Welcome to a new year!

Well between the earthquake and Tropical Storm Irene, our 2011-2012 year is already memorable!

The ID team has been hard at work this summer and we'd like to update you on some of the changes made to instructional technologies. Of course the biggest change is the completion of the migration to Bridges/Sakai as of June 30. All our summer courses used Bridges and the team offered 65 workshops from June through August, both virtually and on-campus, on a wide range of topics. In August we upgraded our version of Bridges/Sakai to 2.8 in order to improve the system as well as to add some new tools. One new tool that we know will be popular is the Sign-Up tool that will allow students to sign up for their own groups, field trips, office hours etc.

The ID team developed a robust Faculty Resources site within Bridges (viewable under the My Sites tab) that contains a wealth of information and tutorials about our instructional technologies. Check out the narrated videos for many of the Bridges tools under the Lessons link within the Faculty Resources site. We also developed a Student Resources site for students new to Bridges and posted instructions on how they can join this site on our gateway page. Both these internal resource sites supplement our external Instructional Design tutorial website at: http://departments.rwu.edu/id/instruction/resources.shtml. If there is something that you don't see that you'd like added to either of these sites please don't hesitate to send us an e-mail at id@rwu.edu and we'll do our best to create it.

We also upgraded our Panopto Focus Lecture Capture tool to version 4.0 in order to increase the options for editing videos. Having a site license for this easy-to-use video creation tool makes it an attractive addition for both faculty and students to develop multi-media presentations.

Elluminate Live! web conferencing continues to be the tool of choice for our distance faculty to offer synchronous class sessions with their students, as well as an option for offering virtual office hours, tutorial sessions and group brainstorming. Both faculty and students can create their own Bridges project sites and utilize Elluminate for group work and research collaboration, even with non-RWU colleagues. You can even bring in a virtual guest speaker to any classroom or Bridges site. This is a great cost-efficient way to enrich your classes without travel and hotel fees.

Turnitin anti-plagiarism tool plugs right into a Bridges assignment. This means that as students submit their assignments their files are automatically forwarded to Turnitin and an originality report is sent back to Bridges and stored with the student submissions. This can be a great educational resource in deepening students' understanding of what constitutes plagiarism as well as the rules for citing sources.

A new tool that we added last year was a site license for the Respondus quiz creator. This software will convert a Blackboard quiz bank or a publisher quiz bank into Bridges format and upload quizzes and exams directly into your course(s). You can also download this software onto your own computer and create your exams on your hard drive and then upload them to your course. This is a great solution if you find that your Internet connection is slow.

The fall schedule for training on all of these tools will be posted this week. We hope that one or more of these tools will help enrich your classes or advance some of your learning goals for your students.

It sure is an exciting time to be in higher education!

Creating Electronic Assessments in a Snap!

Many faculty have discovered that the electronic exam tool in a system like Bridges has a variety of benefits. To list a few:

• An electronic quiz can be used as a review tool by your students. You can set up a pool of review questions and then create a quiz that will draw a random set of questions from this pool each time a student accesses it. For example, a pool of questions could contain 30 questions and the quiz would draw out a random 10 questions. This means that every student gets a different quiz. In addition, you can set a quiz so that students can take it multiple times so students can go through it repeatedly to test their grasp of the content. You can even include feedback so that students understand why they got something wrong or right (no more multiple guess!) This strategy really helps the students focus their study on areas that are the weakest.
  
  
• If you notice that your students are coming to class ill-prepared, you can require them to take an electronic quiz before they come to class. You can set it so that the quiz becomes unavailable once class starts so that any student who has not taken it will get a zero (can be weighted as part of their participation grade if you'd like). This strategy assures that most of your students will at least skim through their reading before class.
  
  
• If you ordinarily give your students a quiz during class time, electronic quizzes are a great way to move this testing outside of class. This frees you up to dedicate the time with your students to more active learning activities.
  
  
• Pop quiz - or if you don't mind taking a few minutes out of class time, you can administer a pop quiz that will give you instant feedback on where your students are having difficulty. This strategy presupposes that all students have a laptop or other mobile device to access an online quiz.
  
  
• No more grading! If you normally use multiple choice exams, electronic quizzes or tests are a wonderful time saver in that Bridges will automatically grade the exam, produce the grade within minutes for the students (if you release the grades that way) and also record the grade in the online grade book. Students really appreciate this instant feedback.
  
  
• Continue to build question pools. Utilizing publisher test banks or your own questions, you can continue to add to your question pools from semester to semester. You can even ask students to submit questions for the pool or trade questions with your colleagues.
  
