Distance Education Training Options
Developing your DE Course: Materials and Processes
- Updating your Syllabus for Online Learning: This course will address items in your syllabus that require special considerations when you are teaching online or at a distance. We will also discuss some of the required syllabus elements.
- Performing an Assignment Review: One of the first steps you must take when you are moving your course online is to create an assignment review. This helps you to determine what needs to be built or developed, how you convert materials to an online format, what tools you will need to use, and what potential issues, problems or constraints may arise.
- Matching Media to Learning Styles:
This course will address how to meet the needs of your online students different learning styles through a variety of media.
- Clemson University Library Resources for Distance Education: This course will provide an introduction to the library services offered for Distance Education students and faculty. Clemson librarians will discuss Copyright Clearance and e-Reserves. Then they will demonstrate how to access e-Reserves through the Blackboard Content Collection.
- Distance Education Courses and Accessibility: A presentation on the Disability Services that are available for Distance Education students and things faculty should consider when they are developing online materials for students.
- Creating a Welcome Message: When you are teaching an online course, you should plan to send out a welcome message to all of your enrolled students. The welcome message should contain several key items that will allow students the chance to learn more about you and the course.
- Quality Assessment for Distance Education Courses: Essential attributes of a Distance Education course that result in a quality teaching-learning experience.
Blackboard Course Management System
- Blackboard Admin Tools: Saving and Reusing your Course: If you teach a course in multiple sections or repeat a course each year you will want to learn how to archive, copy and restore the contents of your Blackboard courses. These tools will help you archive a snapshot of your course, clean up the contents of your course at the end of a semester, and restore everything to a new course later on.
- Blackboard New Faculty Introduction: This class is for faculty who are new to Clemson in 2007. Blackboard offers an instructor a set of tools to deliver part or all of a course on line. Functions include uploading documents for students, setting up discussion boards and chats, posting/dislaying grades securely, and providing online tests, surveys and assignments. This class will introduce you to the Blackboard system and begin with the basics of setting up a Blackboard course.
- Blackboard: Getting Started: Blackboard offers an instructor a set of tools to deliver part or all of a course online. Functions include uploading documents for students, setting up discussion boards and chats, posting/displaying grades securely, and providing online tests, surveys and assignments. This class will introduce you to the Blackboard system and begin with the basics of setting up a Blackboard course.
- Blackboard Assessments: Creating Online Assignments: Often a student's assignment involves preparing and turning in a specific product. This may be a lab report, research paper, spreadsheet or a photograph or drawing. With Blackboard's assignment tool you can issue an assignment to students and have them submit their results to you in an electronic format. You can then review and grade their work and reply with a grade, comments and even a marked-up copy of their work. This class will cover the basics of creating and receiving online assignments in Blackboard.
- Turnitin Plagiarism Detection Application within Blackboard: Clemson has licensed the Turnitin technology of Paradigms, LLC as an aid to faculty who need to review their students' work for originality and possible problems with plagiarism. The function of Turnitin is to encourage student originality and to provide instructors a tool to use Turnitin to screen student assignments. Faculty can use Turnitin as a means for raising the profile of the plagiarism issue with students, acting as a deterrent to student plagiarism, and streamlining the process of evaluating a document for possible plagiarism. This training class will help instructors become familiar with the tool itself and how they can apply it in their classes.
- Blackboard Content Collection: Building Your Content Library: With the introduction of Blackboard's new Content System an instructor can build a master library of content materials that can be shared among many courses and updated in a single step. This class will introduce you to the Content System for loading course materials and linking to them from within your Blackboard courses.
- Blackboard Communications: Discussion Boards, Chats & Virtual Classrooms: In-class discussions have long served as a primary means for introducing and understanding subjects in a course. Online Discussion Boards can provide a rich format for supplementing in-class discussions in face-to-face courses as well as providing a means for similar discussions to take place in distance education courses. In addition, real-time on-line discussions can be an excellent tool for distance education courses as well as enhance a face-to-face course. Blackboard offers a Discussion Board, Lightweight Chat and Virtual Classroom that can be used very effectively in drawing students into the study and discussion of various subjects.
