Instructional Support’s Blog

This post is a follow-up to the announcement posted on Monday, December 28th.

The Blog, Wiki, and Podcast Blackboard Building Blocks have been upgraded successfully. The previous post stated that all faculty must re-create their links after the upgrade. This may not be the case as post-upgrade tests did not require us to re-create links. All faculty should check their blog, wiki, and podcast links just in case there is a problem. If you can click the link and access your content then nothing further needs to be done. If you see an “Access Denied” error, then the links need to be re-created using these directions.

The new features listed below have been tested and appear to be working well.

Spell-check – will “red squiggle” underline a misspelled word. Click on the word and replacement options will appear.

Equation Editor – This tool provides a fairly robust mechanism for building equations that are embedded in your blog or wiki

Media Embedding – You can now embed Flash, Quicktime, Shockwave, Windows Media, and Real Media files in your blog or wiki

RSS for Wikis – previously RSS capability was on available in blogs and podcasts. It is now available for wikis as well.

If you have any questions about the blog, wiki, or podcast Blackboard Building Blocks, please contact Instructional Support.

You can also view full user guides by clicking here.

On Tuesday, December 29th I conducted a webinar for SNHU COCE faculty on the basics of creating audio podcasts using Audacity and making them available in Blackboard.

This webinar was requested by Trish Dionne from COCE Faculty Development and Training and marketed primarily to online faculty through COCE’s Faculty e-Source Center and faculty development blog. For a holiday week I was very pleased to have 13 attendees though I will admit I was a bit nervous as I usually conduct webinars for one or two people at a time.

This introductory session lasted about 50 minutes and covered the following:

What is a podcast?
Basic equipment and software
Preparing your podcast
Recording your podcast
Putting your podcast in Blackboard (using Learning Objects Podcast Building Block)

If you wanted to attend the webinar but were unable to or you just weren’t aware of it, a full recording of the event can be viewed at your convenience by clicking here. The recording includes all slides, demonstration, audio, and chat.

If you have questions or would like to schedule a training session (face-to-face or online), please contact Instructional Support. More webinars will be scheduled in the near future and announced on this blog so stay tuned.

It is important that all faculty using the blog, wiki, and podcast building blocks in Blackboard read this post. Action is required to ensure that your course blogs, wikis, and podcasts* function properly.

On the morning of Wednesday, December 30th the blog, wiki, and podcast Blackboard building blocks will be upgraded. This upgrade is necessary to provide bug fixes and implement new features including:

Spell-checking
Equation Editor
Content change notifications
Easier options for embedding videos and other content
RSS feed subscription capability for wikis

We apologize for the short notice but the window of opportunity to complete this task is very short. We needed to find a time that did not interfere with any running courses or other Blackboard maintenance.

Once the upgrade is complete all links to course blogs, wikis, and podcasts must be re-created. All content present before the upgrade remains, but the links do break during the upgrade process. Re-creating each link takes less than 30 seconds to complete. All faculty must recreate their links with the exception of faculty teaching Content Enhanced Courses online. The links for these courses will be recreated by the COCE Instructional Design team prior to the term start.

Once the building blocks have been upgraded, have been tested and deemed successful, an announcement will be posted on Instructional Support’s Blog.

Re-creating your blog, wiki, and podcast links is a simple process. You can click here to view step-by-step instructions.

Please post any comments or questions at the bottom of this blog post or email Aaron Flint

* This announcement only applies to blogs, wikis, and podcasts created within Blackboard using the Learning Objects Campus Pack Building Blocks (Journal LX, Teams LX, Podcast LX). Podcasts created using iTunes U are not affected.

On Saturday, January 2nd 2010 Turnitin will be unavailable from 6am to 2pm eastern time while the software is upgraded.  This upgrade is being conducted by Turnitin and affects all of their customers, not just SNHU.  On Monday, January 4th Instructional Support will upgrade the Blackboard Building Block so that all new features are available through Blackboard.

The upgrade will bring with it some enhancements to the instructor and student dashboards with which users will need to become familiar.  You can read about the enhancements by clicking here.  Please note that SNHU only subscribes to Turnitin.  We do not currently have the Peermark/Peer Review/Write Cycle products so please disregard those feature announcements.

Instructional Support will provide training if needed after the upgrade.

You may have heard this through other channels but just to be sure we cover all our bases…

Following is a message from SNHU’s Blackboard administrators.  Since this outage is between terms it should have minimal impact but please plan accordingly.

Blackboard Outage: December 28, 2009

This notice is to inform you about the scheduled maintenance outage that blackboard will be performing on Monday December 28, 2009. The work will start at 02:00 am ET and continue for 24 hours. This means that blackboard will be unavailable for 24 hours. During this time blackboard will be doing several things to improve the system.  The first is shrinking and cleaning up the database and second is moving our database to a larger storage area to accommodate future growth.  With these two important processes done, we will then gain back much needed space and also improve our database performance.

