Distance Education Newsletter

Educators give so much year-round; let's make February, with Valentine's Day at its heart, the month to nurture ourselves for a change. Buy yourself some chocolate! Go watch the sunset at the beach (keep your mask on and stay socially distanced, of course)! Give yourself permission to do something just for fun! Then cultivate your professional growth with a great tech tip, a fun virtual workshop, a stimulating podcast, or fascinating article (see below for some great suggestions).

Laptops, webcams, and headsets are now available in Lama Library for Kapi‘olani CC students to borrow for the entire semester (while supplies last). In order to check out the technology resources, individuals must be current students and have a picture ID. Please let you students know about these invaluable resources!

A student contacted her instructor after being informed by tutor.com that she had reached the limit of her tutoring time and that she needed to pay for any additional service. The faculty then reached out to our Lamakū Learning Center Coordinator, Virginia Yoshida, and found out that “The maximum number of tutor.com minutes provided by our college is 300 per student per semester. If a student runs out of tutor.com minutes, the student is referred to me so I can help to connect them to our Kapi‘olani CC tutoring services, all free, unlimited, and online” (see Virginia’s Spring 2021 Tutoring Support announcement).

If you have used the Kapi‘olani CC Syllabus template and included a link to the Student Support page, it has now been updated to reflect the change and you don’t need to make any changes to your syllabi. If you have students who heavily rely on tutor.com, please let them know that after reaching their limit of 300 minutes, they can contact our Kapi‘olani CC Online Peer Tutoring Service.

Mahalo to Virginia and History faculty Julie Rancilio for passing on this information.

Two desserts, many forks! At lunchtime (12:00 - 1:00 pm) every Friday this semester, please join your Kapi‘olani CC colleagues for a fun lunch-hour chat and tour of online classes. Each Friday, two teachers will give us a tour of one of their classes and share with us their sweetest ideas. These informal Zoom sessions will include time for Q&A and conversation. Watch the bulletin for information about specific tour guides and disciplines, but save these dates!

Fridays, 12:00 - 1:00 pm

• February 5, 12, 19, & 26
• March 12
• April 9, 16, 23, & 30

Zoom link: https://hawaii.zoom.us/j/96315187922

Meeting ID: 963 1518 7922
Passcode: sweet!

Currently, Kapi‘olani CC has a subscription with Go2Knowledge, which offers Kap‘olani CC faculty and staff free access to dozens of Innovative Educators webinars, both live and on demand (pre-recorded). Many of them are quite good! Here's a sampling to pique your interest:

Upcoming live webinars:

• Reduce Cheating in the Online Classroom: Shifting from Punishment to Prevention (Thursday 2/11, 8:00 - 9:00 am HST)

• Avoiding Academic Advisor Burnout: How to Mitigate the Stress and Anxiety Precipitated by the Pandemic (Wednesday 2/17, 8:00 - 9:30 am HST)

• Improving Online Student Success Rates: Using A Holistic Approach To Assess Course Quality (Tuesday 2/9, 8:00 - 9:30 am HST)
  

Recently-added on demand webinars:

• Active Learning in the Online Classroom: Strategies & Teaching Techniques to Foster Student Engagement

• 20 Innovative Strategies & Activities to Engage Students In Synchronous & Asynchronous Remote Learning

• Online Classroom Management: Course Design Strategies to Minimize Problems and Promote Learning
  

And many, many more. Sign up at Kapi‘olani CC's G2K account page and browse through the offerings.

Experiencing Kahoot!-fatigue? We know students love the competition of Kahoot! Quizizz is another learning quiz site that works on any device with a browser or the downloaded app. It’s simple and it is free. According to its site, “Quizizz is a self-paced learning tool that helps every student celebrate their achievements. Teachers incorporate Quizizz into instruction, review, and assessment to support students.” It uses music, memes, and bonuses to engage learners. Instructors can create their quizzes or select from a vast library of quizzes.

Quizzes can be played live, assigned as homework, or independently played or reviewed. Instructors can utilize different options to customize the level of competition, speed, and other factors.

“The only sign [in an online classroom] that something may be wrong is that a student does not submit an assignment that week, or they may have been absent from a discussion post.”1

How can we create more opportunities to be in touch with our students and their academic progress? A brilliant idea was shared by ​Kapi‘olani CC Japanese Language faculty Lisa Kobuke: use the Checklist tool in Laulima Lessons to check in with your students weekly (Lisa calls them Kaomoji Checklists). This screenshot image is an example but the possibilities are endless!

Since the Checklist tool only allows text, check out text symbols or text emoticons if you want to add visuals.

1 Goyak, E. (2021). Our online learners need more empathy and less criticism. Faculty Focus.

Did you know that Zoom offers a Live Transcription feature? This is an automated service which enables speech to text in Zoom Meetings and Zoom Webinars. This tutorial will walk you through enabling and disabling Live Transcription in Zoom.

Also, when you present using Google slides, you can also turn on automatic captions to display the speaker's words in real time. Here's more info. on how to present Google Slides with captions.

The last Laulima upgrade integrated the heightened security of Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), which is great for helping us safeguard our FERPA-protected data, but is also somewhat less convenient. Particularly if you're working from home or even from your own password-protected device (on campus or anywhere else), receiving a push, call, or passcode multiple times a day can be a bit of an unnecessary nuisance. Luckily, this little checkbox can save you a week of running to get your phone every time you want to log in! Just click the "Remember me for 7 days" box for a week of double-check-free logins! (Note: Use this option when logging in on a personal, secure device - this should not be used on public devices.)

Taking screenshots can be extremely helpful to capture what you are seeing on your screen to share with others or for later reference. Did you know that you can make a custom screenshot through the Firefox browser, such as taking a full web page screenshot in a second? Here is a video tutorial (5:23) explaining how it could be done.