  
• Create a survey by using the same quiz template but without points. The survey will be anonymous but will aggregate all the answers so you can read through them. This is a great way to do course evaluations or to elicit opinions or preferences from your students.

So, you're probably thinking "Sure, but I bet this is a ton of work!" Well, it can be - however we purchased a site license this year for a product called Respondus that allows you to feed in quiz questions from a Word document, a publisher's testing program, or from another system like Blackboard, and automatically reformat them and upload them into your Bridges course. It can literally take minutes. How perfect is that! I think it may even be better than a scantron :)

If you are interested in installing your own copy of Respondus on your home or office computer, please send an e-mail to id@rwu.edu and request the download and passkey information. There will also be a tutorial session on using Respondus on Wednesday, October 20 from 1 - 2 p.m. For more info and to sign up, please see our October Workshop Schedule at: http://departments.rwu.edu/id/instruction/rwu_bridges_workshop_10_10.htm

Welcome back to Fall 2010!

Welcome to a new academic year. Why does the summer seem so long in May and so short in August?? I guess it's one of those age-old mysteries.

The Instructional Design team has had a busy summer with a lot of new things to share. First and foremost we are working with our talented IT colleagues to bring our Bridges course management system up for all courses for Fall 2010 powered by Sakai. Any faculty member who would like to use this new system with their classes is welcome to try it out. There are many wonderful features that will be sure to please everyone. Many faculty have already started exploring with an impressive number achieving Sakai certification and others attending the full-day virtual Summer Institute webinar held on August 20. The ID team is also offering instructor-led sessions, both virtual via Elluminate and on campus, during the month of August. It's not too late to sign up - check our registration info and topics at: http://www.timetosignup.com/rwusignup/signupsheet/1701 More on this to come...

Forty-six faculty and deans participated in the E-Portfolio Institute this summer that was generously funded by Provost Laura deAbruna. This four-day intensive workshop was offered in three separate series with two in June and one in August. Faculty explored the use of e-portfolios for learning, assessment and professional development. Our Bridges system offers an integrated e-portfolio option that will be a great benefit for faculty who opt to use it. One of the highlights of the Institute was the creation of a professional e-portfolio for each participant that included a digital story of each person's professional journey. What a wealth of talented and experienced faculty we have! Our hope is to have a website up soon that will feature some of these professional faculty e-portfolios so you all get to see them as well.

Upgrades are happening during the month of August to both our Panopto CourseCast lecture capture system as well as our Elluminate web conferencing system and we're also bringing back the Turnitin Anti-Plagiarism software that will be accessible to both Blackboard and Bridges users. Another new edition to our instructional toolbox is Respondus. This application does a great job of creating electronic quizzes that can be used in either Blackboard or Bridges. It's easy to learn and is a huge timesaver for faculty. We'll be offering some workshops on these and other topics during the Fall semester. Stay tuned....

I'd also like to put in a word for some of the work our Learning Commons partners have been doing over the summer. You all were sent a notice in late Spring about our new video collection. Veronica Maher can fill in anyone who missed the announcement about a substantial digital video collection that is now available to faculty or you can view the nifty video that Barbara Kenney produced at: http://www.youtube.com/user/BJKenney1. Also, our library now offers a texting option to connect to our library staff. How cool is that! To find out more about this option for our community go to http://library.rwu.edu/mobile/ Thanks to Sue McMullen for all her hard work on this new benefit. In addition our Center for Academic Development has brought two new people on board to replace retired administrative assistants. Wendy McDonough and Patsie Almonte will be a great support for the Center (although Wendy's help will be missed in the Library). Also the Center will feature a new tutor reporting application called TutorTrak that will automate tutor scheduling and tracking. Thanks to all the hard work by Karen Bilotti along with our IT colleagues in getting this set up.

So... lots to hear about. Looking forward to seeing all our faculty at the upcoming Fall Faculty Conference on August 31 and hearing all your stories about what you did for your summer vacation :)

RWU Team Competition

Congratulations to the SEECM and SAAHP Student Competition for placing in all three categories!

Design Build - 1st Place
Heavy Highway - 1st Place
Commercial Build - 3rd Place

Great job by all of the students!

Intel Reader Marketed for Accessibility

In a posting located on Intel's website:

Printed text into audio: quickly and easily

There has never been a mobile device quite like the Intel® Reader. Such convenient access to the printed word can be life changing for people with vision or reading-related disabilities, blindness, or low vision. The level of success and freedom they stand to gain with the Intel Reader is unprecedented.

