Week's End Report- July 31, 2015

Tip of the Week!

Fall courses became available to instructors on Blackboard on Monday, July 27th. Some faculty have reported that their courses are “not loaded.” There are two different types of course “loading” - instructor loading and course content loading - what you should do next depends on which type of loading needs to be done.

• I log in to Blackboard and my fall course does not appear- your school has not loaded you into your course in Banner. In order to remedy this you will need to speak with your school. Please be aware that there is up to 36 hours delay after your school loads you in Banner before your course will appear in Blackboard. Unfortunately there is no work-around or shortcut for this delay.
• I log in to Blackboard and my course appears but the course is empty- your course has not been loaded with content yet. The Center for Instructional Technology and your regional Online Technologies Coordinators are in the process of loading content for both statewide and face-to-face courses. If your course is currently empty, please do not do anything with it until it has been loaded with the standard course content.
   

SafeAssign

SafeAssign underwent maintenance on Wednesday, July 29th, beginning at 3:30 am and lasting until 7:30 am. During this maintenance, users received an error when trying to access the tool. Papers were not processed while maintenance is taking place and the processing of papers will be delayed after the maintenance until the system has caught up.

System Issues - Blackboard

During Blackboard's weekly maintenance, there was an issue that resulted in an intermittent outage from approximately 2:30 AM - 5:05 AM on Friday, July 31st.  Please work with your students who may have experienced issues accessing Blackboard during this time frame.

Reminders

• Semester ends Saturday, August 1st
• Grades due by Midnight on August 4th
• Help with finalizing your course:  http://bit.ly/idcfinalize

Week's End Report - July 24, 2015

Tip of the Week!

Remember to always enter 0's for all those assignments for which your students did not earn any points. This becomes particularly important at the end of the semester. Due to a glitch in the grade center in Blackboard, assignments may become invisible to the students if 0's are not entered where appropriate thus leading students to believe that their score is higher than it really is.

For example: Quiz 1 was due in Session 2. John Student does not complete Quiz 1 and Ann Instructor leaves the Quiz 1 score blank. After the due date, the quiz is made unavailable to students. Because John Student doesn't have a score for Quiz 1, the column disappears from his grade center as it disappears from the Class Session. John's grade center will now look like this:
 

John Student	Grade Center
Intro Discussion = 10/10 Assignment 1= 10/10 Discussion 2 = 10/10 Quiz 2 = 10/10 Total = 40/40     100%	Intro Discussion= 10 points Quiz 1= 10 points Assignment 1= 10 points Discussion 2= 10 points Quiz 2= 10 points Total= 50 points

 
John now thinks he has a score of 40/40, or 100%. Without an extensive review of the course calendar and syllabus, John would have no indication that his score is actually 40/50, or 80%.

If a 0 is entered for Quiz 1 for John Student he would then be able to see the Quiz in the grade center (as shown below). This will give students accurate and complete information with which to calculate their true grade.
 

John Student	Grade Center
Intro Discussion = 10/10 Quiz 1= 0/10 Assignment 1= 10/10 Discussion 2 = 10/10 Quiz 2 = 10/10 Total = 40/50     80%	Intro Discussion= 10 points Quiz 1= 10 points Assignment 1= 10 points Discussion 2= 10 points Quiz 2= 10 points Total= 50 points

See the Finalizing Your Course page on the IDC website for more information about finalizing your course!

http://bit.ly/idcfinalize

Week's End Report- July 17, 2015

Tip of the Week!

Due to security vulnerabilities, Mozilla Firefox may block certain versions of Flash player from running on your computer. This may effect your ability to access Pearson MyLabs and some other Blackboard functionalities. Should you run in to difficulties, either allow Flash to update itself when requested or manually download and install the latest version from the Flash website at https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer

This issue is expected to be temporary and effects only certain versions of Flash. More information can be found in the following article:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2487628,00.asp

Blackboard Update

Faculty will be loaded into their courses in Blackboard on July 27th. You may see your course in Campus Connect prior to that, but your courses will not appear in Blackboard until after July 27th.

Students will have access to courses in Blackboard 72 hours prior to the beginning of the course this fall (approximately 8 am on the Friday prior to the first day of classes). Please make sure that your course is ready by the end of the day Thursday so your students can get off to a running start.

