Category: General

Springing Forward Before you pack your bags and head off into holiday bliss, let’s wrap up your course and get them ready for your return in the spring semester.  This is the ideal time for course and self reflection.  This checklist focuses on your course content, your course mechanics and…

What are the benefits of Respondus? Respondus is a great tool to use for creating exams for your courses and allows you to save them to build an exam library. It will transfer your questions/pools to Brightspace and it can tie to publisher content. Exams can be also be created…

Flipped Classroom. A Definition “A flipped classroom is an instructional strategy and a type of blended learning, which aims to increase student engagement and learning by having students complete readings at their home and work on live problem-solving during class time” (Wikipedia Contributors, 2021). This graphic visually represents the flipped…

We’ve all been there.  Selected the wrong answer as the correct one and had to go back and fix the issue.  In recent months the Wentworth community has switched from the Blackboard to Brightspace learning management system.  In Blackboard, changes to quizzes after students already submitted were easy with the…

What’s up with the dials? Instructors: Wondering what that color-coded dial next to your content means? This dial is part of a tool called Blackboard Ally, which you can use to enhance the accessibility of your course content. Students cannot see the dials – they are for YOU so you…

A mid-semester survey is an opportunity to implement student feedback to improve course design and delivery. It is a series of survey questions given halfway through the semester. The timing of a mid-semester survey makes it possible to implement the feedback to improve the students learning experience in real-time. Moreover,…

Like Blackboard, Brightspace has a mechanism for regrading quiz questions where you accidentally set the wrong answer as correct. Moreover, some question types can only be regraded manually, so it pays to be extra careful checking the question scoring. The question types that can not be regraded or are difficult…

by Megan Hamilton Giebert and Lucy Wolski Whose Modality is it Anyway? Courses come in a variety of modalities, and the pandemic has complicated the definitions. Here are three common course modalities at Wentworth (as defined by the Online Learning Consortium), plus a fourth modality that emerged in March 2020.…

As we transition to using Brightspace as our only LMS we continue to tweak settings and the interface to better support our users. For the fall semester,  we’ve made some small but noticeable changes. On the navbar in courses, everyone will see that the course tools has changed. Due to…

There are a number of options that instructors at Wentworth have to learn how to use Brightspace. As always, TLC will offer live sessions on topics instructors need to learn about at appropriate times in the semester. These will be listed on our Events calendar. Brightspace offers additional options, Subscription…