Portable and unobtrusive, the Intel Reader takes pictures of printed material. It then converts it to digital form and allows magnification and/or audio playback. The reliable Intel® technology combines a high-resolution camera with an Intel® Atom™ processor. Which means conversion is fast, and the Intel Reader can hold large amounts of text.

With the Intel Reader, you have convenient and flexible access to a variety of printed content. Being able to read for yourself can increase your freedom, enjoyment, and confidence, and it can help you accomplish more at school or work.

Capturing and playing back text with the Intel Reader is as easy as point, shoot, listen. You just hold it over the printed text, push the Capture button to take a picture of the page, and the Reader will play it back to you on the spot. (You can listen to it through the earphones if you want more privacy.)

You can also store content on your Intel Reader and listen to it when it's most convenient for you. If you want to capture a chapter, an article, or a book, the Intel® Portable Capture Station makes it easier to shoot large amounts of text. The Intel Reader also plays most audio content including MP3, DAISY* digital talking books, and even text that you transfer from a computer.

Instant Formative Assessment (and fun!)

One new technology that is being used at Roger Williams University to instantly assess student understanding of a topic and to hold attention is the student response system (also known as clicker technology or audience response systems). Similar to the polling system used on TV game shows, the clickers allow faculty to put up a question periodically throughout their class session and have students use their clickers to choose an answer (see a short video from a vendor on how these work and hear some ideas for using them to engage students at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1rtsRD465A).

The challenge to this technology is that it requires either the University or the student to purchase individual clickers for each student, with the University, department or instructor also purchasing a receiver and clicker software. The clickers cost anywhere from $26 - $40 per clicker and the receivers typically cost around $200. The cost of the software is variable depending on whether it is open source or proprietary. Once the hardware and software has been purchased, there is also the issue of battery replacements, lost or forgotten clickers and software upgrades for a variety of vendors on our classroom images. Although this is very useful technology, it has been cumbersome to manage.

Now enter Poll Everywhere - a next generation, web-based virtual clicker that can utilize any mobile technology to participate - and all at the same time! To use Poll Everywhere, faculty would type in a question on the Poll Everywhere website and their students could then record their answers by texting with their cell phone, sending a tweet via their Twitter account, or vote on the website using a laptop, Netbook or Smartphone. It doesn't matter how responses are sent, Poll Everywhere will aggregate all the data and produce a report instantly to indicate responses. Faculty are also not limited to multiple choice answers - students can type in sentences as a response (or numbers if solving a math or chemistry problem). With this technology, you'll get instant feedback on whether the students are understanding the topic or whether you have to revisit it. You can also gather opinions, conduct quick pretests and posttests and even take attendance in a large lecture. Polling is a great way to start a class by immediately engaging the students in the topic of the day.

The good news is that Poll Everywhere has a free account that you can register for that will accept up to 30 responses at a time. No software to load, no hardware to manage, nothing to buy - just create a web account and start your first poll. Play a demonstration of their product on their website at: http://www.polleverywhere.com/

Want to talk to someone who has used this strategy at Roger Williams? Contact Linda Beith at lbeith@rwu.edu or via phone at 401-254-3134. Enjoy!

Getting to the Application Layer

One of the challenges that we all face is how to get through all the foundation knowledge with our students that needs to be covered but still allow time to get to higher level learning activities where students have to apply what they learn. Doesn't it always seem that there is never enough classroom time to fit everything in?

Well, one way I've discovered to free up time in class is to offload some of the knowledge level activity to outside of class. So I utilize tools like Panopto CourseCast lecture capture that lets me record narrated PowerPoint presentations that I can post as videos in Blackboard. These videos supplement the reading that students are supposed to be doing before coming to class and help provide that all-important knowledge level on specific topics. What that has now allowed me to do is to craft interactive activities during classtime where students have to practice what they have learned. It's higher level learning for them and much more fun for me!

Panopto CourseCast lecture capture software is site-licensed, which means that all faculty and students can download it to your own computers and use it. Faculty can either capture their lecture from any classroom using a microphone (and camera if you'd like but it's not necessary) or from the comfort of your own home. There are just two buttons to learn - Record and Stop. You can capture your PowerPoint and add narration, or capture anything that you do on your computer. If you are interested in this option please see more info at: http://departments.rwu.edu/id/instruction/panopto_coursecasttext.html

Questions? Just send e-mail to bbtech@rwu.edu.