Self-Produced Brightspace Tutorials: Dr. Ella Howard

Posted on by zakrzewskit

This is a series of short tutorials Dr. Ella Howard, Associate Professor in the College of Sciences and Humanites, put together covering the basics of building a course in Brightspace. For assistance in setting up your gradebook, please consult an LIT team member (lit@wit.edu).

Getting Started with Brightspace:
How to set up your course, customize the page banner, use modules, and design checklists to keep learners on track.

Don’t want to use checklists?
Here’s another way to control students’ tracking of their progress.

Want to embed content from Films on Demand?
Wentworth’s library provides smooth integration.

Want to link students directly to passages and chapters inside library ebooks?
This video shows you how.

Learn how to upload videos to Panopto and use the caption editor here.

Panopto allows you to add short objective quizzes inside your recorded lectures.
These can be as simple as the “are you still watching” prompt in Netflix or can pose more challenging questions. Learn how to use that feature here.

This video shows you how to add Panopto video content to your course.

Want to add a discussion to your module? Learn how here.
(This video truncates a bit abruptly. Sorry! The rubric demonstration is in the following video.)

Rubrics make grading faster and more transparent.
Learn how to build them in Brightspace here.

This video demonstrates copying a component from one Brightspace class to another.

Here I demonstrate attaching a rubric to a task–in this case, a discussion. (This video ends with me saying “In another video I’ll give you a more thorough discussion of… no, I won’t.” I had intended to edit that out, but since it slipped in and made me laugh, I left it here. I had initially planned to create a video showing you how to create a gradebook. That is such an important task, however, that I think the advice there is best left to the professionals.)

Grading with Turnitin video

Grading using Turnitin QuickMark video

Open-book quizzes can help keep students focused on the material through frequent, low-stakes learning opportunities. Learn how to create them by viewing this video.

Uploading lectures to Panopto and editing captions video

Now you know as much as I do. I think we are intermediate Brightspace users now. Best of luck with your teaching!photo of Dr Ella Howard

Can you import Bb Courses to Brightspace? Yes. Should you? Probably not.

Posted on by cookel

Wentworth’s pilot of D2L Brightspace is in full swing and we’ve been learning a lot as we go. One question we’ve been asked is can I just import my Blackboard course into Brightspace? The easy answer is yes, exporting a course from Blackboard is easy. Importing that package into Brightspace is easy. However, depending on what tools you use in Blackboard, you may have a lot of clean-up to do in Brightspace. Some content/links do not transfer cleanly.

We are recommending, based on the advice we received from three schools we contacted for reference checks on D2L, that you export your content, review it, and then build your course in Brightspace. We have resources to help you with this task and will be sharing a recommended process to transition your course to the new LMS with a structure to meet your students’ learning needs.

So what can go wrong when you import a Blackboard course into Brightspace?

Links to third-party tools break. Although we have added the various tools that we have in Blackboard into Brightspace, the connections are different and will not connect to the same content.

Now for publisher content, this might not be too significant a problem because you have to relink your course each semester to the new course you create for the text resources.

Some content like SCORM content (Rise module are in this category) will need to be reimported. Although Brightspace allows uploading SCORM content, it needs to come in on it’s own rather than as part of another package to display correctly.

Another area for concern is the grade center. If you have hidden columns, they will be copied over and added to the grade book along with any assignments or tests that might be associated. If you carefully clean up your course before exporting it, you should have no problems with extra columns.

Content – do you have a lot of files? Are they organized so your students can easily find what they need? Reorganize before building will allow you to quickly build a course where your students can easily find the resources you are providing to them. We recommend that you use a module structure or checklists to organize content by session, week, or topic, depending on what works best for your content. This is also a good time to check the value of the content. Do you need all the content items/files you have uploaded to your course or are some files no longer used?

Extra content that is not referred to in your course is a distractor to your students. (In the Bettering Learner Engagement Study we found that courses with lots of files were associated with poorer performance for students in the lower half of the grade scale). Do them a favor and cull the content to what you expect them to use and organize the remainder.

Are your quizzes and assignments in a single content area in Blackboard? Then it’s time to organize these activities with the appropriate content to create a course that students can navigate easily.

It is best practice to create modules containing links to all the activities students must complete. Modules can be time-based (think weekly modules) or topic-based. Which kind of module is less important than the organizing of your content into modules. If your Blackboard course is not organized in this way, take the time now to create the best structure to help your students navigate your course materials.

So, yes, you can export your course from Blackboard and import it into Brightspace, but we recommend that you do some clean up first so that the result does not require a lot of work to clean up on the back end. Very clean and well-organized courses can import well into Brightspace but if you have to spend time cleaning up your course first, you should download content and plan the new structure, then rebuild in Brightspace.

The LIT/WIT Online team is developing materials and tools to help guide you through the process of moving your courses from Blackboard to Brightspace. We’ll add new resources as we develop them.

Resources:

Guide to downloading content from Blackboard and rebuilding in Brightspace

 

Changes in Graduate Grading Schema

Posted on by cookel

Earlier in the year, the Institute Curriculum Committee (ICC) approved changes to the grading scale used for graduate courses. This unfortunately means that any courses created for Fall 2020 created before the announcement, have an out-dated schema. We explored the possibility of having Blackboard run a backend database query to correct the schema but the addition of additional rows in the schema in each course offering made this approach impractical.

