FACIT Notes 12/16/2008
Introductions and announcements
Members present: Mark Goodacre (Religion), Sheila Dillon (Art, Art History and Visual Studies), Dick MacPhail (Chemistry), Marcy Uyenoyama (Biology), Steve Mitroff (Psychology and Neuroscience), Shai Ginsburg (Asian and Middle Eastern Studies), Michael Morton (Germanic Languages and Literature)
CIT and A&SIST staff present: Amy Campbell, Andrea Novicki, Randy Riddle, Hannah Arps
1. Feedback on communications plans related to the Bb 8 upgrade (Andrea)
- Faculty don't want too many emails, maybe 3:
- just as a warning, before classes start
- just as they begin using the new Bb upgrade
- just before midterms, as that's when the new gradebook features will be important.
- suggested putting in an announcement, but make sure it looks different from the current announcement
- wanted a short online video to help them
- also suggested a notice within Blackboard (not possible, apparently)
- pointed out DUSs had a role in SISS upgrade, would be natural for role in Bb, so they should know how things work
2. Show and tell by FACIT members
This portion was a time for open sharing by FACIT members of things that work for them in their teaching, based on prior feedback that members found this type of conversation helpful. Some notes about the discussions are below:
Sheila asked about the grading scale in Blackboard, and how to set that (other members don't use that feature and were interested to learn about it). There was also some conversation about the STORM grade upload to Blackboard, and difficulties using that (Amy learned later that often faculty difficulties result from modifying the file Bb outputs, before loading it into STORM).
Some members asked if we could create short video tutorials of common features. Short discussion followed about what those might be, since there are too many features to treat them all with videos. Mentioned also that there are many other schools, and Blackboard, Inc. as well, which create these types of tutorials, and CIT may has FACIT to review some of these to see if they are clear enough for use here at Duke.
Some questions about two of the new Bb 8 features mentioned on our handout: Bb Scholar bookmarking tool, and the Facebook integration with Bb. Unclear what these would be, or how they would be useful. Amy tried to explain the bookmarking tool (a way to maintain online collections of bookmarks accessible from Bb sites) and the Facebook integration (where groups in Facebook could be built of those in a class together....although the description of the latter was less certain).
Currently FACIT members mostly don't use bookmarking tools like delicious or Scholar, and weren't sure if they would make things easier or not. Mark mentions that he does give students direct links to articles to read (he used to have them look them up themselves, but lately feels that takes time away from students focusing on content, especially because there were always some students who weren't able to find the correct articles).
Returning to the grading scale question, Dick and Mark mention consternation that there is no grading or evaluation rubric/criteria provided by Duke or their departments. Sheila also found this difficult. There should be some grading criteria or rubic, student outcomes and learning objectives.
As a teaching tip, Steve mentions that he requires pre-posting of responses to readings; Shai also does this. When using this method, students come to class ready to discuss (Steve literally said that sometimes they are already discussing with each other before he gets there).
Mark describes again how he uses Pidgin to allow students to IM him without having to allow them access to him when he isn't available to students but wants to be online. He puts the students into a "group" in Pidgin, and can set his availability for that group separately from his general availability.
Dick asks about how long others keep their Bb sites open after the course ends. Responses generally seemed to be that other members turn off their sites just before the next term, or up to a few weeks into the next term.
