Are Students Watching Your Videos or Learning from Your Videos?

Posted on by fratturar · Leave a comment

Are you assigning videos as part of your remote teaching strategy?  If so, what are your students required to do when watching your video or what are they required to do once they’ve completed watching the video?

Faculty Focus “Teaching With Technology” says there’s a big difference between watching a video and learning something from a video.  Videos are great to watch, but you want your students to watch with a critical eye. This is where your expertise comes in.  How do you teach your students to watch videos actively?

Here are several ways on how to create interactive videos:

  1. Pose a question at the beginning of each video
  2. Include embedded questions within your videos
  3. Have student share their thoughts and interpersonal experiences
  4. Optimize by having students post their work to a discussion board

Visit Faculty Focus for more idea using videos in your teaching.

Respondus Monitor for Remote Exams

Posted on by cookel · Leave a comment

Due to the University’s decision to move classes to remote delivery for the remainder of the Spring 2020 semester in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a concern for how to hold final exams.

A couple of years ago we introduced Respondus LockDown Browser to our toolkit to address exam integrity in face-to-face proctored environments. Respondus LockDown Browser is a special browser application that runs on a student’s computer that locks them into a Blackboard test or exam. The student can’t browse other websites, other parts of Blackboard, or use other applications on their computer. They can’t print the exam or copy and paste the questions into an email to send to other students.

Respondus is now offering Wentworth a two month unlimited trial of their Respondus Monitor product as their pandemic response to support us with our remote instruction. This . This tool offers an additional feature when using  LockDown Browser by providing remote monitoring of student activity during an exam. Respondus Monitor is not live proctoring in that there are no humans watching for suspicious behavior, nor are students stopped or ejected from an exam as a result of any behavior.

Instead of human proctors watching for infractions and reminding the student that the behavior is not permitted or ending the student’s exam session, the student’s exam session is recorded via their webcam and analyzed using artificial intelligence. The recording is scanned for suspicious behavior. The algorithms used to detect more than one face in camera view, the student reaching or looking outside the camera view, and turning the webcam off, among other suspicious activities. If any suspicious behavior is identified, the section of the recording is tagged for review by the instructor.

Like LockDown Browser, LIT would like to work with instructors to streamline the adoption of this tool during final exams. We’ll be running training sessions and provide outreach to help set up both LockDown Browser and Monitor for your course.

The overall process will involve importing a course package containing content items (download instructions and quizzes) into your course and then having students install LockDown Browser on their computers and taking a sample quiz. The quizzes contain items testing students on what LockDown Browser and Monitor do and some academic honesty policy guidelines.

We’re currently working on getting the rollout ready and you’ll hear more in the next week or so.

Panopto/Zoom Integration Enabled

Posted on by traciad · Leave a comment

This document will highlight how to use Panopto’s integration with Zoom.

What this means is that when you use the Cloud recording option in Zoom, it will automatically upload the recorded Zoom meeting file to your “My Folder” in Panopto.

Here is how it works…

Once the Zoom meeting recording file upload is completed, you will receive an automated email notification from Panopto confirming that your recording is ready to view.

Zoom email image

The file will reside in your personal My Folder location (in Panopto) in a subfolder titled Meeting Recordings as shown here.

You can now “move” the file to the desired Panopto provisioned Blackboard course and make the recording available to your students to view.

To move the file to your provisioned Blackboard course folder, follow these steps:

Step 1: Locate the file (recording) you want to move from the Panopto My Folder > Meeting Recordings folder.

Step 2: Check the checkbox located in the upper left corner of the thumbnail image of the file.

Step 3: Click Move from the list of options that appear at the top of the screen, once you select the file.

Step 4: Use the Drop down menu to choose the provisioned course folder.

Step 5: Once the file resides in your course folder, use the Panopto Video Embed option to embed the video in your Blackboard course website for your students to view.

What if I don’t use Panopto?

No worries.  For those of you that do not use Panopto, your Zoom Cloud recordings will still reside in your Cloud Recordings tab as always.

Once the Zoom meeting recording is completed, you will receive an email notification from Zoom confirming that your recording is now available.

You can share the link information provided in the email message with your students so that they can view the recording.

You can also access the Cloud Recordings tab in Zoom and click on the Share button and copy the Recording link Information and share with your students as well.  Either way works.

We hope you found this document helpful.  For more information about the Zoom/Panopto Integration feature, please contact LIT at lit@wit.edu.

 

 

 

 

Banner Grade Submit not Available for Spring 2020 Courses

Posted on by cookel · Leave a comment

If you use the Banner Grade Submit tool in Blackboard to submit midterm and final grades you may notice that the tool is unavailable. After consultation with our Enterprise Systems team, we determined that the changes that were needed to accommodate the change in grading in response to the sudden shift to remote instruction were not possible to make in the system and the effort needed by faculty was too great to use the tool. To avoid confusion and reduce the frustration that would be generated by a tool not functioning properly, we made the decision to turn the tool off for this term.

Instead, faculty will submit grades through LeopardWeb where they will have a dropdown option for each student that will reflect the grading scheme for that student. To use the Blackboard tool would require that faculty know which students have petitioned for  P/NC and which students are still receiving letter grades. There was no way to get this information to display in Blackboard.

While this may result in more work for faculty in large enrollment classes, we believe the increased accuracy of grade submission and reduction in frustration from errors is worth the temporary change.

Beware the Party Crashers!

Posted on by cookel · Leave a comment

With more schools opting to shift instruction to remote delivery, there has been a surge in remote conferencing usage. With that surge has been a new phenomenon, Zoom Bombing. Zoom Bombing is the entry into a Zoom session by individuals who have not been invited and the unwanted sharing of screen content.

Zoom Bombing occurs when a link to a Zoom session with no password is shared publicly, often on social media. There are ways to protect your sessions by careful attention to your settings. Zoom has written about how to protect your sessions from unwanted guests and unwanted content during your sessions.

We are investigating whether GoToMeeting is susceptible to this type kind of activity and will post links to related posts or instructions on protecting your sessions.

A couple of simple steps to protect your sessions is to post your links to Zoom sessions in Blackboard, not on any social media, and limit screen sharing to the session host. The blog post linked above provides additional settings to protect your session.