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…
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 [...]
New Features in Blackboard Learn Service Pack 11
Purdue will upgrade to Blackboard Learn Service Pack 11 during the 2013 Summer Session. With this upgrade to Service Pack 11 will come several notable changes that faculty will see as they use Learn. While the look and feel of Blackboard will not change dramatically, several new features will be introduced to enhance the use [...]
WAVE: A Free Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool
WAVE is a free tool created by WebAIM to help individuals evaluate, and thus improve, the accessibility of web pages. It is an automated tool, so by itself it cannot tell you if all aspects of your web content are accessible. (Knowledgeable humans are still necessary!) However, WAVE is a powerful tool that makes [...]
Analytics and Utilitarianism: The Renegotiation of the Student-Institution Relationship
As discussed in my previous blog posting, utilitarianism is a useful ethical model to examine academic analytics. Utilitarianism is the theory that ethical decisions ought to be made in terms of what benefits the most number of people. This is especially useful for academics because decisions are often couched between the needs of individual students [...]
Highlights from the EDUCAUSE Midwest Regional Conference 2013
I attended the EDUCAUSE Midwest Regional Conference in Chicago in March of this year. My primary reason for attending was to deliver a presentation with Pat Reid on Gradient, a peer review tool developed by the Informatics team here at Purdue. I also went to learn more about the wonderful projects that our colleagues throughout [...]
Creating a Complete/Incomplete assignment option in Blackboard Learn
Instructors sometimes ask, ”How can I create an assignment in Blackboard Learn that isn’t graded?” It is possible to create a check mark in your Grade Center indicating a task is completed without assigning a grade value. The trick is setting that part up after you have created the assignment. To have an entry that [...]
Analytics and Utilitarianism: Student Success
As discussed in my previous blog posting, utilitarianism is a useful ethical model to examine academic analytics. Utilitarianism is the theory that ethical decisions ought to be made in terms of what benefits the most number of people. This is especially useful for academics because decisions are often couched between the needs of individual students [...]
Evaluating Your Students- Blackboard Learn and its Underused Unique Feature- Part 1
Who viewed this item? What did students look at before test day? Are any of my students utilizing the resources I’ve posted? If you are the type of instructor who is asking these questions – it could be that you teach a large lecture course, maybe an online course with students all over the nation [...]

