IDC Tips & Techniques

DCC 2009 Film Submissions on Youtube (Warning: these films have not been rated and may contain language and situations that may not be suitable for all audiences)

Blackboard Corner

Submitting Final Grades

There have been no changes in the final grades submission process since Fall 2008.

Instructors may submit their final grades through Blackboard or through MyPurdue beginning Monday, May 4 at 8pm and ending on Tuesday, May 12, at 5pm.

Interested in increasing quiz security in your Blackboard class?
Instructors invited to upcoming webinar

Are you looking for ways to discourage students from cheating during online assessments? Respondus is offering an informational webinar on Respondus LockDown Browser on April 27, 2009, 3-4pm. The webinar will explore common methods used by students to cheat during online tests and how to minimize them using the Respondus LockDown Browser software.

Respondus LockDown Browser "locks down" the testing environment within an online course, preventing students from printing, copying, going to another URL, accessing other applications, or exiting an exam without submitting it to the grade book.

Interested faculty and staff are invited to attend.

Blackboard Student Tutorial Learning Module Now Available

A Blackboard Student Tutorial,
designed to help students learn how to use Blackboard Vista, is now available from the Instructional Development Center.

Student Experience icon

The learning module contains step-by-step guides for using some of Blackboard's most commonly-used tools. The instructions are accompanied by videos with audio showing how to accomplish tasks in Blackboard. The learning module ends with a short quiz.

Instructors need only import the learning module into their Blackboard class to begin using it.

Instructions to Add the Blackboard Student Tutorial to your Blackboard Class are available online at ITaP's training website; at the same location, click to download the zip file, Blackboard Student tutorial (Learning Module).

Summer/Fall 2009 Changes in
ITaP Instructional Labs

To see the list of changes affecting ITaP's instructional computing labs over the summer and planned for Fall 2009, see TLT's Upcoming Changes web page. These include planned software and hardware upgrades.

To stay apprised of changes, check the page through summer and before the Fall 2009 semester begins.

Hosted Survey 'Switched Off' on May 9

On May 9, 2009 at 5pm, Hosted Survey will be switched off for Purdue users, and they will no longer be able to access surveys or data created in Hosted Survey.

If you have not yet downloaded your survey data or made arrangements to recreate needed surveys in Qualtrics, you should do so at once:

Create an account on Purdue's Qualtrics survey page
Download your Hosted Survey data

For assistance, please contact tlt-hostedsurvey@purdue.edu.

Drop us a Line!

Do you have questions, comments, or ideas for what we can talk about in future IDC Tips & Techniques? We'd love to hear them!

Send your ideas to
tlt-consulting@purdue.edu.

Five Purdue Instructors Awarded for Quality Distance Ed Courses
$3,000 Cash Prizes Awarded by IDC Awards Program

Five Purdue faculty members have been awarded a cash prize for the development of a high-quality distance education class in 2008 by the Instructional Development Center (IDC).

Run in conjunction with the Office of Continuing Education and Conferences (OCEC), the goal of the IDC Distance Ed Incentive Awards program is to support the development of quality distance education courses at Purdue University - West Lafayette.

The 2008 Award Winners developed classes which were evaluated highly in the areas of course design, interaction/collaboration, assessment, and learner support. They are:

Instructor	Class
Emily Bouck (EDPS)	EDPS 568 - Social, Legal and Ethical Issues in Special Education
Peg Ertmer & Minchi Kim (EDCI)	EDCI 513 - Foundations of Educational Technology
Ellen Gundlach (STAT)	STAT 301 - Elementary Statistical Methods
Deb Saks (OLS)	OLS 440 - Leading with Integrity

To be eligible for the award, faculty attended a set of instructional technology/distance education workshops in May 2008 and consulted with IDC or OCEC educational technologists for feedback during course development. After development, they submitted their courses for review to IDC staff. Those courses that scored well in the evaluation process received a $3,000 award.

Benefits of Program

Instructors who win the award benefit monetarily, but program participants also valued the opportunity to improve their online courses. According to Prof. Deb Saks, "The IDC Distance Ed Incentives Award Program gave me the push I needed ... Basically, it encouraged me, with support from the TLT team, to make my class one of high quality of which I am proud. It was well worth the work."

