Rubrics in Blackboard SP11

In our current version of Blackboard, you can create rubrics and associate them with assignments, but their usefulness ends there. Currently, you can't grade using these rubrics, and students can't view them. This all changes with SP11. In the new version, students are able to see the rubrics so they understand your grading criteria before they start an assignment, and you'll be able to grade and give feedback to students using interactive rubrics. Rubrics can be imported and exported for use across courses.

Rubrics Video Tutorials

To find out more about rubrics, watch these three videos and try them out on our test server.

• Creating a Grading Rubric
• Associating a Rubric with a Gradable Item
• Grading with Rubrics

Rubrics Resources

• "Authentic Assessment and Rubrics" from the University of Central Florida's Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning: http://www.fctl.ucf.edu/TeachingAndLearningResources/CourseDesign/Assessment/AssessmentToolsResources/rubrics.php
• Utah Education Network: http://www.uen.org/rubric/know.shtml
• A Rubric for Evaluating Student Blogs: http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/a-rubric-for-evaluating-student-blogs/27196
• Rubistar - search through their database to get ideas: http://rubistar.4teachers.org/
• NIU guide to rubrics: http://www.niu.edu/blackboard/guides/rubrics.pdf

Import Rubrics

Blackboard has gathered a few rubrics from the higher ed community that can be imported into Blackboard, then edited to meet your needs. These are available at http://www.blackboard.com/Platforms/Learn/Products/Blackboard-Learn/Features/Sharing-Rubrics.aspx.

Test Server For Blackboard SP11 Is Available

The Plan

We plan to upgrade to Blackboard 9.1 SP11 on June 7th and 8th, with the system hopefully coming up sometime early on Saturday, June 8th. See this previous blog post for more information on this upgrade. Your Blackboard containers will continue to be in the same state they were in before the upgrade after the upgrade is finished. That means the menu will be the same, and all the content you've added to your courses will be the same. So there's nothing really to worry about in that regard. The differences in SP11 mostly involves new functionality.

Test Server Log In

There will be some changes to the look and feel of Blackboard and many new features after the upgrade, so we have installed SP11 on our test server so you can to try it out at http://gcccdtest.blackboard.com. Log in using your usual Blackboard username. Your password will be your birth date unless you've changed it on the test server. As soon as you log in, be sure to change your password by clicking on Personal Information on the TEST Site tab. If you have trouble logging in, please send an email to Rhonda using your campus email account so I can be sure it's you.

Summer and Fall Semester Course Containers

Fall containers will be created on May 1st. It is best to continue to copy and modify your Summer and Fall semester courses on the live server just as you normally would. The test server can be used to experiment with new functionality, but it would be best to do course development on the live server and phase in use of new functionality over time once the live server is upgraded.

Open Education, MOOCs, and Student Access: A Panel Discussion

Free CCC Confer Webinar
April 30th at 10 am
Dean Florez, Barbara Illowsky, and Michelle Pilati leaders in the field share their thoughts.

Find out more and sign up at:
http://www.cccconfer.org/webinarEmail/templates/webinar-0413.html

Outlook Web Email May Not Work in IE 10

Some people have discovered that Outlook web email for GCCCD may not work in the Microsoft Internet Explorer 10 browser (IE 10). Sometimes a website you're visiting doesn't look like you expect it to. Images might not show up, menus might be out of place, and text boxes could be jumbled together. This can be caused by a compatibility problem between IE 10 and and the site you're on.

If this happens to you, choose one of the following three options:

1. Tap or click the Compatibility View button in IE 10
   
   
2. Use the Firefox browser
3. Use the Chrome browser

@ONE Technology Training Survey

@ONE, a project of the California Community College Chancellor's Office, is dedicated to providing all Faculty & Staff at the 112 California Community colleges with the best technology training possible.

We want to hear from you!

Please take a few minutes to complete this survey about your technology training preferences. Your participation in this survey should take about 15 minutes. Your participation has the potential to guide future enhanced technology training available to you. The data collected is completely anonymous, you will not be asked for your name, and will not be linked to your identity in any way.

