Category Archives: tutorial

FACT2 AI Faculty Development Workshops 2024

Please check out the Spring 2024 Workshops below. The workshops will be offered at no cost, and will be recorded, and the recordings will be available on the Playlist below.

Getting Started with Artificial Intelligence

 

  • March 12, 2024, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM
  • March 15, 2024, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM

 

Description: As GPT has gained widespread attention since the release of GPT 3.5 in late 2022, our digital landscape has been evolving quickly.  With academia, media, governments, and corporations focused on the furthest reaches of artificial intelligence, it is easy to get overwhelmed by the possibilities this powerful tool offers us. This hands-on session focuses not on the outer limits of AI, but instead on:

 

  • Getting started with GPT/ Understanding its roots
  • Establishing best practices for general usage
  • Expanding our comfort zone
  • Working with AI to determine how it can and cannot meet our individual needs Attendees will have the option to observe, click along with provided usage examples, and share their results with others.

 

Presenter: Robert Becker


Exploring Potential and Pitfalls of AI Use in the Classroom 

 

  • March 19, 2024, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM
  • March 22, 2024, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM

 

Description: AI tools have access to enormous data and use enormous processing power to generate plausible patterns that can save time, offer sophisticated text for users to consider, and boost thinking/learning and writing/communication for students and faculty alike. But they also have glaring weaknesses, such as their inability to recognize reality (versus merely “plausible” strings of words), understand context or culture, offer unbiased and ethical responses, avoid privacy or security infringement, etc. Join this hands-on session to learn and share how to help students recognize pitfalls of AI, as well as explore its potentials. We will collaboratively develop and exchange learning activities for our students.

 

Presenter: Shyam Sharma, Michael Murphy, & Cynthia Davidson


Developing Syllabus Statements on AI Use

 

  • March 26, 2024, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM
  • March 29, 2024, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM

 

Description: As faculty navigate the use of Chat GPT and other AI tools in their courses, it is important to communicate their expectations with the students.  This session will provide participants with examples of syllabus statements being used within SUNY and beyond.  The examples will reflect varying levels of permitted AI usage:

 

  • Minimal/ none
  • Some use with specific rules/ circumstances
  • Expected/ required

Participants will be encouraged to discuss the examples and how they relate to their own current or future AI use in their courses.  Following an open discussion and sharing of ideas, individuals will collaborate to adapt/ develop a syllabus statement based on their desired level of AI usage.  Participants will leave the workshop with a syllabus statement that they may use in their course.
 

Presenter: Meghanne Freivald & Keith Landa


AI As An Assistant

 

  • April 2, 2024, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM
  • April 5, 2024, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM

 

Description: AI can be helpful for a number of tasks for students, including suggesting writing improvements, summarizing or rephrasing concepts they are learning, helping with ideation to overcome “blank page syndrome”, or even generating questions for review. The commonly available tools, such as ChatGPT, have been trained on a vast corpus of information that covers many subjects, albeit non-uniformly, and its ability to provide accurate and helpful information varies by subject, as it its likelihood that it will provide incorrect information (they call this a “hallucination”).

Those are factors that are out of your control, but you can mitigate them….with a well crafted prompt.

This workshop aims to help you assess how effective these tools could be for your students – looking at whether they work out of the box, and whether the right prompt can address gaps and concerns. Even if you find that these tools are really not well suited for your course, that can be something that you can share with your students and have a chance to guide them to other options.

Presenter: Maureen Larsen & Brian Cepuran


AI Tools to Help You Build Your Course

 

  • April 9, 2024, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM
  • April 12, 2024, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM

 

Description: There are a variety of tools to help instructors build out their courses, from designing learning outcomes, to creating course content, to creating quizzes and other assessments.  Both general-purpose and specialized AI tools will be demonstrated in the workshop, and participants will have opportunities to try them out.  Both faculty and the instructional support staff that assist them are encouraged to attend. No prior AI experience required.

Presenter: Brian Cepuran & Keith Landa

Register Now

Open Workshops for polling/clickers today

Echo360 (which bought Turning Technologies) will be on campus today (9/12/23) to run two workshops and to assist walkup students with their clickers/mobile licenses.  Workshops are in the Faculty Center in the Melville Library 10-11 and 3-4 (beginner and advanced).  Students should go  to the SINC site for the walk up assistance.

 

Brightspace – Managing Restrictions in Discussions with Groups

If you want to have discussion boards used in  your class, and also use groups in such a way that members of different groups do not see each others posts… rather they only see the posts from their own group in the discussion board – these are the steps you follow.

Please note that these are steps that should be taken before the discussion board has any posts.

Go to Groups:

Set up your Groups, by creating a Group Category:  I used the # of groups “Enrollment Type” option.

Click Save.

Go to Discussions:

*This assumes you already have the discussion boards in place.*

Use the drop down to the right of the Topic name to “Edit Topic”.

Go to “Availability Dates & Conditions” on the right hand part of the screen.

Click on “Manage Restrictions”.

