Monday, June 18, 2012

Word Counter for Blackboard

Liberty University created a Firefox add-on that counts the number of words in discussion board, blog, journal, and wiki posts made by students. This add-on lets faculty quickly see the number of words a student has posted to make grading easier.

To get the add-on, go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/Word-Counter-Bb/ using Firefox. Click the green "Add to Firefox" button to install it.

After installing the add-on you'll see something like this in your Discussion board threads.


Friday, June 8, 2012

Online Teaching Conference This Week

The Online Teaching Conference for 2012 starts this Wednesday and runs through Friday. You can attend online for free by registering at http://www.onlineteachingconference.org/.

To kick-start the conference, 2012 Blackboard Catalyst "Exemplary Course" Award winner (and former OTC Keynoter) Dan Barnett's presentation -- "Closing the Loop - Creating Self-reflecting Students in Online Classes" -- is now free to view on YouTube at http://youtu.be/MmmXpjSt2ag. This thought provoking video is pertinent to all online teachers.




Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Cheating in Online Classes

An article in The Chronicle titled, "Online Classes See Cheating Go High-Tech" underscores the importance of having multiple measures of assessment in an online class AND making some of those measures project based so that a student’s work and skill set becomes recognizable.

The Cuyamaca College "Best Practices Checklist for Effective Online Instruction" lists several ways to reduce cheating. In particular we encourage "Instructors use more than one method to assess student learning, and the methods are appropriate to the content being assessed. (item 3.4)"

Another Checklist item that is applicable is "Learning activities foster instructor-student, content-student, and if appropriate to the course, student-student interaction (e.g. e-mail, discussion, phone, online conferences)." (item 5.1)

The more instructors get to know their students through discussion and other interactive assignments and activities, the easier it will be to determine when a student is not doing their own work.