The outage was planned during this time to have the least impact to the Blackboard users.  This was a perfect opportunity to take advantage of the holiday season and to give our system some well deserved maintenance and downtime.  We thank you in advance for your support as we improve the blackboard system.

Thank you,
The SNHU Blackboard Team

As the fall terms draw to a close, I want to take this opportunity to provide an update on our new course evaluation process using CoursEval.

First a brief recap… in September 2009 the university transitioned from paper based course evaluations to an online system called CoursEval, a product of Academic Management Systems. This product was chosen after extensive research and a pilot in the spring of 2009 for its scalability, flexibility, and reporting. Instructional Support spent time over the summer getting CoursEval configured and began using it to deploy all course evaluations starting in September with COCE Term 09EW1.

Where are we now… since September we have deployed 21 separate course evaluations to a little over 29,000 students. Note that “students” doesn’t mean 29,000 distinct students. This is the cumulative number of registrants across all classes.

The overall response rate for all of these evaluations is around 55% with the response rates varying by term, location, and class. A more detailed breakdown can be found on our blog’s CoursEval page. More detailed stats will be posted in the coming weeks. Making the transition from paper to online, we expected the response rate to be a bit low and this is something that we will work on and anticipate will increase as the new process becomes fully integrated into the university culture.

From a staffing/budgetary/administrative standpoint CoursEval appears to be a good investment. Paper evaluations required the time and effort of approximately 12 employees and 4 work study students across campus to print, distribute, collect, scan, and transcribe all submissions. Add to this the cost of paper and ink. The same evaluations using CoursEval requires less than one full-time equivalent employee and no paper. The Instructional Support team (3 people) is now managing CoursEval as part of its normal workload. While it has increased our workload somewhat, it has not created an unreasonable burden. Also, having one centralized system means that university-wide data is available quickly. It no longer has to be collected from various locations across the university. The staff that did manage evaluations have not been negatively impacted by this change. They have been able to devote their time and energy to other projects important to the university and from what we hear they don’t miss the evaluations.

Course Evaluation Results… Once the deadline date for final grades is reached, course evaluation results will be released to faculty. Each faculty member will receive an email with instructions for viewing their course evaluation results online in CoursEval. The email subject line will be “Your course evaluation results are available”. Term 09TW1 faculty were sent an email on Thursday, December 17th inviting them to review their results. Faculty who taught in Terms 09FADAY, 09EW2, 09EW1-16wk, and 09SW1 will receive an email on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 22nd inviting them to review their results.

Where are we going… CoursEval will continue to be used for all course evaluations. Some tweaking of system settings and reports will be made on an on-going basis. For spring terms we hope to implement some additional features such as evaluations for student teaching/internships, incorporation of custom questions from faculty, report triggers and more.

Any comments or suggestions on the course evaluation process and CoursEval are welcome. If you have used CoursEval as student or faculty we would like to hear your thoughts. Please post a comment on this post using the “Leave a comment” link above. If you would prefer your comments to be private, please email them to me at a.flint@snhu.edu

Thank you to everyone who assisted with the process of implementing CoursEval.

Following is a notice we received from Computing Resources.  While this downtime does occur during the last week which is used for finals and grade submission, there shouldn’t be too much of an inconvenience due to the time period.

Notice: Blackboard will be conducting maintenance on Friday, December 18, 2009 from 02:00am to 06:00am ET. During this time the blackboard community will be unavailable, but other services such as Webmail, Penpal, and the Shapiro Library will still be operational. They can be reached through the SNHU website located at http://www.snhu.edu. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Instructional Support is pleased to offer discount software purchase programs to faculty, staff, and students. You can see all the details of these programs by clicking here or clicking the Software Purchase Programs link in the Blogroll list to the right. While we have offered these programs for some time, there are a few updates. They are…

Microsoft Work at Home Licensing Program:

This program is available to faculty and staff only. We are pleased to announce that Windows 7 Professional (32 bit) is now available for purchase.

In addition, we have recently updated the purchase/payment process. Payments are now made through the Bursar’s office which allows us to accept credit cards (MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Discover). You can obtain your software in person or via mail. Just complete the order form found on the Software Purchase Program page for Microsoft.

Adobe:

This program is available to faculty, staff, and students. This program makes a variety of Adode products available at up to 80% off retail pricing. The prices have recently dropped so check the page to see what is available. This software is ordered online and shipped directly to your home.

If you have any questions about our software purchase programs, please contact Aaron Flint at a.flint@snhu.edu

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.

In addition we have 4 student workers who assist with support and training. They are Eric Moore, Greg Preston, Gabby McNevin, and Dan Marquis. In the spring terms our student workers will be offering training classes on RefWorks and a couple other topics to be determined. More details later.

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

For our visitors who have been here before, you will notice that we have a new look.  In the coming week’s the Instructional Support team will be experimenting with new Wordpress themes to test the functionality of various tools.  While the theme may change, the content will remain in roughly the same place.

Let us know what you think.

~ Aaron