SHSU Online is offering numerous How-To Sessions in February to meet faculty needs. SHSU faculty can sign up for fully online, cohort-based, and self-paced courses, as well as scheduled webinars. Blackboard instructors can also use the faculty sign-up form to request a by-appointment session that can be conducted in person, over the phone, or via a webinar.
This month, SHSU Online will be starting the 13th cohort of the well-received Teaching Online with Blackboard Certification Series. This series is highly recommended for faculty members who are teaching online courses in Blackboard or would like to do so in the future. There is also a new self-paced certification course for Blackboard Ally available. Blackboard Ally is a new tool from Blackboard that will help make your course content accessible to all students.
SHSU Online is providing VoiceThread webinars for February, along with a brand new offering, Blackboard Grade Center Best Practices. This webinar covers key points and best practices to remember when working in Blackboard’s Grade Center. If you have ever been frustrated with the Grade Center in Blackboard, this webinar is for you!
Below is a full list of faculty development offerings for February 2018. Be sure to go to our sign-up page to enroll.
Faculty Development - Fully Online Cohort
Teaching Online With Blackboard Certification Series*
The Teaching Online with Blackboard Certification Series is the fully online, cohort-based training option for faculty wishing to improve their online teaching skills. The certification consists of four courses aimed at preparing an instructor to master the online teaching environment through Blackboard.
Courses included within this series comprise the following:
Course Building (Starts 2/5): Two-week course that will equip online instructors to build and share content in their online courses.
Communication (Starts 2/19): Two-week course that will cover tools of communication, as well as applicable communication strategies for online course management.
Assessment (Starts 3/5): Two-week course that introduces participants to how to get started assessing their student's learning in an online class.
Teaching Online - Strategies for Success (Starts 3/26): Two-week course that presents participants with the opportunity to explore best practices for creating engaging and effective online learning environments.
Enroll in each course separately, today! *Successful completion of all four courses required for certification.
Faculty Development - Fully Online Self-Paced
Blackboard Ally: Making Course Content Accessible
This online, self-paced course allows instructors to learn how to utilize the Blackboard Ally tool to improve course content accessibility. Online materials and activities will guide participants through the instructor workflow, how to interpret accessibility scores/reports, universal design for learning and how to improve file accessibility. For more information about Blackboard Ally, see the article in the August 2017 edition of this newsletter.
Blackboard Collaborate Ultra
This fully-online, self-paced course is designed to familiarize Blackboard instructors with how to use Blackboard Collaborate's new Ultra Experience in their Blackboard courses. This course covers:
- Web conferencing as it applies to education
- The continuous release cycle as it applies to Collaborate
- Comparing and contrasting session roles in the Ultra experience
- Navigating and participating in a session using the Ultra experience
- Setting up a Collaborate session in the Ultra experiences
- Use Moderator tools to facilitate a Collaborate session in the Ultra experience
Successful completion of this course awards the Blackboard Collaborate Ultra certification.
Faculty Development - Webinars
VoiceThread
VoiceThread is a Blackboard enabled, collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate slides and leave comments in five ways - using voice (with a mic or telephone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam). Participants will learn how to add VoiceThread to their course, set up the VoiceThread link, and grade student work. For more information on VoiceThread, check out this video.
Blackboard Grade Center Best Practices
This one-hour webinar covers some key points and best practices to remember when working with your grade center in Blackboard. Topics covered include common reasons that lead to miscalculation of grades for students, grade center columns (the ins and outs), extra credit, what the grade center icons stand for, and more.