Saving Time in the Online Class

CenterPoint is an online video magazine for online teachers. Each quarter CenterPoint publishes a new video covering topics of interest to faculty teaching online. This episode includes "Saving Time in the Online Class." They suggest collecting the emails from your students for a semester, then compiling them into an FAQ to post the next semester to save you the time it takes to answer the same questions over and over. 

Of course we all know, getting the students to read the FAQ is another topic altogether!  You may want to incorporate the information into your syllabus or into the assignment that generates the question.

Here's the link to watch the CenterPoint video in case the link above doesn't work:
http://www.regent.edu/admin/ctl/onlinetraining/centerpoint/home.htm

Camtasia Captions Just Got Easier

Camtasia is screen recording and video editing software that many faculty use to enhance teaching and learning. This week a new version of Camtasia came out.  The biggest change in this version is enhanced ways captions can be added to videos. They even added text-to-speech capability from within the program. Check out a video showing how it works at http://www.techsmith.com/learn/camtasia/7/captions-overview/

SafeAssign Slowdowns

Blackboard sent us the following message about SafeAssign performance issues. If you get an error when trying to access SafeAssign, wait 10 - 30 minutes and try again.

"This message is to notify our clients of two intermittent SafeAssign issues due to an increase in volume of papers processed.

Extended time to receive submission results. Typically papers submitted into SafeAssign take a few minutes to process. However, during this peak season there have been multiple occurrences of SafeAssign paper submissions building up in queue. This causes a lag in processing time. While the papers are processed successfully, it can take several minutes up to 2 to 3 hours, due to the current high volume. Note that any papers that accumulate in the queue are processed and do not need to be re-submitted.

Intermittent errors when submitting papers or accessing submissions. Occasionally when a student attempts to submit a SafeAssign paper or an instructor attempts to access a SafeAssign submission,rather than processing the paper or accessing the paper, the user receives an error message. This error signifies that one of the SafeAssign servers is unresponsive due to load. Our team is automatically notified when this occurs and takes immediate action to restart the services, which typically is accomplished in a matter of minutes. Submissions that result in an error need to be re-submitted.

Peak utilization of our SafeAssign product typically occurs during the months of October and November. While we made adjustments to our environment to prepare for this high volume season, we’ve seen a 60% increase in submissions over last year. Therefore, we are currently working to address this additional usage in our SafeAssign environment. We will send a follow up bulletin within the month to share our progress."

New Video for Students - "How to Submit an Assignment"

An instructional video on "How to Submit an Assignment" was created so that faculty can provide the link to their students.

If you were linking to the old video, please update the link to the new one at
 http://www.gcccd.edu/online/tutorials/bb/videos/submit-assignment/