If you work for more than one community college, please complete ONLY one survey based on either your primary college, or the college of your choosing. It is appreciated that you limit your responses to that one college only.

If you have any questions or concerns about this survey, are interested in the data collected from this survey, or would like to view the recommendation report based on the data, please contact @ONE via email at info@onefortraining.org.

Survey Link:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TT-CCC

If you are not familiar with the training @ONE provides, check out their website at http://www.onefortraining.org/.

New version of Blackboard in June

It's a pleasure to announce that we will be upgrading Blackboard on June 7th and 8th to version 9.1 Service Pack 11 (SP11). We are currently on 9.1 Service Pack 5 (SP5). We haven't upgraded in two years, so this new version will give us some exciting new features. I have listed some of the major improvements below.

New Features:

• Interactive rubrics - grade by clicking directly in the rubric
• Needs grading tool enhancements - option to choose how many interactions will place the item in Needs Grading status
• Timed assessments enhancements - auto submit at time expiration, auto save answers
• New user interface - clean and more modern interface
• Automatic test re-grading - change an answer or throw out a question then Blackboard handles re-grading
• Redesigned discussion boards
• Force first - students have to post before being able to read other posts
• all messages for a forum on one page
• New calendar - vastly improved
• New content editor
• No extra steps to safely paste from Word
• video everywhere – record from your webcam to your YouTube account and embed
• It actually inserts a blank line when you press return
• Course Evaluations & Enterprise Survey Tool built in to core product
• Inline grader for assignments - no more downloading files
• Improved item analysis for assessments

We should have the new version installed on our test server sometime next week. You can also get access to the test server to try it out yourself. Just send me an email requesting access.

You can check out Blackboard's official information about this upgrade at http://go.blackboard.com/faculty. I'll provide in-depth articles about these new features throughout the rest of this semester. I will also give workshops. Stay tuned to this blog for more information and have your colleagues sign up if they haven't already done so.

Syllabus Builder Tool

George Joeckel from Utah State University developed an easy to use interactive tool that any instructor can use to create a course syllabus. This free tool will walk you step by step through the process of creating your syllabus including doing some of the calculations for the grading scale and offering up action verbs to use for learning objectives.

The video at http://youtu.be/K_M1Ii92OY8 shows how to use this tool.



You can access the tool at https://elearn.usu.edu/OAR/PDF_Syllabus_Builder_v1_beta.pdf

Online Course Policies

Laurie Furry sent me this link to a YouTube video about defining course policies to students.
(http://youtu.be/naxrUWXLJy4)



Thanks Laurie!

Online Teaching Certification and Courses at @ONE

@ONE offers an Online Teaching Certification Program that will help you excel in the digital age. It's extremely affordable, comprehensive and easy to fit within your busy schedule. Cuyamaca College, as well as practically every community college in California, honors this certification as preparation to teach online.

Find out more about the Online Teaching Certification Program

Spring 2013 Online Courses

(You don't have to be in the certificate program to take these courses)

Creating Accessible Online Courses
 2/19/13 - 3/15/13

Designing Effective Online Assessments
2/11/13 - 3/08/13

Introduction to Teaching with Blackboard 9.1
3/04/13 - 3/29/13

Introduction to Online Teaching and Learning (New)
4/8/13 -5/3/13

Building Online Community with Social Media (New)
4/15/13 - 5/10/13

We recommend only taking one course at a time to maximize your success.

What do Students [Really] Want in an Online Course?

The Online Learning Insights blog has an interesting post called "What do Students [Really] Want in an Online Course?" that can be read at http://onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/what-do-students-really-want-in-an-online-course/.

Blackboard bug - Hiding the Cengage Tool

There's no need to try this, but if you go to Tools or Tools Area on your Blackboard course menu and click the "Hide Link" button next to Cengage Learning MindLinks, you'll see a blank white area below the Welcome and My Courses tabs. If you've tried this, just click the back button on your browser to take you back to the Tools area.

This bug will be fixed in a future version of Blackboard, but in the meantime, you can fix this bug and hide the Cengage tool by going to the Control Panel > Customization > Tool Availability. It's best not to change anything in the Tool Availability section. All you need to do is open it. You don't need to click Submit either. Just click on Tools in your course menu again.

