Week's End Report - Oct. 30, 2015

Tip of the Week!

Spring courses in Blackboard will become available to faculty beginning December 14th.

Please note, there are two different types of course “loading” - instructor loading and course content loading.

• Instructor loading- Each school inputs instructors into their courses through Banner. Once the courses become available to instructors through Blackboard, any instructor who has been assigned to a course through Banner will then be able to access the course in Blackboard. You will not see spring courses in Blackboard until after December 14th. If you do not see your course in Blackboard after December 14th, it is because your school has not put you into Banner. To remedy this, you must speak to your school. After you've been added to your course in Banner, allow 36 hours for the course to appear in Blackboard.
• Course content loading- Statewide online course content is loaded by the Center for Instructional Technology, regional online course content is loaded by your regional Online Technologies Coordinators. All courses must use the same 16-session formatted original course as loaded into their live course, 16-week courses complete one session per week, eight-week courses complete two sessions per week, etc. Instructors are not permitted to make changes to assignments or to course layout. You may post clarifying information or supplemental materials, but graded assignments may not be changed.
   

Training Opportunities

Event: GoToMeeting 101: The Basics webinar
When: Thursday, November 5, 10 am (PST) / 1 pm (EST)
To register: Click here

ASCD (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) has a large number of archived webinars available on their website. These archives include presenter biographies, recorded presentations, digital copies of presentation materials, and more!

Click here to access currently available webinars!

System Update

Issues were experienced with Campus Connect, email, etc. on Tuesday afternoon, October 27th. Issues began at approximately 1:30 pm and continued until approximately 4:00 pm.

A Banner upgrade will take place beginning at 7 pm on Friday, Oct. 30th and ending at 7 pm on Saturday, Oct. 31st. Tools affected include:

• Banner INB
• Banner SSB
• All third-party Banner systems (ODS, Ivy Markets, Evisions, etc.)

Week's End Report - Oct. 23, 2015

Tip of the Week!

On Friday, October 30th, old courses will be removed from Blackboard. If you have a course from 201230 (Spring 2013) or earlier that you will need to access after Oct. 30th please make sure you retrieve that content and place it into another course or development shell before the end of next week.

Courses will be remain available in Blackboard for seven semesters. Once seven semesters have passed, the courses will be removed from Blackboard. Older courses can be retrieved from the servers, but this is a manual process that can be performed only by C4IT and takes approximately one week to complete.

Online Course Reminder

Thursday, Oct. 22nd was the deadline for students to participate in 8-week online courses in order to not be dropped for non-attendance (NW). If you have students in your class who did not participate prior to midnight on Thursday, Oct. 22nd, they should be dropped for non-attendance. 

It is critical that all faculty review their courses, determine those students who do not meet the requirements for participation, and submit NWs through Campus Connect. The deadline for reporting NWs is Tuesday, October 27th. 

Remember, the NW deadline is set by the college and is not up to instructor discretion. If a student who has not participated wishes to continue with the course, instructors should process the NWs and assist the student in going through the proper channels to be officially reinstated into the course.

Week's End Report - Oct. 16, 2015

Tip of the Week!

Don't forget that Midterm grades are due by midnight on the Tuesday following midterm week for 16-week courses (next Tuesday, October 20th).  

For more information on how to submit Midterm grades please see the following link:
https://www.ivytech.edu/files/10.8_KeyReportingForFaculty.pdf 

When entering grades in the Grade Center in Blackboard it is important to put in a "0" for any assignment that has not been turned in.  This will allow the grades to calculate properly. 

For more information on Grade Columns: click here.
  

System Information

Resources (including Banner and employee mail) may be intermittently unavailable from 7AM - 11AM on Sunday, October 18th

Outages

McGraw-Hill experienced an outage with their Connect and MHE systems on Thursday, October 15th at approximately 5pm.  In particular, students were having trouble taking their APHY101/102 midterm exams.  

Week's End Report - Oct. 9, 2015

Tip of the Week!

Important reminder! All faculty are required to complete BBRD101 prior to teaching. If you have not already completed this course (or it's predecessor, BBRD291X) please log in to Blackboard and complete the course now!

Not sure if you've completed BBRD101? Check your record in the Training Portal. 

