NIU’s Customizations and Building Block for Blackboard Enterprise Surveys and Course Evaluations

Since the open discussion at BbWorld where NIU shared that we’ve been working on some system tweaks as well as a custom building block for providing an alternative reporting format for Bb enterprise surveys and course evaluations, we’ve conducted a very small pilot of the tool this summer and continued efforts on an initial draft of a building block that provides an alternate report format.

For those interested in learning more about our efforts, I recorded this screencast demo of the functionality at this point that I can share with those who would like to see the building block deployed within our dev environment. I tried to avoid as much technical-specifics as possible and rather just show the workflows and functionality tweaks that we’ve envisioned.

A decision still hasn’t been made institutionally whether we will continue to pursue a wider pilot of the tool with additional building block enhancements to be requested, or look at other 3rd party tools.

For follow-up on any additional technical details about the tweaks and building block depicted, please contact Ruperto Herrera (rherrera@niu.edu) and Matt Kacskos (mkacskos1@niu.edu) who have done all the technical development work.

Designing Competency-Based Self-Paced Online Workshops for Introducing Faculty to Online Teaching Technologies

ALN14 Presentation Header

Wed, 10/28/14, 12:00-12:35pm
Southern Hemisphere I

During this session at the 20th Annual Online Learning Consortium International Conference, learn about Northern Illinois University’s innovative faculty development initiative to offer introductory online technology training via self-paced online workshops as a component of comprehensive online faculty certification. An overview of the process identifying technology competencies for online teaching was shared as well as the design, development, and implementation phases of the project, highlighting lessons learned and tips for other institutions interested in pursuing a similar self-paced model for scaling their faculty development efforts. Accompanying slides are available here and links included in slides shared below.

Resource Links

#BbWorld14 Trends in Online Learning

Group Photos

Wed, 7/16/14, 9:15-10:00am
Murano 3301

What’s holding you back from growing your online presence? Based on research with hundreds of your peer institutions, this session will explore how the use of collaboration tools, mobility, and more will be changed by shifts in student demands and the fight to attract and retain students. During this session at BbWorld 2014 on July 16, 2014 led by a panel of academic technologists, learn how leading schools are thinking about online learning in the future and what you should be thinking about as part of your long term strategy. (This is based on a webinar held in April of 2014 that was very popular, archive available at http://www.jasonrhode.com/trends-in-online-learning-april-2014)

Accompanying slides are available here.

#BbWorld14 Notes – Opening Keynote by Joi Ito

Presenter: Joi Ito (@Joi), Director of the MIT Media Lab
Date/Time: Tue, July 15, 2014, 3:45 PM – 5:00 PM
Location: Venetian Ballroom

Description: Using his exceptional practical experience and unmatched bird’s eye view of technology, Joi will provide his perspective on what new technologies are just over the horizon and how that they will affect the way education is delivered and received.

Welcoming comments from Jay Bhatt

Jay Bhatt

This is the biggest physical and virtual attendance at any BbWorld (over 2,500 people in person, over 2,000+ teachers and administrators streaming during K-12 live experience)

Over 200 sessions offered during the conference

Notes from Joi Ito

Joi Ito

“Learning is what you do to yourself, education is what others do to you”

“You can learn without a formal system of education”

When you can communicate at nearly no cost, it opens the door for incredibly communication and collaboration

It costs almost 0 to try something new

Creative Learning is About…

  1. Projects
  2. Peers
  3. Passions
  4. Play

The Principles

The Principles Shared by Ito:

  • Resilience over strength
  • Systems over objects
  • Disobedience over compliance
  • Pull over push
  • Compasses over maps
  • Emergence over authority
  • Risk over safety
  • Practice over theory
  • Learning over education

#BbWorld14 2014 Blackboard Exemplary Course Catalyst Award Poster

As a 2014 Blackboard Catalyst Exemplary Course Award Winner, I’ve prepared this poster presentation to share at BbWorld14 on Tuesday, July 17th from 5:00pm-7:00pm in the Exhibit Hall. Stop by then and/or feel free to tweet me any questions you might have.

2014 Exemplary Course PosterTo enlarge, click poster image above

For more details about my award-winning course, see the 6-minute course tour as well as detailed overview I previously shared. I have also made the entire course available to self-enroll and/or download as OER package, available at http://coursesites.com/s/_ett510ecp.

For more details about Blackboard’s Exemplary Course Program, visit blackboard.com/ecp