Digital portfolios can be interactive, meaningful, and engaging assignments in online courses. According to Ecampus Instructional Designer Jonan Donaldson, “Well-designed learning environments organized around published digital portfolios can increase not only academic achievement but also intrinsic motivation, student autonomy, collaborative learning, and digital literacies.”

Read more about digital portfolios in Jonan’s article for Educause, Digital Portfolios in the Age of the Read/Write Web.

 

Knowledge, Skill, Collaborate, Create, Structure, Publish, Reflect

You or your students might encounter a bug when playing Adobe Presenter lectures where the audio track will not produce any sound or “No Audio” will be displayed. Try re-installing flash and playing the lecture again, if that does not prove success then try this workaround:

  1. Open up a youtube video on a new window.
  2. Play the youtube video.
  3. Now reload the Adobe Presenter lecture, audio should now be playing.
  4. You can now close the youtube window.

Chrome is not a supported blackboard browser, you might encounter flash interactives not being displayed correctly for the student using Chrome.

Courses that use audio in assessments should not be using Chrome, as the audio player will not display correctly.

Please recommend Firefox if your course contains any flash.

In building online courses, we try to create three forms of interaction on a regular basis throughout each class:

  • Student-Content, where the interaction is as active as possible for the student;
  • Student-Instructor, where the students have a chance to ask instructors questions, engage in facilitated discussions, and receive feedback from their instructors on assignments;
  • Student-Student, where students have an opportunity to communicate with peers and learn in the framework of a learning community.

Sometimes these interactions are formal and graded, such as graded class discussions, group projects, or multimedia presentations. Other times, though, we want a more informal means of generating these three forms of interaction.

Wallwisher is a free online tool that can be used for this purpose. Wallwisher is a simple website that allows participants to visit and post quick, virtual sticky-notes that include text or links to audio or video content. Wallwisher is easy for instructors to set up and easy for students to use.

Here’s a Sample Wallwisher page we set up for you to try. This page asks students to quickly note which concepts they’ve found most difficult so far during the course of a term. An instructor might use this tool to gather opinions, gauge assumptions, check comprehension, or to help students prepare for an exam.

Looking for ways to make your online class more interactive? Wondering what your students are thinking about a certain topic in your class? Wondering if your students are struggling?

Surveys are helpful tools to help us meet these needs in online classes. Google Docs offers a free survey tool, Google Forms, which you can use in your online class by following a few simple steps:

1. Go to your Google Docs account.

2. Create a Form.

3. Choose a Theme.

4. Write your questions.

5. Share a link to the live form.

6. Collect your responses in one convenient location, your Google Form spreadsheet.

Click the image above to watch a brief video that explains how Google Forms can work in your class.

screenshot of library course guide

Did you know that the OSU Library offers Course Guides? Course Guides are webpages that the librarians can help to create for your class. Then Ecampus can place these webpages in your Blackboard class.

Course Guides are a great way to …

  • Guide research projects
  • Put students in touch with the library and library staff
  • Guide students beyond Google and Wikipedia
  • Focus your students on specific journals or even on specific articles
  • Provide plagiarism prevention information
  • Provide citation formatting information
  • And more …

Visit the library course guide webpage to browse through course guides from courses in almost every discipline. To start setting up a Course Guide for your class, please contact Stefanie Buck (stefanie.buck@oregonstate.edu) or your subject’s librarian.

Are you searching for a way that students could post a presentation to you or your class online? One option might be Zoho Notebook. This online program allows you to easily create content and collaborate with others using a familiar notebook-like interface. Combine text, images, audio, video, or live web-content in one place. Other uses of Zoho Notebook include using it as a location to aggregate research for a project or as a device for you to create and tell a story using a variety of multimedia resources.

Check out this short tutorial for more information about how to get started using Zoho Notebook.

Are you currently using Adobe Presenter to add narration to your PowerPoint presentations for your online classes? Consider going a step further and adding short, interactive quizzes within your lecture. Research shows that students have fewer attention lapses while listening to information when active-learning activities are integrated. Adobe Presenter allows you to easily add a couple of quiz questions at various points in your PowerPoint deck. This forces students to stop and check their understanding of the information — as you’re presenting it.

View this tutorial for instructions on how you can add short quizzes to your next online presentation.
Adobe Presenter – Creating Quizzes

Blackboard has a built-in equation editor that allows you to add scientific and mathematical notation to a discussion board entry, an assignment submission, or an exam answer. The Equation Editor is available anywhere the visual text editor is available to you in Blackboard.

Students who may be new to building equations using this editor may find that it is not entirely intuitive. We’ve developed a short video tutorial and a template-group sheet as a guide. We hope you find these resources useful.

Tutorial – Using the Equation Editor (6 min.)
Equation Editor – Template Groups (PDF)

This tool is great for Instructor to Student interaction either to show a quick demonstration or for office hours use. Students to Student interaction for group collaboration work. Student to Instructor/Students for a project presentation.

Pros

  • Voice/Video communication up to 10 people.
  • Free
  • Most everyone has a google account
  • Screenshare
  • Sketchup
  • Google Docs Integration
  • Use with mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, iOS Devices, Android Phones)
  • Dial in a guest speaker via phone

Cons

  • Google+
  • Install Plugin

 

If students don’t want to use their personal account or share personal information, have them create an alias account under a different name or email address.

Here’s what the Google Hangout interface looks like

Google’s Guide to Hangout.

On Air, this is a new feature that google just added, so not everyone will have it yet. It will allow:

  • Real-time streaming of your google hangout up to 10 people viewable to anyone on the Internet.
  • Allows viewers to interact with the hangout via chat interface.
  • Upon completion the video broadcast will be recorded and stored on youtube for viewing.

So you don’t have On Air on your account, how do you record your Google Hangout session?
5 Free Tools for Recording Google+ Hangouts