• Log in to Campus Connect (cc.ivytech.edu)
• Click on the Employee Services tab
• On the right side of the page click the Ivy Tech Training Portal link
• In the Training Portal click the My Training tab
• Click on the My Training Record tab
• If you have successfully completed BBRD101 or BBRD291X, the course will appear in your training record and the Passed column will show Yes and a link to a PDF version of your training certificate

IVYC110 Online Certification Clarification

We've fielded some great questions regarding IVYC110 since our post last week. Here's some clarifying information for those of you who are considering taking the course:

• If you have already been certified to teach online through IVYC101, you do not need to take IVYC110
• You should not sign up for IVYC110 unless you are planning to teach online in the spring (you must teach online the semester immediately following your completion of IVYC110, otherwise you will have to retake IVYC110 in the semester preceding the semester in which you teach online)
• Space for IVYC110 is extremely limited and is shared throughout the entire college so don't sign up for the course unless you are committed to completing the course and are planning to teach online next semester
• C4IT will be opening practice sections of IVYC110 for those instructors who wish to view the materials but are not planning to teach online or are already online certified, we'll send out notification when those sections become available

System Information

Employee e-mail was down for maintenance from 11 pm to midnight on Thursday, October 8th.  

Ivy Appointment will be down for maintenance from 8:30 - 9:00 am Sunday morning, October 11th.

McGraw-Hill Connect performed maintenance at approximately 5:30 am EST on Thursday, October 8th. During this time students and instructors were unable to access the Music Listening Guide and LSI (sciences math engine). All other Connect systems were accessible during this time.

Tutor.com is now set up to raise flags in Starfish. These flags will notify instructors if their student is using Tutor.com and demonstrating low prerequisite knowledge. 
During the month of September, Tutor.com worked with the following students from each region:

• Kokomo: 38 students
• Lafayette: 535 students

Total throughout the college:

• 4,261 sessions
• 2,160.03 hours

Highest usage courses were MATH123 and ENGL111. 97% of students who used Tutor.com felt the service helped them improve their grades and made them feel more confident about their school work. 98% of students would recommend the service to their friends. Encourage your students to use this service if they have not already done so!

More information about Tutor.com can be found in the June 19th blog post.

Week's End Report - Oct. 2, 2015

Tip of the Week!

Are you scheduled to teach online next semester but are not currently certified to teach online? Contact us at laf-distance-ed@lists.ivytech.edu to sign up for the new IVYC110! This is a new course containing two parts, a self-paced training with four modules that you have four weeks to complete, and two instructor-led modules that you will complete over the course of two weeks. Following IVYC110 you will be able to participate in IVYC112, which allows you to teach online as a probationary instructor working with a mentor.

You must have completed BBRD291X/BBRD101 prior to beginning IVYC110, you must also be planning to teach online in the next semester. 

IVYC112 must be completed the semester following your completion of IVYC110 so if you are not planning to teach online you are advised to wait until you are planning to teach online before signing up for IVYC110. (Ex. If I take IVYC110 in the fall of 2015 and do not teach online in the spring of 2016, then my IVYC110 completion becomes null. If I am scheduled to teach online in the summer of 2016 I will need to repeat IVYC110 in the spring in order to be eligible.)

Professional Development

New professional development courses are now available in Blackboard. To access the professional development courses, click on the Courses tab and look for the Course Catalog module. Click on the Self-Paced online professional development courses link to access the list of available courses and enroll in the course(s) of your choice.

Open Educational Resources

A new development initiative is encouraging the exploration and use of Open Educational Resources (OER) in new online course development statewide. There are many benefits to this option:

• Saves students an average of over $100 per course (vs. IncludED)
• OER courses don't require adoption across all sections when used in face-to-face courses (ex. if the instructor in section 30X want to adopt the statewide content for their face-to-face course, they don't require the agreement of the instructors in sections 31X, 32X, 33X, etc. Each face-to-face instructor can use the content they prefer)
• Promotes development of new OER

Talk to your curriculum committees about the benefits of OER!

Blackboard Updates

On December 23-24 Ivy Tech will be upgrading to Blackboard 9.1 Cumulative Update 3 for the October 2014 release.Click here to view update release notes on our website.

Old courses are archived and removed from Blackboard after two full academic years plus one semester (seven semesters total). After that time, in order to access a course a request must be put in through C4IT to have that archive retrieved and loaded into a new development shell.

A new online course template is being piloted with IVYT111. The current goal is to release the new template statewide beginning Summer 2016. If you mentor a regional online course we will work with you to adjust your course to the new standards. The changes are not significant, the majority of your current course layout will remain unchanged.