Welcome to Faculty Basics - This is our first competency. Click the heading like you see in the attached image and work on the Blog input. Create your instructor contact and post a bio so we know who you are. Do students need to know who you are? Yes they do if they are going to tell you what they are interested in, and what is going on in their lives. Regular Effective Contact begins with telling students as much about yourself as you can. Students are expected to learn from you - Tell them you are interested in the subject matter
Blogs can be a low risk way of communicating information to students. Blogs are kind of "webby" and may seem more like: "modern" - Web Logs (blog) seem like a modern way to do things. Students will feel more at home if they're learning tools seem to be congruent with other parts of their lives. Instructors need and want to communicate learning to students in their class. Sometimes the students resist learning if they are suspicious that the learning is not new...not the new way. Students do not want learning to be old fashioned. Would you use a Blog in your class to give the students an opportunity to communicate using terms that are familiar to them?
In Faculty Basics look for collaborative spaces on the left hand side of your window. Find the links to blogs under the collaborative spaces section. Click on the C3 competency Blog. Blogs can be a low risk way of communicating information to students. Blogs are kind of "webby" and may seem more like: "modern" - Web Logs (blog) seem like a modern way to do things. Students will feel more at home if they're learning tools seem to be congruent with other parts of their lives. Instructors need and want to communicate learning to students in their class. Sometimes the students resist learning if they are suspicious that the learning is not new...not the new way. Students do not want learning to be old fashioned. Would you use a Blog in your class to give the students an opportunity to communicate using terms that are familiar to them?
Competency 4 is an assessment in Blackboard. Instructors completing competency 4 will have multiple opportunities to take this and other exams in the Faculty Basics course. Exams can be a great way to study. This is particularly true if students come to assessments with lots of anxiety about " I cannot do well even if I study " - Practice Tests can assist these students with being "more ready" and keeping it together during the exam.
Welcome to competency 5 where instructors build a website that will afford them an online "presence" among the students. This part of Faculty Basics is managed by ACT. Online Campus Registration System ACT main department is at X47109 | also the HelpDesk number is x47157
We strive to have all syllabi at Cypress College conform to accessibility requirements. Why? Meeting accessibility requirements means the content instructors create - will have a longer life time, and be more useable by all students. We are not simply attempting to support the learning among the disabled. We strive to support the learning among all students. This includes the elderly, students who speak english as a second language and any other student who is not able to negotiate all of our digital resources. Students who are poor readers will benefit from Accessible content everywhere it is in our course(s).
Don't forget on tests or quizzes for Faculty Basics you can take the assessment as many times as you like. Why not if you learn the test to get a perfect score that is another way to study. College is hard. Students get tired and it is an imperative to learn as much as we can and not have obstacles to learning. There is no specific way to learn and some people learn even while to another person : "It is impossible to learn a subject this way or that way" Give students every chance they need to learn. Using assessments as a teaching tool has value in online classes.
Wiki software is a type of collaborative software that runs a wiki system, allowing web pages to be created and edited using a common web browser. It may be implemented as a series of scripts behind an existing web server, or as a standalone application server that runs on one or more web servers. If you run a wiki in your course students can collaborate during the creation of a document. Wiki's are a good tool to use for student teams or student collaboration.
Create an orientation module for your students. Your module needs to meet the minimum acceptable proficiency. Click for Rubric Instructors can email their Welcome letter and post it in your class as an announcement. Make your course available to students: Edit Mode On > Control Panel > Customization > Properties > Set Course Availability
Create an orientation module for your students. Your module needs to meet the minimum acceptable proficiency. Click for Rubric Instructors can email their Welcome letter and post it in your class as an announcement. Make your course available to students: Edit Mode On > Control Panel > Customization > Properties > Set Course Availability
Provide Context: Your students cannot see you probably when they are learning at a distance. Be concise: It can be too short but it also can be too long. Think about your students - How long are they able to pay attention? Provide Practical Resources: hopefully that students can access on their phone using a browser. You will have to create the discussion and you should create the first post to help shape the discussion. Be in the discussion the students want you to participate. If you are not present they cannot use you as a role model.
