Vol 1: Issue 6, July 2021

UM's Official Nomination

To our learning community, we are proud to share that the Division of Continuing and International Education (DCIE) and Learning Innovation and Faculty Engagement (LIFE) has been officially nominated in Blackboard Catalyst Awards 2021 under the Training and Professional Development Category.  Being nominated from hundreds of applications is a significant milestone and recognizes UM's faculty trainings and professional development as ranking among the best across the globe.

Based on leadership guidance of the institutional needs, DCIE and LIFE collaborated and developed a series of varied ‘just-in-time’ workshops for faculty during the summer and fall of 2020.

You, our faculty are instrumental in this recognition. We applaud your concerted efforts and commitment to engage with your students in every mode possible. We recognize your creativity and innovativeness in leveraging tools and technology to advance your students’ academic growth and instill life skills.

What is the Blackboard Catalyst Awards?

The Blackboard Catalyst Awards program, founded in 2005, celebrates the successes and honors remarkable achievements in innovation and hallmarks of excellence in the Blackboard global community, where educators from around the world are front and center in optimizing the use of technology to promote high standards of education.

What was the significance and impact of this achievement?

UM Faculty and teaching staff were empowered to:

• submit their courses in the Blackboard Exemplary Course Program.
• learn new techniques and use of third party tools such as Voicethread, Padlet, FlipGrid, H5P, Kaltura in-video quizzes.
• make informed changes and improvements to their courses and teaching methodologies after attending the summer and fall 2020 workshops.
• go the extra mile and learn additional Blackboard Features (Collaborate Ultra, Rubrics, Portfolio, Journal, Blogs, Wikis, Groups etc).
• interact with and seek suggestions from peers/colleagues during workshops and forums
  
• increase awareness of accessibility considerations when designing online and flipped courses, including leveraging institutional resources, and Blackboard Ally.
• consider course design using practical and detailed ideas or templates for implementing or revising assessments with more feedback opportunities, using Blackboard tools (e.g., journals).
• attend demonstrations and opportunities to practice how to implement a strategy within an online or flipped classroom environment.

Congratulations also goes to Dr. Nam Ju Kim, Assistant Professor with the School of Education and Human Development and Cate Dowman Instructional Designer with DCIE, for receiving the 2021 Blackboard Exemplary Course Award.

This is the first time since 2012 that the University of Miami has received the Blackboard Exemplary Course Award for designing an engaging effective online course.

Is your course an exemplary course? Contact the Distance Learning team in DCIE  for a course health check up. Email us at help.dli@miami.edu.

By Nick Armas

Lights. Camera. Lecture. Well, maybe not the lights...and you might not even need a camera. But “lecture”... that’s where the action is!

A powerful tool in your online teaching arsenal is the video lecture. Utilizing video in your online course can be vital in creating a superb learning experience. So, what are the things we need to know to use video effectively?

In their most basic form, when one thinks of a video lecture, some people may imagine exactly what it sounds like: a recording of a standard hour-long lecture with an instructor, a white board, and a camera. For students in the classroom, a lecture like this has dialogue, breaks in the action, and interactivity with the instructor that contribute to the learning experience. For the online student, a recording of this is just a static, hour-long video. Online students watching a video lecture like this often feel frustrated and bored. Plus, they aren’t likely to learn effectively. To avoid these feelings and enhance learning outcomes, there are a few specific strategies we can apply to keep the students engaged and learning during a video lecture.

• Simplify: The first, and most important, strategy is to simplify the lecture so that it only includes essential content. By reducing the lecture to that which is absolutely necessary, we are more efficient with our time and the videos, in turn, become shorter. According to research, viewers often begin to disengage after about seven minutes of viewing. Now, if you just read “seven minutes” and thought, “It’s impossible to squeeze my entire lecture into just seven minutes!” Don’t worry. You don’t have to. Read on.
  

• Segmentation: Using this strategy, we take one long lecture and chunk it up into shorter, separate video segments. This way, we can take advantage of the knowledge that students’ attention drops every about seven minutes to strategically plan our video segments into bite-size chunks. This goes a long way in keeping the students engaged and maximizing the learning experience.

• Meaning Visuals vs “Talking Head”: Remember when I said you may not need a camera? There are tools that will allow you to record your screen and voice...

by Ron Rodriquez

Academic stress is not a new phenomenon in college. High stakes exams and other assessment tools can exacerbate a student’s level of anxiety and discomfort resulting in under-performance and low pass rates. Additionally, online proctoring tools and services have come under scrutiny for privacy invasion, inaccurate monitoring and unplanned technical issues. The pressure continues for teachers to balance the need to evaluate a student’s performance knowing that the evaluation process can be stressful. Is there a better way to evaluate students other than scantrons, paper based tests and unpopular monitoring tools?

Yes! More teachers are turning away from traditional methods to alternatives such as video exams and quizzes because these assessments can provide many benefits to students that traditional exam cannot.

What is a Video Exam?

This assessment utilizes video technology to prompt the exam question. Some examples are: recording yourself asking the exam questions in a familiar classroom setting or creating a computer screencast and presenting the questions on slides with a voiceover. Another popular method is using a video quiz builder.

Kaltura Quiz Builder

UM’s own Blackboard learning system has a built-in feature called Kaltura Video Quiz that allows you to create a video exam. Kaltura has numerous functionalities which allow instructors to customize their exams to meet the needs of their course and the students. In addition to providing video recording technology, the instructor has the ability to choose the question types such as true/false, multiple choice, and short answer. Instructors may also assign independent point values to each question.

Preparing Students

To help students prepare for changes with the assessment format, be sure to....

Through constant practice, we are able to retain a new skill or information.

Take a deeper dive into Blackboard Ultra with a specially designed self-paced course free for UM faculty and teaching staff. Complete this short form to request access.

Additional Resources:

• For future training sessions about Ultra, you can visit this page.
  
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Help Guides for Faculty