Show You Care in February
TOPP 2022 Is on the Horizon!
Our award-winning Teaching Online Prep Program (TOPP) will return in 2022 in three modules and will be facilitated by your faculty colleagues who are experienced online teachers:
Tech Basics - March 4-18, 2022 (Spring Break)
Course Planning - May 23 to June 3, 2022
Building an Online Classroom - June 6 to July 1, 2022
If you need to sharpen your basic technology skills or design & build an SLO-aligned and engaging online learning space for your students using Laulima and Web 2.0 tools, please join us for one or more TOPP modules! Be on the lookout for announcements regarding registrations in the coming months.
Excellence in Education Is Back! Save the Date!
The UHCC System campuses are banding together to bring back a systemwide day of professional development for all UHCC faculty, staff, and administrators.
Excellence in Education (previously known as HISSI)
March 4, 2022 (Friday)
8:30am - 12pm
Via Zoom
UHCC System professional development sessions will be held in the morning. Some campuses are planning campus-specific activities for the afternoon. Details forthcoming.
Willing to Help? Contact your campus UHCC Professional Development Consortium representative if you are interested in volunteering to be a Zoom Room Host for the workshop sessions. Hosts are highly encouraged to have their own Zoom Pro license and will be responsible for greeting workshop attendees, taking attendance counts, and recording sessions.
Want to present a workshop? Solicitation for Excellence in Education workshops will be sent out this week. Watch the Bulletin!
Questions? Contact your UHCC PD Consortium representative for more info. For Kapi‘olani CC, that's Leigh (ldooley@hawaii.edu).
Free 4-part Series on Copyright and Fair Use
Join librarians from Hamilton and Richardson Law Library in a 4-part series designed to address copyright and fair use for librarians and faculty in instruction…
Feb 4: Introduction: Copyright for the Instructor, Librarian, and Author
Feb 11: Copyright Exceptions: Fair Use and the Classroom
Feb 18: Fair Use: Maps & Geospatial Materials and Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) of Whole Books Still under Copyright
Feb 25: Fair Use: AV Media, Music, Videos, Streaming Content, Recorded Live Performances, and Works of Visual Art
The Magical Unicorn: Tips to Enchant and Enhance Your Online Class
Looking for more resources to help you be the best online instructor you can be? Check out the University of Hawaii Online Innovation Center’s Resource page. You’ll find tutorials and resources for online teaching created by the amazing team with the UHOIC and instructional designers across the UH system. Included on the site are Laulima tutorials, Google resources, syllabus and course map templates, third party online tools resources and more. If you missed one of their informative workshops and webinars, you will also find recordings and resources there too.
Online Class Coaching FAQs: Alt Text for Images
Our DE Class Coaching efforts have been collegial, collaborative, and constructive thanks to our amazing course coaches and coachees. Everyone involved in the process has also been learning so much by asking hard questions and sharing the answers.
Every month, we plan to highlight two Q&As from our Peer Coaches FAQ archives as we believe that some of the information will be helpful for anyone teaching online. This month’s questions and answers are:
- I thought you shouldn’t write full sentences for the alt text of an image. What are the rules for writing a “sufficiently descriptive alt text that provides an equivalent learning experience?”
Brevity is recommended. After all, the screen reader will have to read every word of the alt text. But providing sufficient descriptions for equivalent experience is even more important. Leigh’s advice: it’s like writing your dossier—you have to both be concise and comprehensive. 🙁
- Let's say there was a detailed graphic about the water cycle, that shows different parts. Should the alt text be multiple sentences explaining the water cycle? Or should it be brief, less than a sentence, with the instructional content elsewhere?
Some images will require more than a phrase or a sentence to describe (e.g. graphs, infographics). In such cases, place the description on the page near the image or in an external document and link to it. Image caption could then be utilized to redirect the reader to the full description.
For Users of Laulima Gradebook Classic
Zoom Upgrades
Just in case you missed it, Zoom gifted us a few little upgrades over the holidays...
Advanced polling provides matching, ranked choice, short answer, and long answer options. You can also set correct answers to have the poll function as a quiz.
Meeting hosts can schedule a survey to be sent when the meeting ends - this can be a Zoom-based survey or a survey from a third-party app, like a Google form.
It’s time to say goodbye to ‘next slide please’ when you co-present with others in Zoom. The screen sharer can now give slide control to multiple co-presenters in Zoom to avoid unnecessary screen-share transitions.
You have a captive audience when your students are in the waiting room a few minutes before the class starts. Why not make the most of that opportunity? You can now add a video in your Waiting Room for your students to watch! You can do a quick review of the previous class, preview what to expect this week, or maybe just welcome them to class. The only catch -- is that your video should be a local file (e.g. MP4) less than 30 MB and your Zoom version needs to be 5.7.3 or higher.
To enable these features, don't forget to log into your UH Zoom account, navigate to settings, and enable them!
Ad-free YouTube, Anyone?
YouTube can be a fantastic source of video content for your classes, but it can come with a few less-than-ideal distractions. We've already talked previously about how to block recommended videos when embedding YouTube videos into your Laulima lessons by adding ?rel=0 at the end of the URL (this is recapped in this video on embedding YouTube into Laulima, starting 1 minute in, if you're interested).
But what if you're showing a YouTube video synchronously during class or sharing the video as a link with your students? You can easily cut out distracting ads with one little character - no apps, downloads, or plug-ins necessary! By adding a hyphen after the “t” in your full YouTube URL, the video will be put into full-screen mode and you can view it sans Ads.
As an example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIJK3dwCWCw
becomes
https://www.yout-ube.com/watch?v=GIJK3dwCWCw
Laulima Advanced Tips: Clean Up Your Space Junk (orphaned lessons pages)
Did you know that when you delete a lessons page from the left-navigation menu in Laulima, it isn’t really gone? Before importing lessons into your new site, check your development or the previous semester’s site by opening any lessons page then clicking “Index of Pages” button at top right of your screen:
What We Are Reading, Listening to, or Watching Now
The Heart of the Learner (blog, WCET Frontier)
Retention rates are the lowest they’ve been…ever. The author suggests 5 practical steps all instructors can follow as they seek to know the hearts of their learners and retain students returning year after year.
Online Education Isn’t Just a Modality — It’s a Movement. (Karen Ray Costa Blog)
Is it possible that online education is more than a modality? And, "what if we became curious about how online education could be even better or could do something new, something special that could fuel a twenty-first century learning experience??
14 Predictions for Higher Education in 2022 (article, Campus Technology)
What will higher education look like in 2022? Will online education become the norm? Can we expect more innovation with digital learning tools? Students, faculty, and IT professionals share their insights and predictions for 2022.
6 critical trends for the future of higher education (article, eCampus News)
For better or for worse, higher ed will never be the same after the COVID-19 pandemic–and experts have identified trends, technologies, and practices that will shape the future of higher education and that will influence teaching and learning across the globe.
Plagiarism Education: Considerations for the Semester Start-up (article, Faculty Focus)
Providing students with plagiarism education, including class discussions on what is and what is not considered plagiarism, may help to combat the plagiarism engagement rate across campuses.
Community College Students Want More Flexibility, Technology in Their Courses (article, Campus Technology)
In an Oct & Nov 2021 national survey, 78% of students were taking online/hybrid classes. 68% said they want the option to take some classes fully online.
