Zero
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.
AI – New Thread
I am going to be starting a new project based on using AI as an educational resource for both faculty and students. I will create a new searchable category for this here on the blog called “AI” in case anyone is interested in filtering down to this particular journey. I intend for this to move pretty quickly so as to hopefully deploy something while it is still in fact an emergent technology.
First little mention goes to this website tool that helps one understand the currency that this will be running on via MS Azure: https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer
When running this service, you operate with a quota of tokens, and the tokens cost money.
“Tokens in the context of OpenAI GPT models are clusters of characters representing the fundamental unit of text. These tokens are generated by a tokenizer algorithm that segregates text into smaller segments following certain rules, such as spaces, punctuation marks, and special characters.”
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.
ALEKS (McGraw Hill) added to Brightspace.
As you know, many items can be added to the basic Brightspace experience. For a full list of the current “add ons” – you can look here: https://it.stonybrook.edu/help/kb/brightspace-add-onsltis
ALEKS is a product made by McGraw Hill “ALEKS is a research-based, online learning program that offers course products for Math, Chemistry, Statistics, and more. Rooted in 20 years of research and analytics, ALEKS is a proven, online learning platform that helps educators and parents understand each student’s knowledge and learning progress in depth, and provides the individual support required for every student to achieve mastery.” Right now it is being used in some Chemistry classes here at SBU.
Any additional instructors interested in using this should feel free to reach out and let us know so that we may turn it on for your course.
To locate these tools inside of Brightspace, you would go to Content, find or create the module that you want your link to appear within, and then go to Existing Activities search through the list to see if what you are looking for is there and if not, click on External Learning Tools for access the more items. Make sure to click on the link to the tool after creating it to assure that it is fully configured for your class.
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.
Call for participation with Brightspace
Participate in User Experience Research!
As part of our product development process, we consult with users (like you!) through our user experience (UX) research. In UX research, we take a systematic approach to listening to the perspectives of our end users. This allows us to gain a better understanding of our users and their needs so we can create products that effectively support teaching and learning.
Some of our studies focus on better understanding your challenges and needs to help us plan our projects. Other studies focus on testing user interfaces that we’re designing or have built to help us make our platform intuitive and accessible for all users. We also run surveys to hear from a larger sample of Brightspace users.
We keep a database of Brightspace users that we contact periodically to invite to participate in our UX research sessions. It’s a great opportunity to share your feedback on specific topics or areas of Brightspace. We’d love for you to be a part of it.
Who can participate?
We’re looking for people who use an LMS:
- Instructors, teachers, faculty
- Instructional designers and online learning specialists
- Students in higher education
- Learning and development specialists in corporate organizations
- Individual contributors and managers or people leaders
- Academic administrators, principals, and advisors
- LMS administrators and instructional technologists
We especially encourage people with disabilities to sign up.
Please note: We typically conduct our UX research sessions in English. If there is another language you would feel more comfortable in during our session together, you can request that language when you sign up for a session and we will do our best to accommodate wherever possible.
What does participation look like?
When you sign up to our Participant Database, we’ll contact you periodically to see if you’d like to participate in a study. Each invite will have a description of the study and a link to a calendar where you can find a timeslot that will work for you or a link to a survey. Typically, in a UX research session, you will join us via Zoom for an hour. We will ask you some questions about your work and about the research topic, and we may ask you to try out a few tasks in a prototype and provide your feedback. We offer a reward for your participation as a token of our appreciation.
How do I sign up?
We ask for your contact information and a few details about your work to match you with appropriate studies. It only takes a couple of minutes to complete the sign up form.
Always a favorite
Roadmap for Voicethread. Some nice new features on the horizon:
”
The arc of change in the teaching and learning universe may be long, but it bends towards a more accessible, equitable, inclusive, and human-centric world. We plan on shortening that arc just a little bit in the coming year by introducing the biggest updates to VoiceThread in more than a decade.
A “New VoiceThread” will be available in the coming months, and we’ll have lots of details to share, but what we really want to share now is our redesign philosophy:
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Significantly more accessible
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Add a number of pro features, but be simpler to use
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Designed based on research and user feedback
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Make it easier for people to have authentic, high-quality, human to human interaction
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Give everyone time to try it out before fully transitioning to the new version
In addition to the new VoiceThread, we have lots of new goodies on the way:
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New integrations for Zoom, Google, and Microsoft
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New assignment type allowing students to comment on classmates’ submissions for a formal grade
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More powerful closed caption preferences
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Lots of new mobile updates
Thank you for all your feedback, collaboration, and enthusiasm throughout 2022. None of this work could be possible without you.
– The VoiceThread Team