Jared Stein – Education, Technology, Culture, and the Internet

While Canvas, the LMS we’re using at UVU, does have easy-to-use grading and assignment features, I’m always interested in new tools and services that pop up. Enter Engrade.com, a free, online toolset that focuses on providing a robust and user-friendly online gradebook (more…)

Knewton has put together a tidy little infographic on Blended Learning (K12) that’s worth examining–even if you’re in higher ed (more…)

Since we first piloted our Hybrid Teaching Initiative last Fall for UVU faculty designing hybrid/blended courses, I’ve been slowly compiling resources and information on our Innovation Center Hybrid Course wiki. This includes workshop outlines, participant-generated information, and slides compiled from many colleagues and sources.

Feel free to check it out and use any of these resources. I’ll be refining the organization and depth of the materials during the summer as we prepare for our Fall 2011 hybrid workshops.

I’ve been teaching online courses in Instructure Canvas for a while, but stumbled upon a fascinating phenomenon today thanks to one of Canvas’s built in features. This plays out due to a number of system settings, so bear with me (more…)

It’s not news that teaching an online course does not necessarily mean less work for the instructor–just different work. At least it should. Nor does it necessarily mean more work. We’ll get to that. In my mind, online courses are a challenge primarily because they front load course preparation, but often with additional resource expenditure to ensure engaging learning design. Faculty may suggest that teaching an online course is itself more work, too, but I don’t believe that’s typically the case (more…)

I’m working on an online university course redesign that prompts students to develop web design skills through a series of weekly projects that build upon the previous week’s work. In the past these projects have been submitted privately to the instructor, though students have been encouraged to post their submissions to their blogs or personal web sites, and simply submit the URL as a means to encourage collegial interaction and openness (more…)

Or, Blogs, “Blogs,” and Discussion Boards*

I subscribe to TechTrends as part of my AECT membership. It has a great subtitle (Linking Research and Practice to Improve Learning) and it is peer reviewed, though I don’t know if it’s considered a journal or a magazine (I lean towards “magazine”). Sometimes there are some good articles, sometimes there are bad ones. One particular article in the September/October 2010 issue caught my attention: “Using Blogs to Identify Misconceptions in a Large Undergraduate Nutrition Course”. Not exactly a home run of a title, but I’m interested in examples of student blogging in action, so I read on (more…)

I found this old e-mail from the POD mailing list describing a number of faculty certification programs for online teaching. I’m posting it here more as a reminder to myself as Marc and I move forward with a hybrid faculty development program here at UVU (more…)

The UVU Blackboard server now allows designers to require Respondus Lockdown Browser (LDB) on assessments. This means that if an assessment is set to use LDB, the end-user (test-taker) computer must have the free LDB software installed (Bb should prompt the user to install it before the assessment can be accessed). UVU’s Testing Center has installed LDB on all its computers and is testing it before next semester. We presume this is pointless unless the Bb assessment has LDB selected, but are looking into it. In any case where LDB is used to take an assessment, “lock down” happens according to Respondus’s descriptions–even if the exam itself is not triggered to require Lockdown. I asked Respondus to clarify the “switch” in Bb, and they responded this afternoon (more…)

This semester I elected to test Instructure‘s (pilot? beta?) learning management system with my own online course, DGM 2740: Web Design, the third course in the Digital Media web development track at UVU. Instructure is showing us how it’s done with strong AJAX enhancements for more streamlined user processes (more…)