Category Archives: Distance Education
Creating a Complete/Incomplete assignment option in Blackboard Learn
March 25, 2013
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 [...]
Evaluating Your Students- Blackboard Learn and its Underused Unique Feature- Part 1
March 12, 2013
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 [...]
Tips for Creating Accessible Online Documents
February 18, 2013
Purdue’s Web Accessibility Committee recently published a new resource. It is designed to help faculty and staff author documents that are accessible to people with disabilities. A wide variety of documents created by Purdue faculty and staff are uploaded into Blackboard or web pages. Each uploaded document — whether Microsoft Word, PDF, or another format [...]
Welcome to Purdue nanoHUB-U MOOCs
December 7, 2012
NanoHUB-U courses are massive open online courses (MOOCs) broadly accessible to students in any branch of science or engineering. All courses are so far developed by Purdue University professors for worldwide audiences. Dr. Supriyo Datta, Thomas Duncan Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, offered the inaugural course on fundamentals of Nanoelectronics in January, 2012. [...]
What is a MOOC?
October 26, 2012
If you make your professional home in higher education, you probably have noticed an increasing surge in conversations around MOOCs, or —massive open online courses. The conversations around MOOCs argue that they will transform higher education for both the better and worse (depending upon who you ask). MOOCs offer free or low cost education to the [...]
Review of Blackboard’s Mobile Learn app
October 12, 2012
How can students use the Blackboard Mobile Learn app on their iPad? With the arrival of new technologies there is always the questions posed by higher education, “what could it do for us”? Blackboard Inc, the makers of the course management software we use at Purdue, has created a mobile application that allows students to [...]
Fall 2012 ITaP Instructor Workshops available for registration!
August 10, 2012
Starting August 14th, ITaP Academic Technologies will be offering hands-on workshops to assist instructors with the many tools in the new course management system, Blackboard Learn. The Learn workshops include the new video integration tool, Kaltura, which allows easy use of videos within Blackboard courses. In addition, workshops on the i>clicker student response system, Qualtrics [...]
To rip or not to rip…
May 29, 2012
The exceptions to the U.S. copyright law (Fair Use and the TEACH Act) allow instructors to use video clips in online classes similarly to how they might in face-to-face classes. You might assume, then, that it is legal to take video clips from DVD’s and put them online for a class. But if I were [...]
What’s New in Blackboard Learn
March 30, 2012
With Purdue’s change from Blackboard Vista to Blackboard Learn underway, I thought it would be helpful to highlight some of most noticable changes between the two systems, and point out some things the new system lets users do that the old system could not. No Build, Teach, or Student Tabs There are no Build, Teach, [...]
Blackboard Learn Provides Enhanced Group Functions
March 15, 2012
Group functions within Blackboard Learn now allow for collaboration between students using blogs, file exchange, discussion board, journals, tasks, and Wikis. Students within a group can participate in real-time lessons and problem solving exercises. Groups may be set up manually, randomly automatic and by self-enrollment. Any number of groups or students to a group may [...]