Monday, February 23, 2015

Humanizing Online Instruction

From KCTCS's Instructional Designer, Elizabeth Dalton:


There is a MOOC that will run March 9 – April 7th that focused on teaching online: Humanizing Online Instruction – The #HumanMOOC


I participated in this last spring and did pick up a few new ideas. It focuses on the Community of Inquiry Model. This model is all about how social presence, teaching presence and cognitive presence (interaction with course content and materials) interact to create a deep learning experience.

Pass along to anyone looking for further ideas in being a great online instructor.

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Politico report on Pearson

More evidence that we should be switching to OER?

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/pearson-education-115026.html


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

KCTCS Teaching & Learning Institute

Join us for the spring KCTCS Teaching & Learning Institute as we share expertise and best practices. Together we can successfully progress through change!

This institute’s focus is Change: The Next Generation – Building on Past Success to Address the Future (the impact of internal and external changes on colleges in the near future).

Locations: This is a regional institute. You may attend any of the following campuses locations: 


Somerset: February 13 - Program Schedule


REGISTER TODAY (Somerset)
Registration ends Feb. 11

Owensboro: March 6 - Program Schedule

REGISTER TODAY (Owensboro)
Registration ends Mar. 1


Big Sandy: April 10 - Registration will open soon

Thursday, February 5, 2015

Hello,

On February 8th, 2015 between the hours of 1:00 am to 5:00 am EST, Blackboard Managed Hosting will perform maintenance on Blackboard (Bb may not use this entire time allotted and will bring the system online as soon as maintenance is complete). A maintenance notification is posted on the portal page of Blackboard and the Blackboard helpdesk have been notified. Blackboard Engineers will be installing Cumulative Update 1 for the October 2014 release during the maintenance window. This update contains multiple patches that address some of the bugs that surfaced after updating to the latest release of Blackboard Learn. Cumulative Update 1 was installed on the KCTCS Blackboard staging environment on 01/28/2015 for QA. Below I have listed the bugs that this patch set addresses. Please feel free to access the staging environment if you would like to do testing in your course: https://kctcs-stage.blackboard.com. Blackboard is currently working on Cumulative Update 2. At this time I do not have an ETA on when this will be delivered or confirmation on what issues will be addressed in the patch set, I should have more information on CU-2 soon. For a list of current Blackboard known issues please access this URL: https://elearning.kctcs.edu/bbcswebdav/institution/Blackboard/KnownIssues.pdf

Cumulative update 1  for Bb 9.1 October 2014 should resolve these issues:
  • ·         Some course tool links produce a permissions error after adding the tool(s) to a course menu. Tools affected: Cengage Mind Links, McGraw-Hill Connect, WileyPLUS, Bb Collaborate. The error is “The specified resource was not found, or you do not have permission to access it.”.
  • ·         Student comments do not load on graded journal and blog posts.
  • ·         Course links that link to assignments or content area generate access denied errors.
  • ·         Instructors are unable to print more than one page of a student grade report, a test canvas or course content area.
  • ·         When instructors download the full grade center from their course the weighted totals in the download do not match weighted totals in the course.
  •