Category: General
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Bill Gates on giving Instructors Real Feedback
In this TED Talk Microsoft founder Bill Gates proposes a method for getting teachers real feedback on their practice. A recent initiative from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the Measures Of Effective Teaching Project which aims to close the gap between institutional expectations for effective teaching and what is actually happening within classrooms. The initiative seeks to identify…
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D2L Email: Tracking Recipient Activity
Email: Tracking Recipient Activity To enable your D2L Email to track when recipients open your email messages, follow these steps: From inside your D2L Email, select Settings. Select the first checkbox for Track activity for messages sent to internal email addresses. Choose Save. Go to your Email Message List. Select your Sent Mail folder from…
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Desire2Learn Learning Sessions
This March our Centre began running Desire2Learn Learning Sessions, welcoming 31 instructors from various faculties to 25 different sessions throughout the month. The instructors averaged 2 sessions each! If you didn’t get a chance to attend any sessions, we are offering eleven different 50 minute sessions at many times and days in April, May…
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Learning, Innovation and Teaching Enhancement Grants Awarded
In January 2013 The Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning along with the support of the Vice President Academic and Provost offered a limited number of grants to VIUFA and BCGEU instructors. The purpose of the grant was to allow instructors the opportunity to purchase a teaching or learning resource to support the teaching…
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Rapid Electronic Essay Grading with Adobe Acrobat Pro
‘Marking’ can be one of the most time-consuming of a university teacher’s responsibilities – and one of the least productive. Do students actually learn from your comments? Or do they go right to the grade and ignore the remarks? Do they reflect on end-comments and revise? Or have they heard it all before? (You need…
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Flipping PDFs!
I am always online, both at work and at home. Admittedly, I spend way too much time online some days, but while there, I research and learn quite a bit in my area of interest – web development and related technologies/tools. This week I reviewed a free and rather impressive tool called FlipSnack (http://www.flipsnack.com). This…
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Is Gaming Responsible for Student Disengagement
I’m currently reading a book titled ‘Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter’ by Steven Berlin Johnson. I would recommend reading this book. It is an amazing and thought inspiring read. But that’s not what this post is about. In part of the book, Steven discusses why…
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Adding RSS Feeds to your Desire2Learn Course
An RSS feed is a web feed format used to publish frequently updated works, such as news headlines, blogs, audio and video in a standardized format. RSS feeds allow students to gather information more efficiently as they do not have to visit individual sites or wade through outdated content. Adding an RSS feed to your…
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Easy Importing of Questions into Desire2Learn Quiz Tool
Test-enhanced Learning Increasing Student Success Given recent findings that test-enhanced learning (TEL) improves students’ understanding and retention of material through regular quizzing, (e.g., Lyle & Crawford, 2011; McDaniel, Roediger, & McDermott, 2007; Roediger, Agarwal, McDaniel, & McDermott, 2011) we investigated how TEL-inspired online quizzing tools can be used in the Desire2Learn course management system. The…
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D2L 10.1 – How to access your content tools
When I opened up the freshly upgraded D2L today, I was both excited and nervous. I knew there were some great improvements coming (outlined here by Arwen: https://wordpress.viu.ca/ciel/2012/11/14/d2lv101review/ ), but I also knew some of the changes would affect the look and feel of content areas. I spend a lot of my time in content…
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Why Open Educational Resources Matter
Definition The concept of open education encapsulates a simple but powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that the open web provides an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge.[1] Free Educational Resources Open Educational Resources (OER) are basically freely available and Internet-based, educational content and curriculum which…
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D2L Surveys and Polls
I was recently asked to look into a free tool for polling students (that would show them immediate results) within the D2L environment. D2L currently doesn’t have a poll tool/widget, although it is a requested feature: http://desire4community.com/feature-request-polling-widget-in-desire2learn/ After researching and testing many the free online poll sites, my favorite product for polling is questionpro.com. Here’s…