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Getting started with recorded lectures
With the recent launch of VIUTube on our campus we have seen an increased interest in instructors who want to incorporate video into their blended or online courses. While VIUTube solves the issue of “where to put my video so that my students can access it“, it does not assist or help with the recording of the…
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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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NMC Horizon Report: 2013 Higher Education Edition
The 2013 Horizon Report is now available on the New Media Consortium website. The Horizon Report is a yearly publication which identifies trends and technologies to watch in higher education. It is definitely something I look forward to reviewing each year. From the projects website: The NMC Horizon Project is a decade-long research project designed to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to…
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Personal Message from John Baker, President & CEO of Desire2Learn
We know it has been a tough week for faculty and students working with Desire2Learn at VIU. We thank you all for your patience and perseverance. We’ve just received a personal message from John Baker, President & CEO of Desire2Learn that we wanted to share with the VIU community. Members of the Vancouver Island University…
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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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How to Add Email Addresses to Your Hotmails Safe Senders List
If you are an instructor, the last thing you want is for your students to not receive your emails. Unfortunately, Hotmail recognizes many VIU email addresses as junk and automatically places emails from instructors and student services in the junk folder. Students can prevent emails from their instructor or from VIU services from going to…
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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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Images too large? Don’t have Photoshop? What can you do?
ADDING IMAGES TO D2L When helping faculty with their D2L courses I see a common problem almost daily: uploading images to D2L that are full resolution and too large for the screen. Sure, once uploaded to D2L they can be sized on screen visually, but image size itself stays the same – – so over…