This outcome means that most Fall 2020 graduate courses need their grading schema’s updated to reflect the new grading system. To help you correct the schema in your courses we have prepared these instructions.

 

Meet the Brightspace Pilot Faculty!

Posted on by zakrzewskit

Meet the Brightspace Faculty Champions!

Brightspace is generating a lot of interest with almost 60 faculty volunteering to pilot courses in Brightspace this fall. Due to the nature of our phased implementation, LIT could support approximately 20 (we wish everyone could support everyone!). Pilot faculty were selected from volunteers with input from the Senate Academic Instruction Subcommittee and department chairs. Certain pilot faculty will serve as Brightspace champions this spring – as a trusted colleague, willing to answer basic Brightspace questions and direct colleagues to LIT for additional help. Meet your Brightspace champions:

  • Applied Math: Mel Henriksen
  • Architecture: Troy Peters
  • Biological Engineering: David Simpson
  • Civil Engineering: Anuja Kamat
  • Computer Science & Networking: Sunjae Park
  • Construction Management: Fope Bademosi,
  • Electrical Engineering: Marisha Rawlins,
  • Humanities & Social Sciences: Kristen Rosero 
  • Industrial Design: Derek Cascio
  • Interior Design: Sylvia Masters
  • Management: Michael Mozill
  • Mechanical Engineering: Tony Duva
  • Sciences: Andrew Seredinski

A full list of all Brightspace pilot faculty, many who may be teaching sections of the same course, also includes: Aran Bercu, Swati Kelkar, Marko Milosevic, Gary Simundza, Emma Smith-Zbarsky, and Mami Wentworth, Jennifer Gaugler, Greg Logan, Anne-Catrin Schultz, John Cribbs, Hari Naganthan, Aaron Carpenter, Ella Howard, Megan Kensington, Nick Ortolino, Cindy Stevens, and Mike Tylinski.

When Can All Faculty Check Out Brightspace?

All faculty teaching this fall can log into Wentworth.brightspace.com with your Wentworth credentials. Use your sandbox to experiment with features and functionality.

We invite you to complete the Level 1 and Level 2 self-paced training modules in Brightspace to learn how to navigate and use common features. Find the training under “MyCourses” and scroll over to “Self-Paced”.

Brightspace home page showing "my courses" and "self-paced" options

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can also access resources and subscription training including live and recorded training sessions and regular live Q & A sessions for instructors at https://community.brightspace.com – register using your Wentworth email address (this is critical for you to have access to subscription training). Once you have an active account in the Brightspace Community, click on the Learning Center link in the navbar at the top of the page. Next, click on the big blue subscription training button on the right side of the page. The subscription training site will appear and you can access any of the training for the entirety of our contract with Brightspace.

Look for LIT hosted synchronous hands on workshops starting in October. We’ll advertise them later this month. Contact lit@wit.edu to consult with an instructional designer.

Unification of LIT and WIT Online

Posted on by zakrzewskit

We are excited to share an organizational realignment to unify the WIT Online and Learning Innovation &Technology Teams within Technology Services. Please continue using the current communications channels this fall to contact LIT lit@wit.edu for full-time and WIT Online online@wit.edu for part-time course support.

The realignment supports the strategic focus areas of High-Value Learning and Transformative Student Experience to deliver the modern teaching and learning experiences that all students (undergraduate, graduate, non-degree seeking and non-traditional) have come to expect from a university.

Passionate, talented members of both teams share commonalities in a mission to foster student-centric, interactive, experiential learning across in-person, hybrid, online and dual/Hyflex course delivery modes enabled by a digital learning ecosystem hub. Synergies across the teams present many opportunities to expand faculty professional development, consult toward the achievement of learning outcomes at the course and curricular levels, foster faculty collaborations, and fuel innovative teaching and learning practices.

Organizing this new unified team within Technology Services also provides opportunities for additional synergies drawn from adjacencies with the Digital Transformation, Tech Spot, and Media Support teams, which help us promote a one-stop experience for faculty and students to enhance the teaching and learning outcomes at Wentworth.

We also welcome Josh Luckens, an instructional designer who joined the team in August. Josh is a creative educator with 12+ years in course design and curriculum development as a teacher, writer and editor, and learning experience designer. Most recently, he designed and managed model diplomacy summits for young adults from across the world at Knovva Academy. His previous work includes instructional design for Signet Education, Outward Bound, and the Leadership Institute for Development, Education & Research. He has also taught English and theatre at the high school and middle school levels, designed education programs for a variety of educational travel companies, and served as a Fulbright fellow in Colombia. He is a Massachusetts licensed teacher, a fluent Spanish speaker, and a theatre director and actor. Josh holds an MA in Theatre Education from Emerson College and a BA from Vassar College, where he completed an Interdisciplinary Concentration in Judaic Studies.

This new team will be led by Tes Zakrzewski Ed.D., Director of Learning Innovation & Technology. Your feedback will inform the shape this unified team takes over the next few months, so please feel free to contact Tes Zakrzewski (zakrzewskit@wit.edu) with your input, ideas, and needs.