Prof. Emily Bouck valued the Spring faculty training workshops in particular. "I appreciated the opportunity to ask questions of ITaP staff and to get started working on my online course during the training seminar. It was great to go with colleagues who were also working to put together online courses so that we could discuss design and organization as we were working."

Fellow 2008 Award Winner Ellen Gundlach sees the program as a valuable resource for anyone in distance education. "It was an excellent program! I really learned so much this year... I've recommended it to other people interested in Distance Learning, even if they don't have a course going yet."

2009 Program Begins Soon

The 2009 IDC Distance Education Incentives Award program will kick off with Maymester Faculty Technology Workshops, scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday, May 27-28, 2009. (Register for the workshops on ITaP's training website.) The program is open to all Purdue University - West Lafayette faculty who have developed or are interested in developing a distance education course in a learning management system (LMS).

For more information about how to participate, the timeline for the 2009 program, and the process to apply, see the IDC Distance Education Incentives Award Program web site.

TLT Conference '09
April 21-22: Changing the Learning Landscape

Follow conference news, updates, and happenings on Twitter at @TLTConference. birds

Catch the backchannel action in TLT conference proceedings live by following the tag #TLT09.

ITaP’s Teaching and Learning Technologies (TLT) unit invites higher education faculty, P–12 teachers, and IT professionals to its annual spring Teaching and Learning with Technology Conference on April 21-22 in Stewart Center on the Purdue West Lafayette campus.

Sarah Robbins

The conference theme is “Changing the Learning Landscape,” inspiring more than 30 presentations about Web 2.0 and other emerging technologies, technology-mediated feedback, gaming and immersive environments, mobile devices as a learning platform and student success and assessment.

Edward Gehringer

The conference keynote speaker, Sarah Robbins, is a researcher, writer, and speaker, who studies and reports on Second Life and virtual worlds. Featured speaker Edward Gehringer researches student-generated content and collaborative learning environments. He is also a software developer and is considered an expert in the field of ethics in computing.

Last year's INSITE event: standing room only.

On Tuesday night, 6-9pm in STEW 218, Prof. Tim Newby’s education majors from EDCI 270 will demonstrate their findings about how P–12 teachers may employ emerging technologies for instruction in today’s classrooms. EDCI students collaborated with other students from Singapore, Taiwan, China and Australia to create the projects on display. They will present their applications and demonstrate how to use them in classrooms. The showcase is sponsored by the International Network of Students Investigating Technologies for Education (INSITE).

TLT offers this conference free of charge and encourages preregistration.

5 Things to Know About... The Digital Cinema Contest The Digital Cinema Contest (DCC) is an exciting annual event for Purdue students to develop and produce video or animations. Entries are judged on all elements of development and production, including narrative and technical components and integration of information resources. The Seventh Annual DCC Award Ceremony will take place April 23rd at the Lafayette Theater, 7-9pm, and will screen the films of only the award winners in each category (Narrative, Alternative, Documentary, Animation, and Viewer's Choice), as well as selected film clips of those winning in the "best of" categories. Everyone is welcome, and concessions will be available.
Friends and family of film directors, producers and actors will help fill the theater during the screenings at the Award Ceremony. All enjoy seeing their creations on the big screen.
Please note that the DCC films have not been screened or rated and may contain language or situations that might not be suitable for all audiences.
Mak Hossain, 2006 DCC award winner for his documentary, Three Beauties, went on to win a Student Academy Award Bronze Medal with his film. He is now attending NYU for Film Production (directing).
All 2009 DCC film submissions are also available for screening on youtube at http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=CAD31D1234755F9F
Eight of this year's DCC entries were created in Prof. Jason Doty’s Film Video Production class. The class compresses the basics of film school into one semester, taking students through the process of pre-production (writing), production (filming), and post-production (editing). Students create their own original films by semester's end.

The Hustler & The Blind Man, written and directed by Daniel Skubal, is one of this year's DCC submissions.

For more information, contact IDC at tlt-consulting@purdue.edu

(On the web: http://www.itap.purdue.edu/tlt/idc/tips/current.cfm)