- Blackboard Wiki’s and Blogs: There are four exciting new tools from Learning Objects available in Blackboard. Teams LX creates "wiki" collaborative sites that groups can use to develop media rich projects or course-wide resources. Journal LX offers a "blog" tool that students can use in groups or individually to develop collections of materials or reflective pieces that can be shared with the instructor and/or other students. Search LX offers a full-text search of course and workgroup materials. And Expo LX offers wiki and blog tools to Clemson Blackboard users that extend beyond their courses and workgroups.
- Blackboard Assessments: Creating Online Tests and Surveys: You can create online tests and surveys in Blackboard in a variety of formats. Questions that are multiple choice, true/false, fill-in-the-blank, ordering, matching, and multiple answer can be graded automatically by Blackboard. Essay questions also can be included with the instructor evaluating each student's answers. You can create question pools and draw from them for specific questions or for a random set of questions. This class will look at creating questions for tests and surveys, deploying those instruments, and receiving the grades into Blackboard's Gradebook.
- Blackboard Adaptive Release: Blackboard version 6.3 introduced a powerful tool for instructors called "Adaptive Release." This tool allows an instructor to set conditions under which students can have access to materials, resources, etc. within Blackboard. For example, materials can be made available only to a selected group of students in the class. Students can be required to indicate progress in reviewing basic materials before Blackboard will release lab or project assignments. And students can be required to demonstrate a minimum skill level in one topic before they can move on to the next topic, guiding them more deliberately through the course's lessons and providing valuable feedback to the instructor. This class will introduce the types of conditions that are available to the instructor and experiment with ways to use Adaptive Release to guide, encourage and strengthen student learning.
- Blackboard Assessments: Gradebook Basics: Many instructors need to post grades where students can see them in a secure setting. Blackboard includes a gradebook to provide this feature. This class will look at how to create graded items in the gradebook, enter and update grades, and compute simple totals and weighted totals. Unless you need to computer special totals or other functions you can use Blackboard's Gradebook without having to go through a spreadsheet program such as Excel.
- Blackboard Assessments: Extending Blackboard's Gradebook: Blackboard's Gradebook works very well for displaying students' grades on various tests, projects and assignments. But if you want to compute special totals or averages you will need to use an Excel spreadsheet in conjunction with the Gradebook. In this class we will cover downloading and uploading the gradebook. Also we will look at setting up formulas to set up weighted grades, computer intermediate grades (such as midterms), and compute an average score after dropping the lowest grade.
- Blackboard Admin Tools: Organizing your Course Materials: This class explores different methods of organizing your course materials to make a clear & simple user interface for your students. This includes using Learning Units and Folders to group materials. Creating and managing groups(teams) of students, and identify techniques for modifying your course menu and adjusting your tool settings.
- Blackboard Open Lab: This is an informal, unstructured training session designed to provide faculty an opportunity to discuss issues and ask questions about Blackboard. We will not have a formal agenda, but instead will provide an open time to help you in further developing your use of Blackboard in your teaching. Many of those who attend these sessions are already using Blackboard to some extent. However, if you are just considering using Blackboard or have only used it a little we encourage you to attend. This will be a good time for you to get acquainted with Blackboard, and you can learn a lot just by hearing and observing what other faculty are doing in their courses. You are welcome to bring any materials that you want to incorporate into your Blackboard course so that we can help you set them up. If you know in advance of any specific questions or issues that you would like to discuss, please send an e-mail to ITHELP@clemson.edu before this session so that we can better prepare for you. Note that this session will be held in one of our training labs, so you will have an opportunity to work hand-on with your course materials.
Online Lectures and Synchronous Class Tools
- Adobe Presenter: Learn how to develop web-based presentations that can be accessed on-demand from virtually anywhere using the Adobe Presenter plug-in to PowerPoint. This course teaches participants how to add narration and other enhancements to new or existing PowerPoint presentations, and then publish them in a customized Flash format (for reduced file size).
- Adobe Meeting: This series offers an introduction to Clemson University's supported web conferencing application called Adobe Connect. The first session will include a demonstration and hands-on practice using the basic collaborative tools that Adobe Connect Professional offers. Basic requirements and suggested best practices will be discussed to inform users of the implications of bandwidth, as well as the basic concepts of Pods and their functionality. In the second session participants will work hands-on with Adobe Connect Professional and practice uploading content into Adobe Connect Meetings, customizing their webconference workspace, and managing their user registered space on the Adobe Connect Server. Other best practices will be discussed as well.
