such as using common file types (like PDFs), keeping titles short and testing links on a variety of devices.
Build game badging options inside of Blackboard Learn
We all spend time playing games. According to vertoanalytics.com, we spend more than a billion hours per month playing mobile games and that doesn’t include games played on laptops, desktops or with game consoles.1 According to the entertainment software association, in 2015, 65% of US households had at least one person who played online games, three hours or more per week.
Release content when students are ready
In most disciplines, there are skills that need to be learned and understood before moving on to something more complicated. Without a solid foundation, moving on to more difficult endeavors can be challenging as well as frustrating and can be a hurdle the student is not able to get over.
Blackboard provides student performance analysis tools
The Blackboard Grade Center offers options for reviewing student performance on your tests and exams and can be a useful mechanism for evaluating the effectiveness of your test questions. A poorly worded question doesn’t mean your students aren’t mastering the content. Look for Attempts Statistics, Download Results, Item Analysis and Column Statistics as options in the column header for your test.
Use profile pictures to increase engagement
A picture gives us a visual anchor that helps us navigate an online conversation, particularly one with many participants. Social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter are obvious examples, but did you know that Blackboard also supports profile pictures? Encouraging their use in your course could help increase student engagement in discussions and allow a learning community to develop more naturally.
Blackboard hints & tricks
If you’re a longtime Windows user, you might be wishing for a visual folder structure view of your course. You may be more familiar with a “tree' structure where you see folders with a “+' sign indicating something in the folder. When you click on the folder icon that is right above the course name, a new window will open that allows you to navigate quickly to a nested tree structure where titles are links. This option is also available for students.
Going mobile
The Blackboard Learn application for iOS has been available for quite a while. The application is very student friendly and is a great option for accessing course material and posting to the discussion board using a mobile device. The Blackboard Grader application is now available (iOS iPad only) and should prove to be a great advantage for instructors.
Blackboard
Having an institutional Learning Management System (LMS) has both advantages and disadvantages. Some of the advantages are that class and student data is automatically created based on the institution’s registration system, students gain familiarity with the LMS’ structure and navigation, there is an online gradebook for teachers and students, and more.
Word vs. Blackboard
Many instructors spent frenzied final hours before launch wrestling content into Blackboard. One frequent source of challenge is that nearly all of us develop our lectures, notes and syllabi in Microsoft Word and when we transfer these materials online, we unwittingly wander into a decades old battleground. We innocently expect that we should be able to copy and paste from our Word document directly into Blackboard. But the potential layers of complexity and conflict can be more than frustrating.
The care and feeding of progress
I’d advise everyone who uses Blackboard’s Grade Center to embed this tip–or a link to this WordPress post supporting it–in your “Getting Started' folder. It’s perfect for the student to understand how to see your feedback.
Bb CTL tab
Are you teaching or are you enrolled in a UAF CTL-supported course? If so, you may have recently noticed a new feature in Blackboard we call the ‘UAF CTL Tab’. If you haven’t checked it out, next time you log into Blackboard, look next to the ‘My Blackboard’ tab at the top right and click on ‘UAF CTL’. You will find three sections there with lots of important and helpful information including links to social media on each page.