Select “Restrict Topic and Separate Threads” Users in the selected groups/sections can view this topic but will only see threads from their group/section.

It is possible to have multiple Group Categories and Course sections to chose from.   You will probably have only one Group Category.

Click Add.  Click Save and Close.

 

You should now see under the topic name an indication that Group/section restrictions have been applied.

 

 

 

 

Need to regrade a finished quiz?

If you realized after the fact that a quiz/exam assessment had an error – just fixing the question will let you know that it will only affect future users who take the exam.  You should still correct it there, but in order to regrade, we need to do something else.

Go to the Exams/Quizzes area.  Find the assessment that had the problem.  Click on the dropdown menu to the right of the name of the assessment.  Click on Grade.

 

 

 

Now click on Questions

Check the radio button for Update all attempts.  Find the Question that had an issue.

Clicking on the question will give you a break down of how it was answered and shows what was graded as correct.

Here you can choose whether to give every one points, or just give points to the people who answers in the desired manner.

Click Save.

 

Brightspace and Echo360

To create a list of all of your course videos, similar to what most people would be used to seeing in Blackboard, you will want to go to the Content Area, decide where you want your Videos to appear…  select Existing Activities -> External Learning Tools..

In this example I created a new Module called “Videos”. You will see it below under Syllabus.

So picking up from before, select Existing Activities -> External Learning Tools.. and then Pick Echo360 Course…

And this will leave you with a link Called Echo360 Course.

Now that you have that Echo360 Course link, the next thing you need to do is click on the link to join it to the correct content.

[Service Page with similar instructions]

If your intention is to link to the current semester’s recordings, make sure you have filled out the form to have them recorded.

 

Alternatively, to embed videos into any wysiwyg text editor in Brightspace you can use the Insert Stuff button. (More instructions here.)

    The Insert Stuff formatting button

Echo360 is the last choice in the Insert Stuff area.  Choose the Library for existing videos in your collection

OR you can even make a new video right from where it says “Create New Media”:

Automatic Speech Recognition – Now Available in Different Languages

New feature!

Echo360!

Change you ASR to be something other than English at the course section level!!

Log into echo360.org

Go to your desired Course, then to Settings and then Features.

and find ASR Language Settings

Then select the new language that you would like your section transcribed to.

Obviously this is fantastic news for language courses.  Let me know in the comments what other courses you will be using this for!

 

Uses of Groups in Brightspace

Here is some regular info on creating groups. 

Additionally: 

You can restrict the quiz to be available to a specific group. So if you had five different versions of a quiz, you can assign each group to their own quiz.

————————————————————————————————–

You can set up each group to access quizzes at different times. Here’s a link to the article that has steps on how to set up special access in quizzes, https://community.brightspace.com/s/article/000017306

————————————————————————————————–

If you had everyone doing the same quiz at the same time, but in groups, you can sort your gradebook by group, and then when you see the first grade come in from a group, manually assign it to the rest of the students in that group.

————————————————————————————————–

 

I hope that helps.  Feel free to send your ideas for how you use groups!

Brightspace Grading Columns – Part 1

Setting up an organized gradebook isn’t the same as in Blackboard.  If you are used to Bb, there are going to be some headaches and confusion.

Some things are organizationally nice.  For example, you can assign items to belong to grading categories, and they stay grouped that way in the grading spreadsheet.  Not only that, but items in a grading category will get a subtotal column auto created for you, which I think can be particularly helpful if you are keeping track of attendance in your gradebook. (Note: the attendance tool in Brightspace does not report into the grade book. This is something I manually setup.)

To create new categories or items (columns), you will want to go to “Grades” -> “Manage Grades” and then “New”.

To decide on your categories, you should refer to your course syllabus.  You should have something like:

Class Participation/Attendance – 15%
Quizzes – 20%
Midterm – 20%
Project(s) – 25%
Final – 20%

You can see that every item listed that has multiple items nested (Class Participation/Attendance, Quizzes and possibly Project(s)) will be your categories.  Since there will only be one midterm and one exam, you cou hold them as just singleton items that are not in a category, OR you could make a category called exams and add them both to that.

First make the Categories, then the Items inside the categories.

Since you indicated in the Category that all items would have a total value of 100, the maximum points fills in automatically for all associated items and is a graded out field.

Resulting spreadsheet with grades filled in:

Note: I manually filled in these grades and you are able to do that.  If you want these grades to auto populate from an actual brightspace exam, you will want to go to your Exams/Quizzes area from the NavBar and create or find the exam you want to use, and associate it with the right Grade Item.  

Warning: This is one of the places where Brightspace can be … shall be say, confusing?   When you go to edit your exam/quiz, you will see this:

That Category pull down… even though. yes, we were just calling things items and categories in the Manage Grades area, has NOTHING to do with categories in Grades.

Instead, you will want to switch to the Assessment tab and find the pull down for Grade Item.

If you haven’t already setup the Items in your grade book, you do have an opportunity to select [add grade item] and throw in the item into an existing category.

