Qualtrics recently added a series of features that you will see listed as you log into Qualtrics, along with links to instructions and tutorials. To review a few of those features, let’s start with the Mobile Compatibility Checker. This checker allows you to optimize your survey to be viewed and taken on mobile devices. Mobile [...]
Qualtrics Offers New Features for Mobile Compatibility Checker, Multi-Click Heat Maps, Goals Lines for Graphs and More…
Ten Things I’ve Learned Teaching Online
I’ve been teaching online courses for over 6 years now, and every semester it seems to be a new experience. Some semesters go smoothly, and other semesters present new opportunities for me to change my approaches. Regardless of every group of students, there are ten things I have learned that I keep in mind when [...]
Licensing Basics and Permissions
The University Libraries’ 10th Annual Copyright Conference at Ball State University this year was informative. It held a series of workshops covering topics such as copyright, fair use, and Creative Commons license for Open Educational Resources (OER). More details for Creative Commons are available in my colleague Akesha Horton’s blog “Creative Commons and Copyright”. This blog is [...]
Using iZoom and NVDA in the ITaP Labs
In most cases Purdue’s Assistive Technology Center is able to provide assistive technology to students who use the ITaP labs at Purdue. For this article I would like to focus on software for screenreading and screen enlargement. JAWS is the screenreader that is available in the ITaP labs. JAWS is installed in the Assistive Technology [...]
Installing the Focus Braille Display to work with Screenreaders other than JAWS
Purdue has purchased a couple of Braille displays for use by students, faculty, and staff. In most cases the Focus Braille displays have been set up to work with JAWS screenreader. There are occasions, however, when it would be helpful for the user to use a different screenreader. The challenge is to make sure the [...]
Strategy for Making PowerPoint-Based Multimedia Presentations Accessible
There are a variety of methods for recording a PowerPoint presentation along with a voice over to create a multimedia presentation that can be put on the internet. Most of these methods create a movie of the presentation. There are a few issues for people who have disabilities that can occur with these types of [...]
PowerPoint vs. Prezi
When I think about using Microsoft’s PowerPoint program for creating a presentation it brings to mind the red Chevette I had as an undergraduate student. It would get me where I wanted to go but the floor boards let water in when it rained and it might stall a few times along the way. It [...]
Creative Commons and Copyright
Last month I was able to participate in the University Libraries’ 10th Annual Copyright Conference at Ball State University. This conference was extremely informative and covered a bevy of topics that educators need to know about digital media and copyright law. I am currently exploring Open Educational Resources (OER). Since OER documents usually come with a [...]
Evaluating Your Students- Blackboard Learn and its Underused Unique Feature-Part 2
We are at the end of the spring semester, which means Summer courses will begin soon and planning for the Fall semester is already underway. Now is a great time to consider how to use student activity reports in addressing participation issues or finding out what content/tools in your course(s) are getting attention and which [...]
Analytics and Utilitarianism: The Future of Big Data
In an age of “big data” – Excel spreadsheets with a million lines of code, SPSS and SAS files computing data far beyond the reaches of the human mind, and super-computers reaching distantly into our cosmological past and future(s) – is there such thing as a moral compass? Do our technological capabilities progress at a [...]

