Category: General

Ice Breakers give students the chance to express their knowledge of themselves. They are the first foray into an active and engaged class community. Ice breakers are fun, person-focused, and have the purpose of requiring learners to find something in common with the learning community. Whether you are teaching an…

One of the benefits of a flexible grading tool is that you can grade almost any way that you want. One of the problems with a flexible grading tool is that it is complex and sometimes confusing. The Brightspace grade book complexity, while allowing instructors to grade in a manner…

As part of our migration from Blackboard to Brightspace we plan to turn off access to Blackboard on June 1 so that we can ensure we get the most up-to-date course archives and to pull data from the system that we want to retain. If you have a student in…

This summer will bring a few changes to the digital learning environment at Wentworth. Our recent shift in learning management systems has changed how often we will see changes in our environments. Brightspace is a SaaS (Software as a Service) deployment and updates every month. We review the announced changes…

As the summer semester quickly comes into view with the promise of colorful flowers, beach days, glowing sunsets, and the transition back into the classroom, many might feel that it’s time to pack up the online learning system and move back to the trusty paper and pen. Let’s not be…

Of all the tools in my Instructional Designer (ID) toolkit, TILT might be my favorite. It has the greatest impact and it takes the least amount of time and effort to implement. TILT stands for Transparency in Learning and Teaching. It is a student-centric way of writing out assignment instructions.…

You set up your grade book but the grades don’t look right. How can you find out where the problem occurred? Sometimes the problem may be settings. For example, I recently reviewed a problem grade book where the total points for a category were not what was expected. The category…

What does “Celebrate Differences” mean to you? For the Autism Society of America, #CelebrateDifferences means promoting acceptance of autism, and fostering inclusivity. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2020), the prevalence of autism in children has grown to about 1 in 59. Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by differences in communication, relationships, and social…

Most of the courses that instructors requested us to migrate were migrated using a bulk process developed by D2L for their Brightspace product. However, this process had limitations, namely that the course export package from Blackboard could not be larger than 1 GB. Before we tried converting courses, we ran…

We are making progress migrating content from Blackboard to Brightspace and anticipate completing all the course migrations requested by the March 22nd deadline complete by the end of March. The exceptions are Spring 2021 courses. We will migrate these starting about April 19th to capture as much content as possible.…