Now it knows that this Quiz is  from the Category “Exams” and will grade it and submit it into the grade spreadsheet appropriately. It also knows that it will be worth up to 100 points and will be equally weighted with the other exams to the 20% total value of the final grade, because that is how  the category Exams is setup.

End of Part 1

 

 

 

 

 

Need to Move a Course from Blackboard to Brightspace?

If your course was not one of the courses that was automagically moved from Blackboard to Brightspace, you may be wondering how to move it yourself.

The first thing you should look for is whether ANY version of the course you want to export has already been brought to Brightspace.  You may have more than one.  For example you might have a Fall 2021 copy and an empty shell for Fall 2022.  If what you want is in the Fall 2021 copy, you don’t need to export anything from Blackboard – it is already there.

If absolutely no version of the course you want to bring over exists in Brightspace (perhaps something you haven’t taught in a while AND you aren’t teaching it in the fall either), pause following these directions to make a ticket for a “Bb course copy shell in Brightspace” where you will include the Course Designator & Number (example: BIO 203). After you have some place to put your export, continue with these steps. If you only have the 2022 shell in Brightspace and you don’t want to move your old course directly into 2022 (very wise move!), also complete that same ticket.

The second thing that I want you to know is that Brightspace cannot import courses that are greater in size than 2 gigs.  You may not know what the size of your Blackboard course is until you export it, so perhaps don’t worry about this right away, but if after exporting the course it turns out to be too big, just remember what I started with here.  If it is too big, this will probably be due to large presentations or documents that you loaded directly into your blackboard course.  You will need to remove these items and host them elsewhere.

For example:

  • Videos can be moved to echo360 or youtube
  • Documents can be moved to google drive
  • etextbooks can be moved to google drive or check to see if they are available via the library

Exporting a course doesn’t work exactly like it used to work in Blackboard, so if you have done it in the past, read this anyway.

NOTE: For a far less verbose version of this post, please see this link.

Go to your course that you want to bring into Brightspace.  Go to Packages and Utilities under Course Management in the left menu.  Under Packages and Utilities, select Export/Archive Course.

Select Export Package.

Under Select Course Materials, “select all”. 

THEN UNSELECT SETTINGS — this is the new part that changed

Click Submit and wait.

Success: This action has been queued. An email will be sent when the process is complete.

When the export is finished it will show up on this page if you hit refresh.

You might, like me, think “download” would be in this pull down menu:

It isn’t though.  Just click on the name of your export to download it to your computer.

Now go to Brightspace.

Enter the course you want to import the content into.

TIP:  You can use your Fall 2021 course to bring in other semesters content too.  That way you have one place for all versions of a particular course you have taught.  Like a box of all things BIO 203 – regardless of what semester it came from. 

Go to Course Admin

Find the Catagory “Site Resources”

Click on Import/Export/Copy Components

Select Import Components (at the bottom of the page) and click start.

Click upload and select the zip export file you downloaded from Blackboard.  If this is a big file, it will take a little time to upload and you won’t be able to select Import All Components until it has finished. If your export file was bigger than 2 gigs, see the “second thing” to know at the top of this blog post.

 

Assuming for a moment that you imported the content into a location that is not the “live” course you will be teaching from, go to the course that you will be teaching from and go back to the Course Admin -> Site Resources -> Import/Export/Copy Components area again, and this time select “Copy Components from another Org Unit”.

You will be able to search for the location you copied the course to, and select just the items you want to bring to the “live” course shell.  This way you aren’t pulling years worth of unneeded items into the live course, just the pieces that you know you want.

TIP: Keep your non-live course storage organized by semester and year if you have the desire to bring many semesters worth of the same course over. Try to help your future self find what you would be looking for.

Don’t forget to do some housekeeping on any content you bring over to the “live” course.  Check for correct dates, availability, exceptions, links, formatting, accessibility, etc.

 

A Great Free Training Opportunity – The OTTER Institute

The SUNY Center for Professional Development (CPD) is hosting the OTTER (Online Teaching: Technology & Educational Resources) Institute July 25-28, 2022. The OTTER Institute is an opportunity for online practitioners to learn more about the innovations, trends, and challenges with online education. This year we are responding to the DLE Implementation and focusing all our programming on the new Brightspace Learning Environment. See examples of best practices for course design and delivery within Brightspace. Learn about the tools and features within Brightspace that will help you create and deliver effective and engaging digital course content.
The OTTER Institute is free to all SUNY campus members. The webinars will be recorded and the recordings will be available on the DLE website (this requires SUNY Federated ID/campus login credentials).
Topics to be covered in this Brightspace Edition of OTTER include:
  • Design Considerations
  • Brightspace Document Templates
  • Getting Started Module
  • FAQs & Glossary
  • Rubrics
  • Groups
  • Discussions
  • Assignments
  • Quizzes
  • Pulse App
  • IM & Email
  • Attendance & Checklists
  • Awards/Certificates
Registration is open and more details can be found on the event website:
Warmly,
The SUNY Online Team