Spring 2018 Blackboard instructors,
Information/reminders prior to the start of the Spring semester, which will be the final semester of Bb usage at LPC:
- Make your courses available to students by the beginning of the day Tuesday. If you are not teaching an online or hybrid course and want to wait longer to make your courses available, that’s up to you. To make courses available, go into a course, and click Control Panel - Customization - Properties, and for Make Course Available, click Yes, then click Submit.
- Blackboard will undergo maintenance from 9:01 p.m. Jan. 19 until 1 p.m. Jan. 20. Bb says that although it doesn’t anticipate any outages, it cannot rule out “periods of intermittent activity.” In other words, there might be some short outages.
- Make sure all of your content is accessible to students with disabilities. Everything you need to know about web accessibility, including “how-to” tutorials, is available in a new Canvas course in which you have access. Just log into Canvas, and you will see a web accessibility course in your Dashboard called Creating Accessible Course Content. Learn how to log into Canvas.
- If you are teaching a DE class and want to see how your course measures up to the quality standards set by the Online Education Initiative, you can compare it to the OEI Course Design Rubric. The LPC Academic Senate has endorsed the rubric as the standards to strive for in DE classes. View the Senate’s resolution. Examples that meet the rubric’s criteria can be found in the Online Course Design Guide and the Course Design Showcase.
- The Regular Effective Contact Guidelines, approved by the LPC Academic Senate, state that all Distance Education courses, whether fully online or hybrid, must demonstrate regular effective contact with student. For hybrids, this contact is required not only during on-campus meetings, but it is also required online.
- The LPC DE Committee has developed recommendations, along with answers to frequently asked questions, that are intended to aid instructors—particularly new instructors—in determining how many students to add and when to add those students near the beginning of the semester. View the recommendations and FAQs.
- The LPC Online Learning web site has been redesigned. Since many pages have been added and others changed, you might want to verify any links you have to it from within Canvas. The new site also includes a link called Faculty Resources, which was created for you.
- If you use SafeAssign, after performing a course copy or moving an individual SafeAssignment to another course, an additional step is needed to activate the SafeAssignment in the new course. From the Control Panel, click Course Tools, then SafeAssign, then SafeAssign Items, then Synchronize This Course to establish the link between the SafeAssignment and the Central SafeAssign server.
- Encourage your students to use the NetTutor online tutoring service. View student information about NetTutor. View faculty information about NetTutor.
- Here is LPC’s DE drop policy:
The instructor may drop students who miss the first meeting of a course. The first meeting of online or hybrid Distance Education courses is the first day of the class as specified in the class schedule listing. For these courses, instructors may drop students who do not log into their Blackboard course and/or complete indicated activities by the third day of classes. DE instructors may drop students if they have not submitted work and/or accessed the class for two consecutive weeks. For Summer courses, DE instructors may drop students if they have not submitted work and/or accessed the class for one week.
Good luck with your courses!
Scott
