assessment, Keep Teaching, Teaching, tests, tutorial

All Those Test Options in Blackboard & How to Give a Synchronous Test*

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This blog entry is going to focus on the options in Blackboard that have to do with the timing of an test.

When you are first creating the Test.. these options are found under the Test Information area and span a few sections.  If you have already made the test you can find these options by clicking the chevron next to the test name and clicking “Edit the Test Options”.

Force Completion


When you set this option, if the student looses the connection or accidentally closes the browser, they will be unable to go back and finish the test. (Without you having to intervene anyway.)  We don’t recommend enabling this setting.

Set Timer

This option gives the student a visible countdown timer during the test. It begins after the test description and instructions have been displayed. If Auto-Submit  is selected, at the end of the count down, it ends the test, no matter where they were.  If Auto-Submit is not checked, you will see an exclamation point in the grade center and have the option to adjust the grade, if they went long.

If the Force Completion is not set, and a student looses their connection or accidentally closes the browser, they will be able to continue taking the test, and the timer will continue from when it initially started. (eg., If they loose the connection for 10 minutes, they loose that 10 minutes.)

Display After and Until

A better way of handling whether students can see the test, rather than the “Make the Link Available” option.  Also consider, they can’t start what they cannot see.  *So if you want everyone to be done by 1pm and you have a 30 minute timer with auto-submit enabled, consider Display Until to end around 12:30. 

Due Date

Due dates (and times) do not affect the test availability (unless you choose the Do not allow students to start the Test if the due date has passed option), but rather provide a flag on the test if it was started or ended after the due date/time.

Test Availability Exceptions

This section allows you to make test rule exceptions for people that need accommodations, or have other needs depending on language or technology situations.

If these settings exist for a test or survey, you can create these exceptions:

  • Number of attempts
  • Timer
  • Availability: Date and time the test is available to the student or group
  • Force completion
  • Restrict location

 

Have any interesting testing stories to tell?  What other testing options do you have questions about?  Please comment below!

This blog is a cross post from https://you.stonybrook.edu/academictechnologyservices

assessment, Keep Teaching, Teaching, tutorial

Accepting Videos as an Alternative form of Course Assessment

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This is about using a echo360 mashup tool to accept video submissions inside of Blackboard and which instructor will be able to grade under Needs Grading in the Grade Center.  This is an excellent alternative to high stakes grading via traditional exams.

First you will want to create an assignment. You will go to your Assignments area and go to Assessments -> Assignment.

Give it a name and add instructions for the students to follow.

Create a due date and points possible for the presentation.

Make the assignment available to the students.

Submit.

 

What the students see:  (You can also see this yourself using the student preview mode, entered by clicking on this icon in the upper right part of the screen in blackboard:

Under assignments, they locate your assignment and click in it’s name.

They see the points possible and the instructions that you wrote previously.

They need to click on Write Submission to get to the Blackboard WYSIWYG editor. They should type the name of their assignment into this text box and then select the Mashups button.

Then they click on Mashups -> Echo360 Video Library

This opens a new window for them where they have three choices.    They can choose any video already in their echo360 video library. (That is Choose From My Home), they can create something new (Create New Media) or Upload a video they have on their computer. This is what the different options look like:

Choose from home allows the student to either browse or search for files in their echo360 library.

Create New Media will give them the option to Launch Universal Capture from their computer.

Where they can name the video and start recording from their webcam, desktop and audio.

and finally Upload Existing:

Here they can grab videos from their cloud storage locations or browse from their computer.

After they have typed the name of their presentation and selected the video, they will click submit.

After submitting they will get a submission confirmation:

As the instructor, you can find the student submission under Needs Grading in the Grade Center:

…where I will see the list of submitted assignments and I can either chose Grade All or go through them one by one.  Here is the assignment I submitted and you can view the presentation, grade it and leave feedback for the learner right here.

Keep Teaching, Teaching, Video Creation

Huge Update in Echo360’s Universal Capture!

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It now allows for live streaming!

I’ve done some tests already.  I’m seeing a 10 sec lag on what comes out of my mouth and what comes through the stream.  The screen share seems about 3 seconds ahead of my camera’s live video.  There is a 15 secondish lag between when you start streaming and the stream actually begins.

I was testing on a laptop that had a hard wire connection to my router at home… the receiving computer was on the wireless.

 

Here is their documentation which includes technical requirements:

https://learn.echo360.com/hc/en-us/articles/360041458112

I will be doing more tests… but this is awesome news for additional options for synchronous and asynchronous teaching and learning!

You don’t have to download a new version of the software.  If you have never used it before, the software can be downloaded from echo360.org with your netid and password.

 

More to follow!

 

Keep Teaching, social media, Teaching, troubleshooting, tutorial

STOP THE ZOOMBOMBS!

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You made a room from Zoom Meetings in Blackboard.  You know it has a forced password.  You know students will be logging into Blackboard to find the link.  Isn’t that enough to prevent others from joining?  And when I say others, I mean truly foul people who apparently have nothing better to do with their time then really and truly mess up your whole class.  Nope.  We have to do more

After creating your room in Blackboard, leave Blackboard, and sign back into zoom at stonybrook.zoom.us.  Your room will be listed under meetings. Click on the name, go to the bottom on the page and click edit meeting.  Just above there, in meeting options, you will find the “only authenticated users can join” option.  stonybrook.edu will pre-populate for you.  This will force them to use a stonybrook.edu email address and they can no longer be anonymous in the session.

Please note that this means that guest speakers from outside the University will not be able to join.  Nor would high school students be able to participate.  See other methods for tightening up security below the screenshot.