Design the prompt - Discussion board is extremely important for all kinds of classes. Encourage students to become active learners. Which discussions are the best - Listen to the students! Students will be more than happy to tell you if they felt they learned something. Expect to have "Lurkers" - These are students that read posts but are not active. They need to be encouraged to post in their own words. No one is any better compared to anyone else using discussion boards. Some days students feel like talking other days they do not. For online classes we are attempting to recreate the same learning environment that students experience in on campus classes. Never under estimate the importance of Discussion board.
Create an Assignment that is as Cheat Proof as possible. Cheat proof is different today. Students work in teams. One student taking the test and another student writing down all the questions. I helped an instructor with a class where students were getting a perfect score on the final and it took them 4 minutes. What happened ??? Students have copies of the test. Is that cheating or are students being smart. Collaboration has changed education. What constituted cheating before could be called "Collaboration" today. Be careful with Cheating it can get really complicated fast in an online / hybrid class.
This competency is attempting to get you to use all that you have learned in the process of building your first Blackboard course. Call it what you want - It is a development shell that you are building so that it will become a course you can use with your students. Will it be perfect? No it won't be finished building until the students have a chance to try it out - Thats when instructors can fix the confusing parts and lead the students on the path towards being intellectually creative. Do you know where your development shell is??? Don't worry you cannot break it so enjoy!
Would you get other opinions of your class that you created and put on Blackboard? Playing the devils advocate = Your students will tell you things about your class you never imagined and you created the class!!! Are you the "Sage on the stage" or are you "the guide on the side". When you get to class in your virtual environment you will see there will be confusion despite your best efforts to *Be Clear* , *Provide Context* , *Be Relevant* ! Is this something negative about students NO ! Students are looking at your class on their phone when they are standing in line at Albertsons. With our students today : MAKE your delivery SIMPLE & KEEP your delivery SIMPLE. Your subject matter is what they are trying to learn.
Write Your Syllabus as an accessible Microsoft Word file. Include the following: Curriculum Committee Syllabus Requirements. Distance Education Syllabus Requirements. Distance Education Course Quality Rubric Indicators - Accomplished. Recommended Items from the Curriculum Committee Syllabus. What are we trying to accomplish? As a goal we would like to encourage, and support every instructor in the process of making their syllabus Accessible for all students. Do you agree this is a worthwhile
The course plan is an outline of the course you intend to create and teach at Cypress College. Think of this plan as a step by step guide to creating your course. You might use your Syllabus and take out specific dates so as to suggest a pathway for designing your course. A course plan will help you to remember later why you did certain things in your class. This reference point will make it easier to update and correct inconsistantcies in your course design.
This competency will seem like a repeat of the last competency. We are still working with ideas about designing, Planning and Creating a production class in Blackboard. This is another plan where it will be beneficial to begin with your Syllabus. Be sure to reach out to your cohort to see if you can share reports so not everyone is creating all of these documents by themselves. Work together - This is Constructivism Learners are information constructors.
Last competency before Wisdom Wiki competency 20. Hang in there you guys. This competency seems a little more repetitive. We are almost finished and you as instructors will have many opportunities to design or contribute to the design of classes. One more task to plan, organize, and launch your class is not too many the first time around. I hope you appreciate all of the time that we have spent on designing and thinking about the best designs for students. This is distance education - It is not easy and it is not simple. I took Faculty Basics and it is a course that changed my life.
Here we are at the Wisdom Wiki. This is the last competency and requires - not too many - Analytical skills. Say what you think now is the time when you get to say what needs to be better in this course. Why the course helped and why the course did not help. I realize this course is an immense amount of work and I sincerely appreciate you hanging in their with me !!!!! CONGRATULATIONS !!!!!