When you return to Tools, the Cengage tool will have magically disappeared.

How to Create Excellent Courses with Open Education Resources (OER)

What are Open Education Resources (OER)? Find out at  http://onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com/2012/11/30/how-to-create-excellent-courses-with-open-education-resources/.

Blackboard Needs Your Help

Blackboard has three new opportunities to partner with the Blackboard User Experience team to influence future releases of Blackboard Learn. If you are interested in participating, please read further and click the registration links if you want to participate.


Student Engagement & Retention Focus Group

The Blackboard User Experience team is looking for feedback on the design and experience of tools intended to bring retention and student engagement to a teacher's attention, quickly alerting them to potential risk and allowing them to take immediate action.

If you would like to participate in this focus group, please register below.
Registration Link: https://bbuxresearch.wufoo.com/forms/recruiting-for-student-and-engagement-research /


Grading Assignments Research Activity

Are you an instructor? Blackboard is working on streamlining how you grade assignments and we need your help! We've added some new features and we'd like to spend an hour letting you use them and get your feedback.

If you are interested in participating in this research activity, please register below.
Registration Link: https://bbuxresearch.wufoo.com/forms/recruiting-for-grading-assignments-research /


Help Plus Beta

Blackboard is evolving our help (we are calling it Help Plus internally). One key change is we are opening the help system to encourage the community to share the materials they create for their school. Our goal is to build a library of best practices from the community that enhances our help.

We are looking for contributors and end users to help us test the system. Contributors are those of you that are building supplemental resources (videos, PDFs, etc) on Blackboard Learn. If you want to share your ideas and your work with the Blackboard community, we need your help.

End users are those who value help and want to help us test and perfect the system. We need your help, too!

Testing will begin the first week in December with a short introduction.

If you are interested in participating in this beta, please register below.
Registration Link: https://bbuxresearch.wufoo.com/forms/recruiting-for-help-plus/

Creative Commons Licenses

Regent University periodically publishes a video magazine for educators. This month's issue is all about Creative Commons licenses. If you're interested, take a look at http://www.regent.edu/admin/ctl/onlinetraining/centerpoint/.

Instructor Characteristics That Affect Online Student Success

There is an interesting article on the Faculty Focus blog about "Instructor Characteristics That Affect Online Student Success" that can be read at http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/instructor-characteristics-that-affect-online-student-success/.

"From these findings and the comments from participants, we identified communication/availability and feedback as the two primary characteristics that the students found important in their online courses. Students wanted frequent, timely communication and substantive feedback on their assignments. We received comments such as the following:

• “We must hear from the instructor within 24 hours!”
• “I would not think twice about withdrawing if the instructor is not available five days a week.”
• “The worst thing is waiting for a graded paper.”"

What do you think? Please complete the poll below or at http://poll.fm/3yw17.

Grading Assignments Survey for Instructors

Blackboard is working on refining how you grade assignments and they'd love your feedback on how you use assignments in your course and how you expect to be able to grade them. You can share your opinion by answering the questions in the survey below:

Survey Link: http://participate.usabilla.com/891e13ee5a116cf7061662b04082f4279d0b0374

Video Captioning Tool

There is a web-based program that allows you to caption YouTube, Vimeo, or other videos about as easily as any other solution I've seen. They provide easy to follow videos that step you through the process. If you need to caption a video, you might want to give this tool a try.

Amara a.k.a. Universal Subtitles
http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/

Online Student Bill of Rights Video

Quality Matters created this well-done video.
Watch it at http://youtu.be/2mDbSvqBvR8?t=48s

At Cuyamaca College we are committed to quality!

Online Learning in the Social Era Video

Michelle Pacansky-Brock traces the possibilities the social era holds for transforming online learning in this short video. Watch it at http://youtu.be/qh2HskDtpK8 or view the embedded version below.

How to Use Social Media to Advance Science Programs

This article in The Chronicle is available for the next 4 days at http://ow.ly/egkAP

Just a reminder, if you want to create a Facebook page for something related to the college, please review the District Social Media Guidelines and contact Rhonda.