If you want people from outside stonybrook.edu to join, here are other things that you can do:
Never share the meeting link in Social Media.
from the participant list inside an active meeting:
Lock the Zoom Meeting room once everyone has arrived from the participant list.
Mute Participants on Entry & Don’t allow them to unmute themselves.
Remove unwanted visitors* 
Under the share button in an active meeting:
Do not allow participants to share their screen
When you schedule the meeting:
Don’t use recurring meetings.  They all have the same URL and password. Obviously this isn’t as convenient. Maybe try this if you continue to have issues and have tried other steps.
Schedule the meetings outside of Blackboard and only give the students the link from a blackboard announcement or email right before it starts. This way the students will not have the URL to share with others beforehand. This means scheduling from stonybrook.zoom.us and not from Blackboard’s Zoom Meetings menu item.  You will find that setting for Only Authenticated Users right away if you schedule in this manner.
Don’t Allow Students to Join Before the Host
These settings are found in your stonybrook.zoom.us Settings area.
*Don’t Allow Removed Participants to Rejoin.  The default on this setting is for it to be off (which is correct).  What it doesn’t tell you though, is the user that you booted from the room can clear there “cookies” and reenter anyway. So it depends on how savy your bomber is.

“Require a password when scheduling new meetings” – this is locked on.  So you’re good.

“Require a password for Instant Meetings” – default this is on.

“Require a password for Personal Meeting ID” – default this is off. 

In addition, you can disable the setting called “Embed password in meeting link for one-click join”. This means you will have to provide the password in a separate communication from the meeting link. This is much less convenient, but is a deterrent to unwanted visitors.

Consider having a Co-Host to handle these items during the meeting.

and finally:

Shut Down the Meeting

  • In an emergency, end the meeting by clicking “End meeting” in the lower right corner of the Zoom window. Then set-up a new meeting with a unique URL, and send it to participants via a Blackboard Announcement and email, etc.

After having said all that…. don’t you wish people were just nicer??

Keep Teaching, troubleshooting

Zoom feature that doesn’t work as expected

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Polling.  I love polling.  It allows you to engage with a large group of students and comes with all sorts of side reasons to use.. assessment, active learning, demographics, attendance, etc.

But, we are strongly encouraging remote learning these days, as well as asynchronous learning.  This means recording things.  Turns out that zoom cuts polls clean out during a recording.  The screen that is pops up in isn’t part of the recording, and even if you share your display and the poll is on your display when open and as you go through the results, that window is not part of the recording either.

argh.  You could speak the poll question and verbally go over the findings, they just won’t be able to see anything or participate.  So… perhaps a good time to bring Turning Technologies back into the mix??

Let me know what you think in the comments.

 

Keep Teaching, tutorial

Ready, Fire, Aim!

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I’m an admin for a Facebook group called The Connoisseurs of All Things Teaching, Learning & Student Success Related, and we had this webinar posted today on our group by one of our members. I thought it was worthy of a share on the blog.

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I had issues using zoom… here is my story

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Around two years ago, we started doing an exploration of different web conferencing solutions. As part of that, I had a free testing account with zoom. After some time, I had made my mind up on which platform I wanted to recommend, and stopped testing. Time passed and we didn’t immediately switch to the new platform. My account expired with zoom.

Then come the Covid situation and suddenly we are standing zoom up on campus in 24 hours, and for most people it was working great. For me, not so much. If I went to stonybrook.zoom.us I got an error when trying to login with single sign in. If I went to the LTI link in Blackboard, there was mixed results depending on if we tried deleting my account and sending a new invite to the system. I tried incognito windows and different computers/browsers. Nothing worked.

Then finally, I went to zoom.us and tried to open my old test account directly. I didn’t remember the password, and sent off a “forgot password” request. Set the new password, logged in and saw that I could change my email. That seemed hopeful. (In fact I had been telling faculty before we stood zoom up, that if they wanted to become familiar with zoom, go ahead and get a free account, but don’t use your stonybrook.edu email.) When I changed the email, they sent an email to the stonybrook.edu account that I had to click to actually make the switch.

After I clicked in that email… the SSO issues finally went away and I could use my zoom account.

So – maybe this struggle is real for others. Hopefully someone else can learn from my issues.

Keep Teaching, Teaching, tutorial

Setting that aren’t easy to find in Zoom

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Zoom has a lot of features.

A

Lot

Some of them are not by any means easy to locate.  I mean, even not easy enough that I may have told you that apparently we didn’t have access to those features.

So here is the issue.  You need to create the zoom meeting room through blackboard.  That way it is tied to your course, and has all your students getting easy access.  But after you save the room:

Leave Blackboard.

Go to stonybrook.zoom.us and login back in

To find the option for preassigning break out rooms:

and click on Meetings and find the meeting room you just made.

Click on it’s name and then go to the bottom and find Edit this Meeting.

Towards the bottom, in the Meeting Options section, you will see Breakout Room pre-assign. This lets you create the rooms manually, or with a CSV file.

ALSO FOUND HERE:  What you need to stop ZoomBombs:

Anyone can share the link to the meeting.  It can even be a student in the class that is signed in from another device doing the trolling.  The only way to stop this is to enable the authentication profiles and force them to use a specific domain account.  We have done just that so you can add it to any of your meetings.  Simply go into the meeting options and check the “only authenticated users can join” option.  Please be sure to leave the domain as stonybook.edu.  I am including a screenshot below.  This will force them to use a stonybrook.edu email address and they can no longer be anonymous in the session.

image (11).png

Set a Virtual Background, Controlling who can share screens, send invites to meetings in different languages, etc:

Go to Settings on the left menu and dig through this area.  Note that some options are locked by “admin”.

Actually choose the Virtual Background:

This must be done in settings in the Zoom application. (Oiy!)  It will download a virtual desktop package to your machine the first time.

Leave some comments below if you find more “hidden” features in zoom!

 

Emerging Tech for a Changing Edu

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