System Issues

Throughout the weekend of July 11-12, there were issues with the Pearson links in the MATH135 online course. Please allow students to make up any work that was missed due to these issues.

At approximately 11:24 a.m. EDT, July 17, 2015, Pearson began receiving reports of a possible issue that may be impacting MyLab courses.

Online Orientation Webinars Announced

The Center for Instructional Technology (C4IT) at Central Office has announced the fall dates for the Online Orientation webinar.

• Tuesday, August 18th at 1:30 pm EDT
• Wednesday, August 19th at 10 am EDT
• Thursday, August 20th at 5:30 pm EDT
• Friday, August 21st at 12 pm EDT
• Saturday, August 22nd at 10 am EDT
• Monday, August 24th at 2 pm EDT
• Wednesday, August 26th at 5:30 pm EDT

To register, click here: http://bit.ly/1HZTRwD

Please share this information with your current summer courses. Dates will be posted again prior to the start of fall semester.

Campus Closures

• Monticello campus closed at 2 pm, Thursday, July 9th, due to phone and internet outage.
• Indianapolis campus closed, Tuesday, July 14th, due to power outage.
• Warsaw campus experienced an internet outage on the morning of Wednesday, July 15th.

If you had a student scheduled to take a proctored test in any of these locations during the aforementioned time frame, please work with them to reschedule.

Training Opportunity

Respondus is offering three 45-minute webinars on using LockDown Browser. These sessions fill quickly so, if you’re interested, sign up soon!

• Thursday, July 30th at 3 pm ET

To register, click here: http://www.respondus.com/products/webinar/#LDB?utm_medium=email&utm_source=May-2015-training-invite-non-admin-version&utm_campaign=Training_Email_6_2015

Week's End Report- July 10, 2015

Tip of the Week!

Throughout the summer we will be performing our annual reviews of regional online course development shells. The process is informal and meant to help standardize course format with the statewide course template and save faculty time.  

A big THANK YOU goes out to those faculty who have reached out to us and their co-regional counterparts! Much has already been accomplished and we look forward to working with all of you as we continue this successful collaborative experience.

Our goals for course reviews are to:

• Save you time!
• Help familiarize faculty with the standard online QM template adopted by the Center for Instructional Technology (C4IT)
• Fine tune our already high-quality online courses 
• Answer any questions you may have regarding the QM template and online courses in general

If you have questions about the course reviews or would like more information about regional online courses and the policies that guide our practices, we would be happy to discuss them with you!

 

Training Opportunity

Respondus is offering three 45-minute webinars on using LockDown Browser. These sessions fill quickly so, if you’re interested, sign up soon!

• Thursday, July 30th at 3 pm ET

To register, click here: http://www.respondus.com/products/webinar/#LDB?utm_medium=email&utm_source=May-2015-training-invite-non-admin-version&utm_campaign=Training_Email_6_2015

Week's End Report - July 3, 2015

Tip of the Week!

Beginning in the Fall we have a new statewide syllabus template for all online courses. The correct template will be present in each one of your online courses at the beginning of the semester. The new template will not change anything you normally do, but some of the information you normally enter will now appear in a different place.

The following is a link to the new syllabus on our website:  Updated Statewide Syllabus Template

We have always requested that instructors not reuse syllabi from previous semesters because syllabi are constantly changing, however this has now become more important than ever! Remember to download the current syllabus from your course every semester, fill it out and upload it. Never reuse an old syllabus!

Training Opportunity

Respondus is offering three 45-minute webinars on using LockDown Browser. These sessions fill quickly so, if you’re interested, sign up soon!

• Wednesday, July 8th at 2 pm ET
• Thursday, July 30th at 3 pm ET

To register, click here: http://www.respondus.com/products/webinar/#LDB?utm_medium=email&utm_source=May-2015-training-invite-non-admin-version&utm_campaign=Training_Email_6_2015

Reminders

• New sections of IVYC101 are available in the Training Portal on Campus Connect
• Getting Started webinars will be held throughout the week, encourage your students to participate
• If you would like access to the Self-Enroll Module for summer, contact your program chair or dean about requesting access