Teaching, tutorial

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
Teaching, tests, tutorial

importing questions to a question library in brightspace

https://community.brightspace.com/s/article/KBL931001391

The question library is where you keep the myriad questions that you will use when creating assessments.

They can be moved from one course to another using the course import/export tool under course admin.

“Are you looking for a way to add a bank of questions to the Quiz Question Library? Look no further than this handy Quiz Question Converter- now available through the Brightspace Community on the Learning Center!”

 

 

Teaching, tutorial, Uncategorized, Video Creation

Reusing Echo360 content

There are two different ways of sharing echo360 content in Blackboard, and therefore two different ways to reuse the content as well.

Most instructors at SBU currently link to their echo360 videos via LTI links.  This has been the only way in the past to get the analytics that you needed, give the students the active learning tools and also automatically post new scheduled recordings as they happen throughout the semester.  Using the LTI link is the process where you are going to a content area where you want the videos to be placed, selecting “Build Content -> Echo Cloud”.

When reusing the LTI link in a course you have copied from a previous semester, you will want to go to where the link was made (it will still be there), click on that link and reconnect it.

 

The second way and previously feature sparse method (but this has been rapidly changing!), is to embed the echo360 content into any area of your site that gives you the ability to use the Bb text editor.  You can embed content using the wysiwyg editor using the button : “Add Content -> Echo360 Video Library”. It looks like a plus sign in a circle and is the last button on the bottom right.

When you have embedded content and you run a course copy, the video will still work without further tweaking.  It is for this reason, and because echo360 has been working hard to bring all the features to the embed model that already exist in the LTI links, that we will be suggesting using embed going forward (at least, as soon as playlists are up and running and that could even happen this week).

 

 

 

Uncategorized

Organize and Share content changes upcoming in echo360

We are writing to inform you of upcoming changes to how you can organize and share content in Echo360. These changes will improve the ability to share content with others, organize shared and personal content, and find content in your Library.


 

Echo360 Community,

We are writing to inform you of upcoming changes to how you can organize and share content in Echo360. These changes will improve the ability to share content with others, organize shared and personal content, and find content in your Library.

What is changing?

The upcoming changes involve three key components, which are explained below:

  • The Groups feature will be renamed Collections
  • Collections will be added to the Library
  • The existing class collection feature on the section homepage will be renamed to “Class Group” to avoid confusion

All current Groups capabilities will be available in Collections and new capabilities will be rolled out in future releases, making Collections a more powerful way of sharing and organizing content than is currently available.

In the current user interface, Groups is a separate tab, accessed in the top navigation as shown below.

Collections_Picture1

When Groups is renamed to Collections, users will see their Collections on the Library tab as well as on a separate Collections tab, as seen below.

Pic2_customercomm

Also, the feature that allows the instructor to create collections of classes inside an Echo360 Section will be renamed Class Groups as shown in the image below. This will reduce confusion with the new Collections feature, as shown in the image below.

Picture1----2


Why is this feature changing?

By renaming Groups to Collections, it will be clearer that this feature offers a way to organize content as well as to share it with others. Collections can be used by individuals to organize content in their libraries without the need to share it. When a Collection is shared, the new structure will make it easier for users to find content that has been shared with them without the need to navigate to a separate tab.

We will be building out the capabilities and permissions for content shared in Collections going forward and this name will make more sense for the new capabilities that are planned.


How does this affect users?

This change doesn’t remove any existing capabilities and should make new capabilities easier to implement into content management workflows. Other than adapting to a new name, the primary impact of this change is that users will no longer need to navigate to a separate tab to find shared or organized content.


When will this change happen?

At this time, we anticipate this change to be implemented in our first deployment of 2022, on 11-12 January 2022.

What do you need to do?

This change will be pushed automatically and there will be on-screen orientation to explain the changes. To better prepare your users, you may want to provide them with advanced notification. Please feel free to share this email and/or the screen shots in your communications.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact your Echo360 representative.

All the best,
Echo360 Team

 

Uncategorized

Know a Psychology or CEAS student that deserves some $

Aside

Teaching, tutorial, Uncategorized

Getting Started with Echo360

 

These pages are here to provide Instructors a walk-through of the more commonly used features of Echo360. The pages contain click-through infographics, videos, links to our online documentation, and Quick Reference Card links, available for viewing and download as PDFs.

Start with the Overview. Learn about the typical uses of the platform, navigation in and around Echo360, and get insight from other instructors on creating media and engaging students.

 

Overview of echo360Creating and uploading mediaSharing and embedding video Overview of Echo360 analyticsEditing MediaIntegration with MS Teams and Zoom

 

The menu image in the top-left corner of every page opens a Table of Contents for everything here. Easily browse for the pages you want to view or re-visit. Hover over each item in the list to see the full title of the page. Go ahead, click it now! The Search functionality is on the top-right corner of every page. The Main menu icon is in the footer of every page.

Video Creation

Free Video Editor -Davinci Resolve

As more instructors are working to create video content for their courses, I thought I would offer this up for use.

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/

Available for Windows, Mac and Linix in both a free version and a Studio paid version.

This is already an industry standard, so go ahead and suggest it for student use as well.

 

 

accessibility, andragogy

And Now a Word from VoiceThread! ***Accessibility***

What is VT Universal?

It’s a version of VoiceThread that is fully accessible to screen readers. It is the first thing a screen reader will detect on VoiceThread’s website, and it can be set as your default if you rely on a screen reader. Click here for full documentation.

Accessibility Trajectory

At the start of 2021, we released the new and improved version of VT Universal. This reboot created a strong foundation for us to continue adding more and more features until Universal becomes the standard experience. In the end there will no longer be two separate views of VoiceThread. The unified interface will be fully accessible. Adding the ability to share was a major step in this direction.

More features added to VT Universal in 2021

We are passionate about making high-quality interactions accessible to all learners, and we’re very excited that we’re so close to the finish line for this long journey.

Uncategorized

Attending the Virtual CIT today…

I wanted to take this as a note to myself… but feel free to check it out yourselves.

http://sunyinnovativeassessments.com/

This was shared during the session “The Case for Social Justice Assessment of Student Learning ”

Now I’m looking forward to the keynote speaker, Jesse Stommel, as he will possibly be talking about the topic of ungrading – and it sounds incredible! 

Also… https://wvupressonline.com/ungrading

troubleshooting

Using a Universal Blocker and video viewing not getting counted?

If you watch echo360 videos as part of your class, and your instructor has told you that you have not been watching them…  AND you use a universal blocker, you may need to add echo360 as a trusted site.

for example, for ublock specifically – add this to trusted sites:

@@||api.echo360.org/analytics-collector/player/beacon

@@||api.echo360.org/analytics-collector/player/session

 

Note… the fact that you watched the video won’t count until after you have these lines in place, so you would still need to replay the video for it to show up in the analytics that your instructor sees.

 

 

Creating, Crafting, Sustainability

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