• Screencasting tip #1 (hide your bookmarks bar)

The bookmarks bar contains your bookmarks and bookmark folders, which brings easy access to your favorite sites. Did you know that you can hide the bookmarks bar in Google Chrome or Firefox when you screencast a full desktop? Here is how: Press Ctrl+Shift+B (in Windows) or Command+Shift+B (in macOS) to disable your bookmarks bar in Chrome or Firefox to protect your privacy. You can bring it back after your recording is finished by pressing the same keys.

• Screencasting tip #2 (less is more)

Empirical studies (e.g. MIT study) suggest that people's attention drops dramatically after 6 or 7 minutes when watching a video. Thus, breaking a long video down into small chunks or adding one or two call-to-action activities will help keep the viewer's attention and give them a refresher.

• Screencasting tip #3 (make your recording accessible to all users)

As required by Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, closed-captioning/a transcript is needed for multimedia content, such as video or audio. Be sure to provide an equivalent experience to all users. You may consider using YouTube, Augusta ADA Solution, oTranscribe, or Otter.ai for the transcribing work. Supporting tutorials for the first three tools can be found at UH Accessibility (Creating Accessible Media) page.

There are tons of screencasting tips you can refer to if you search in Google. Hope you will find the most useful ones for your context. Happy screencasting.

Heads up if you use the “Record Audio Clip” tool or the new Rubrics tool with Forums!

Fixed in v.19:

Audio files created with Text Editor record button WILL import to another course site (SAK-42800).

• Issue: After Importing a course with audio files that were created using the Text Editor's "Record Audio Clip" tool, audio files won't play for students (but will play for instructors).

• FIX: Audio files created using the Text Editor's "Record Audio Clip" tool, now import correctly into a new Sakai course site.

New Known Issue in v.19:

Excited about the new Rubrics tool in Laulima? Before you start grading forum topics using rubrics, be aware that your students will never see your rubric feedback, unless you do the grading from the Gradebook tool.

ITS recommends this workaround: “Use the rubric in the [new] Gradebook tool and not in Forums. In your topic, do not associate the Gradebook item with a topic and do not choose a rubric. In Gradebook, when creating a topic Gradebook item, choose a rubric for grading discussion posts. Use the topic Gradebook item with a rubric to grade/add comments for your student discussion posts. Both you and your students can see your rubric grades and comments in the Gradebook.” This issue will be fixed in Sakai v.20 and v.21 (SAK-41931).

Update:

File upload size limit has increased from 250 mbytes to 300 mbytes. (If you’ve been using webdav to bypass the file size limit, please be aware that Laulima now imposes the same limit to webdav.)

For more information, contact ITS at help@hawaii.edu or your friendly Instructional Designer.

Have you heard of the UH Zoom Recording Service? You can now record your Zoom meetings on a UH server, then after the meeting retrieve your recording so you can quickly share it with your students. You will not have to worry about downloading an MP4, uploading to Youtube, and all that!

1. Read about the service and request an account.

2. When you click “Record” in Zoom, you will see two options. Select “Record to the cloud.”

3. After the meeting, go to https://kahawai.hawaii.edu/zoom/ and log in. You will see a list of all of your cloud recordings and options to download or copy the URL.

4. Please note that the recordings will be kept in the cloud for the duration of the current semester.

Questions? Contact uh-zoom-support@lists.hawaii.edu.

• Our Online Learners Need More Empathy and Less Criticism (article, Faculty Focus)

“...our course is more than mere content; rather it is a platform on which to model life skills that are woefully lacking in our society: empathy, pity, concern, and grace.”

• What Students Want: A Simple, Navigable LMS Course Design (article, Faculty Focus)

“It is clear that a well-designed and well-managed online course site is vital to student success. But what does that look like? Two key concepts are central: simplicity and navigability. By simple, I mean digital course spaces that prioritize essential information and relegate or even discard non-essential content. By navigable, I mean digital course spaces that utilize a consistent structure that clearly elucidates class activities and student responsibilities.”

• Research Supports Making Video Optional in Zoom-Based Classes (Blog, Duke Learning Innovation Center)

While Zoom has been a critical part of remote/online teaching, many of us have wondered: Should I require students to turn on their video? Duke University decided to look at various emerging research and found "a preponderance of research indicating that requiring video use can create less engagement, not more." Really?! Read the blog to find out more.

• What We Know About Online Education and How it Affects Equity in Hawaii's Schools (research brief, Hawaii Scholars for Education and Social Justice)

“Although people in Hawaii hoped that communities would be safe for schools to reopen fully this fall, and many have been eager to return to in-person classrooms, others are seeing utility in online education, and some people are even using this opportunity to push for an expansion of online instruction.”

• Workload Calculator (web tool)

Check out this cool tool, mentioned in a webinar (20 Emerging Best Practices for Remote Teaching and Learning). It helps you estimate the students' workload for a class (any kind of class, including online).

• Avoiding the Groans, Sighs and Eye Rolls (article, Inside Higher Ed)

This article shares strategies for creating and facilitating effective group work assignments in your classes (including online classes). I wish I'd read this years ago, before learning these lessons the hard way!

• DE Newsletter - January 2021

• DE Newsletter - December 2020

• DE Newsletter - November 2020

• DE Newsletter - October 2020

• DE Newsletter - September 2020

• DE Newsletter - August 2020

• DE Newsletter - July 2020

• DE Newsletter - June 2020

• DE Newsletter - May 2020

• DE Newsletter - April 2020

• DE Newsletter - March 2020

• DE Newsletter - February 2020

• DE Newsletter - January 2020