Instructional Support Services

Faculty and students logging into SNHU’s CoursEval system as of today (Monday, February 28th) will notice a big change in the way that it looks. Over the weekend, CoursEval updated our hosted environment to the newest version and with it came a facelift and some new tools.

While the report pages remain mostly unchanged, faculty and students received new landing pages which are much more informative and easier to navigate. Some of the new features for faculty include access to live response rate data by class, the ability to preview evaluations, and the ability to add custom questions (University College courses only). More information on how to add custom questions will come later. Some of the new features for students include clearer identification of due dates and evaluation progress.

You can see a more complete overview of the changes by clicking here. This overview has also been posted on the CoursEval page of the blog.

Please direct any questions to Aaron Flint at coursevals at snhu dot edu.

 

        
Some minor changes have been made to SNHU’s software purchase program for faculty, staff, and students. The Software Purchase Programs website (See Links section on this blog) has been updated accordingly.

1. Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac is now available for mail order through Instructional Support
2. The Adobe page has been updated to reflect new products and pricing
3. A page has been added for Read Write Gold
4. A page for RefWorks is underway

Any questions can be directed to a.flint@snhu.edu

 

Over the next two weeks maintenance work will be done on Blackboard. While this will result in minimal downtime, please note the dates below.

Monday, December 27th @ 9:00am – Some minor cosmetic changes will be made to Blackboard so that it better matches the SNHU website and SNHU branding. The “logo bar” and tabs along the top of the screen will change color and shape as in the screenshot below. This change is purely cosmetic and will not change functionality in any way.

The current look…

Will become…

Tuesday, December 28 and Thursday, December 30th from 12:00am to 8:30am Eastern – Blackboard will be offline for maintenance. Please plan accordingly. Other systems such as the Library and Penpal can be accessed via the SNHU website.

After hearing from several universities, Blackboard has chosen these dates to conduct maintenance instead of December 18th so as to reduce impact on end of term activities. Please disregard the email about Blackboard downtime on December 18th that you received on December 1st. The maintenance that was originally scheduled for December 18th has been cancelled and the work will be done during this time.

If you have any questions, please email Aaron Flint (a.flint@snhu.edu)

 

Learn how to set up your Blackboard Grade Center to weight your grades in three easy steps.

Download this .pdf for more information:  WeightGrades3Steps

 

On Tuesday, October 12th Instructional Support presented a webinar for COCE instructors on the new features of Turnitin2. Thank you to COCE Faculty Development for scheduling this with us and thank you to all who attended!

For those of you who could not make it or were unaware, you can view the recording of the session. Turnitin2 now includes a slightly revised plagiarism prevention tool called OriginalityCheck and bundles two products previously sold separately. These are GradeMark and PeerMark. GradeMark significantly enhances your grading options and PeerMark is a robust tool for peer review assignments.

If you have questions after reviewing the recorded webinar or would like to schedule training for yourself or your department, please contact one of the Instructional Support staff.

 

A new Blackboard Building Block called Document Unpackager is now available to Blackboard Instructors.  Instructors can easily upload a .zip file containing multiple folders and files to a course content area all at once instead of one file at a time.  The Document Package tool will automatically recreate the original folder structure in the course content area.

To upload the zip file, choose Document Package from the Select drop down menu in a course content area.  It will appear at the bottom of the Select list.  Click the GO button. 

On the Document Unpackage screen, click the Browse button, locate the .zip file, and click Submit.  The folders and files can be reordered or copied to another content area once they appear.  Click here for a short instructional video on Document Unpackager.

*Not intended for use with linked HTML pages.

 

Starting Tuesday, September 14th Instructional Support staff are available for training during free periods.

Linda, Lauren, and Aaron are always available to schedule training or consultations to meet your scheduling needs but in addition we will be offering walk-in support during free periods for the duration of the fall semester. Please see the free period options below.

Starting September 14th through the fall semester:

Starting September 28th through the fall semester:

Instructional Support has reserved RFH 228 for the Wednesday free period for the duration of the term. If you are teaching in this room and would like to practice with the technology, this time is available to you. If you have questions about other academic tools such as RefWorks, Qualtrics, Turnitin, Clickers, iTunes U, etc. feel free to stop by.

To Be Scheduled:

Lauren Andresen will be scheduling a variety of Chalk & Wire training sessions in the next couple of weeks once the initial student training crunch subsides. Please check our blog or subscribe for updates.

If you cannot make a free period time, don’t worry. You can contact us to arrange training that better fits your schedule. Please click here to see the list of services we provide. This is not an all-inclusive list so if you need help with something that isn’t there, please contact us anyway.

 

On September 4th, 2010 Turnitin will receive a major upgrade which looks to be very promising. If you use Turnitin, I STRONGLY recommend that you review this information.

SNHU has been using Turnitin for several years and its utilization continues to grow but we have only ever used the plagiarism checker. On September 4th, iParadigms is launching their new product Turnitin2 which bundles the Turnitin OriginalityCheck (with which you are familiar) with its peer review and grading tools called PeerMark and GradeMark respectively.

This is an exciting upgrade because it automatically adds PeerMark and GradeMark to our license and enhances the usability of Turnitin. This opens up new avenues for us with regards to peer review assignments and grading of papers. In addition, as an instructor you can review the originality report, peer reviews, and grading comments all in one place. You will also now have the ability to add comments to an originality report that the student will see.

Before the change occurs I recommend that you review the new product overview. This is a detailed overview and walk-through video so rather than repeating things in this post, I encourage you to check it out.

Once Turnitin2 is live on September 4th and we (Instructional Support, that is) have had a couple days to test it, we will be available to provide training. I plan to use it for all of my Term One assignments so hope to have some good feedback.

If you have any questions about Turnitin or this upgrade, please feel free to contact me or post a comment here.

~ Aaron

 

The Instructional Support team provides a wide variety of support and training to faculty, staff, and students. Following is a brief overview of the many instructional technologies we support and services we provide. The list below is not exhaustive. We support a lot of things. If it is an academic technology and not on the list contact us. If we haven’t done it, touched it, or experimented with it we’ll figure it out.

First, to introduce our staff… The team consists of Linda McCabe, Lauren Andresen, and Aaron Flint. We each have experience with and provide support for all of the technologies and services listed below but to streamline service, we each take lead roles on different services. If you need assistance, get in touch with the primary contact listed.

The services we provide:

If you would like training on any of the above, please get in touch with the primary contact. We do not schedule many workshops as we prefer to meet with individuals or small groups so that we can customize the training to your skill level and needs.

Please feel free to contact us by phone, email, etc. or stop by to see us in Stark Hall, Room 40.

Contact info:

Linda McCabe
l.mccabe@snhu.edu
603-668-2211, ext. 2241

Lauren Andresen
l.andresen@snhu.edu
603-668-2211, ext. 2174

Aaron Flint
a.flint@snhu.edu
603-865-7132
Twitter: aflint

Our fax: 603-629-4668

 

A few weeks ago a new and fascinating blog was created at SNHU. Into Africa chronicles the trip of Professor Michele Goldsmith and student Nate Boesch to Uganda where Prof. Goldsmith is continuing her study of mountain gorillas in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest thanks to funding from the Papoutsy Chair in Ethics. Prof. Goldsmith is monitoring habitat use and Nate is interviewing tourists. Their blog contains much more detail about their activities and some great pictures so rather than recreate a bunch of details you should just check it out directly.

The blog is interesting and well-written and I look forward to each post. I hope you will too.