WOOL Blog: Ram-ping Up Your Instructional Technology

Are you planning your fall course yet? Thinking about how an online course might differ from a face-to-face course or trying to overcome some obstacles with student expectations in your online course? Consider some of the following tips in this post on writing your online course syllabus in order to get your courses started with clear communication and expectations. Online courses provide students with flexibility. They're available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, so students can work when they have time to work. However, they sometimes also need help in those wee hours of the night or whenever they're working in the course, and they want you, the instructor to be available to help them. We know that's not always possible. We'd do anything to support our students, but we also have families, scholarship, other courses, hobbies, oh and sleep that take up our time. It's impossible to be as available to our students as the course content is. Consider the following tw...

A few weeks ago, we posted instructions for exporting your course gradebooks to keep for your records. This week, we are going to help you take your summer “housekeeping” a step further by detailing how, and why, to export or archive your courses. When you export or archive a course from Blackboard, your course is condensed into a single ZIP folder that you can save to a computer or storage device for safe keeping. In both instances, your course layout, assignments, exams, grading schemas, adaptive release criteria, etc, are preserved within this ZIP folder. This ZIP folder can then be uploaded into Blackboard at a later date to recreate these components. However, archiving and exporting differ in one very important area: exporting a course does not preserve student data, whereas archiving a course does preserve student data. When archiving a course, the final ZIP folder also contains student enrollment, assignment submissions, grades, discussion board and wiki contributions, and ...