Instructional Design Studio

Next fall, with the start of the 2010-2011 academic year, UDM will be upgrading to the latest version of Blackboard. This update will bring with it significant changes to how you set up and maintain your online course sites.  In addition to providing some new course tools — such as journals and blogs — this upgrade streamlines course management, letting you access Blackboard’s features more quickly.

As we have done in past years, on Wednesday, August 25^th we will be taking down the current Blackboard server. When Blackboard becomes available again on Friday, August 27^th, we will have completed the upgrade to Blackboard 9.

To help you prepare for these changes, the Instructional Design Studio will be offering a number of workshops and hands-on opportunities leading up to this change.

Early Access & Update Schedule

If you would like to start familiarizing yourself with Blackboard now, all faculty teaching this summer have access to the BB9 workspace at http://knowledge2.udmercy.edu. Simply log in using the same username you use for TITANCONNECT, along with your T-number (with a capital T) as your password.

If you are not teaching until Fall, feel free to contact IDS to have an account and development course site created. USE THIS SPACE TO WORK ON YOUR COURSES FOR THE FALL

Tuesday July 6, courses and accounts for the fall term will begin appearing on http://knowledge2.udmercy.edu. FALL TERM COURSES WILL ONLY BE CREATED HERE.

On Friday, August 27, all content and courses at http://knowledge2.udmercy.edu will be moved to the usual http://knowledge.udmercy.edu address. Any course content you have created over the summer on Knowledge2 will be available to students as soon as knowledge.udmercy.edu becomes available again on Friday August 27.

At this time, the Knowledge2 address will be retired, and course content from the 09-10 academic year will no longer be available.

Summer Workshops

IDS will be offering an Introduction to Blackboard 9 workshop at 10:00AM on Monday 5/3, Tuesday 5/4, and Thursday 5/6. Instructional Designers will also be available throughout the summer to provide individual or group training sessions, just contact the Instructional Design Studio (ids@udmercy.edu / 313-578-0580) for scheduling.

Register for these sessions now.

In July, the Instructional Design Studio will be offering a three-day intensive workshop that will show you all the ins and outs of Blackboard 9, provide an introduction to using Wimba, and introduce you to some multimedia development tools. This Teaching with Technology Workshop will begin with the pre-recorded webcast “Effective Online Teaching: Designing, Developing & Delivering an Effective Online Course”. Each day of the workshop will consist of two morning sessions and two afternoon sessions, with an hour break for lunch. Following the last session of each day, attendees are invited to use IDS laptops to develop course content in our offices, with designers on hand to answer questions and provide technical support.

We currently plan to offer this session twice in July, first on the 13 – 15, then again on 27 -29. To register, or to find out more about what will be offered during this three-day intensive, please visit the IDS web site.

If you or a significant number of your students aren’t  able to attend classes, how will you communicate with your students? Here are some ideas to get you started developing a plan.

Establish an alternative means of communication

Consider posting information about changes to your course as announcements in Blackboard. Check the “Email this announcement” box to also send your message to your students as an email.
Consider posting a test announcement early in the term to verify that your students are able to receive your messages, either through Knowledge or via email.

Consider alternative activities

If you’re unable to hold class (or if class attendance drops drastically), it may help to plan some alternative class sessions. Some traditional class activities can be roughly emulated online.

Online discussion

Pose questions to your class based on current coursework or readings and use Blackboard’s discussion forums to facilitate student interaction. For large classes, consider breaking the class up into smaller discussion groups. A group leader can then provide you with a summary of the group’s discussion activity.

Collect written work online

Blackboard’s assignment tool makes it easy to collect written work online. If you’ve already planned to collect homework during a “downtime,” consider collecting homework online instead. You may also consider assigning short essays or reflections on readings or lectures in lieu of in-class discussion.

Online lectures

Did you know you can use the Wimba LiveClassroom tool to create lecture videos that your students can watch any time? Consider pre-recording lecture sessions your students can watch from home or download to their iPods. If you’d rather not use Wimba, you can use Audacity to record pure audio files, or download the free iSpring plug-in to turn a narrated PowerPoint into a web-friendly Flash file. IDS has 5 production laptops available for check out that include software for producing high quality, web-friendly multimedia lectures.

Find out more about any of these activities by attending one of our workshops.