Get Your Syllabus Ready!

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The Institute Curriculum Committee posted approved syllabus templates with accessibility features already built in that you should use.  In addition, there’s a short video that walks through the features that make the syllabus accessible. Download the accessible syllabus template and watch the help video on the ICC website

The Wentworth (WIT) Online team has created netiquette language and guidelines for faculty to include in their course syllabi to outline student expectations. Please take a moment to review these helpful tips. Feel free to add or modify these items, depending on your course delivery format. While learning can take place either in-person or remotely, students should adhere to the University’s Student Code of Conduct and respectfully conduct themselves to maintain a safe, supportive, and productive learning environment.

Additional Resources:

August Faculty Workshops

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LIT and WIT Online look forward to cross-disciplinary conversations and sharing in the workshops to end the Summer 2020 term and begin preparations for fall:

Contact Learning Innovation & Technology at lit@wit.edu for support getting your courses ready:

  • Accessible syllabus template and new accessibility features in your Bb course
  • Course copy, merge, and readiness checklist
  • Academic Technology Toolkit and time-saving strategies
  • Course pain points or areas you get a lot of student questions we may be able to help minimize

What Does Asynchronous Really Mean? How Can It Help Me During COVID-19?

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The concept of class time is very different in asynchronous instruction. You’re probably used to thinking of teaching in 50 to 90-minute chunks, planning each session in detail on what you want your students to learn for the day. But, with asynchronous teaching, start thinking of your class as something that happens over the course of a week. Begin by thinking of activities your students can perform that align with your course goals and learning outcomes.

Want to help your students be more successful during this COVID-19? In this article of the Chronicle of Higher Education by Flower Darby, she discusses 5 low-tech examples of how to use asynchronous techniques to improve your online teaching. There is a large amount of creditable and reliable information out there – YouTube, TED Talks, articles, professional journals – that you can incorporate into your course without any heavy lifting.

If your finding yourself in endless one-on-one zoom sessions and emails answering individual questions, you’re to be congratulated, but it’s not sustainable – or healthy. Instead, aim for lots of posts using your LMS and communicating one-to-many. Each week provide your summary of the course materials and make them available on a specific day of the week, so your students know when its coming.

Lastly, hold your students accountable. We know all our students don’t do the required readings as we’d like them too, but, when you incorporate short pop quizzes worth points, students become more engaged.

Check out the 5 Tips. Contact lit@wit.edu for a course consult.

D2L Brightspace Resources

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By now you’ve heard that Wentworth selected D2L’s Brightspace as our new LMS. Learning Innovation and Technology (LIT) will be offering open sessions and training on the new system over the summer and fall. Because many faculty prefer to access materials and learn on their own we will also be offering self-paced training. In addition to those training options, I’ve assembled a preliminary list of resources that you may find helpful as we move toward migrating to Brightspace.

An Instructor’s View of Brightspace for Higher Education

Getting Started with Brightspace Instructor Video Playlist

Teaching Tips for Instructors Video Playlist

Between Two Moose Video Podcast Series

Specific episodes of interest:

Visit often as I add new resources to help the transition from Blackboard to Brightspace.

Bb Annotate to Replace Box View

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Blackboard has developed a replacement for Box View, the assignment annotation tool in Blackboard that most instructors find an unacceptable replacement for the original annotation tool, Crocodoc. Blackboard will deploy the tool to our production environment in late June.

Watch a video:

On or around June 29th, you will see the new tool in Blackboard. At this time, documents annotated with Box View will be migrated to Bb Annotate. According to Blackboard “The migration process could take several hours to days depending on the number of files that need to be migrated from New Box View to Bb Annotate.” During the migration process, the annotated files will not be available. If you are using Box View when the migration takes place, the file you are annotating will be migrated after you complete your annotations.

We are hoping this will finally be an annotation tool that works for our community.