Open Educational Resources (OER)

TED-Ed provides high quality video presentations and
follow-up quizzes and activities that can be customized
by you for your students and then linked to. And, it is free!

Don't reinvent the wheel for your Continuing Education hybrid course!

OERs are digital teaching materials created by other instructors who have kindly shared their work with others. Many of these resources are open for easy editing as well.

There are many collections of OERs. Most of these databases are easily searchable and include an advanced search option to filter by level. A few that we like at ALTEC include TED-Ed, MERLOT, OER Commons, and Khan Academy.

Please leave a comment on this blog post if you know of other good OER options for your subject!

Effective Use of Discussion Forums

"Using the discussion board to build community in online classes": In the online journal EDUCAUSE, William J. Allen of Arkansas State University described his use of the discussion board in his online classes. Dr. Allen begins every semester by informing his students of the participation guidelines for the class, in which he states that students will receive a grade every week for their posts in the discussion forum, "For each discussion topic that I post you will receive three grades, 0-5". He then goes on to outline how he assigns the discussion grade. The three grades are composed of the timeliness of the student post, the substance of the post, and lastly participation. Dr. Allen has found that although the first few weeks of the discussion posts are typically rather "mechanical", as long as he resists the temptation to overly-direct the student discourse, the discussion forum "takes on its own life".  Please visit Dr. Allen's blog post to read more: "Using the discussion board to build community in online classes", March 9, 2006.

I highly recommend that faculty who intend to use the discussion forum in D2L, place a clause in the syllabus about your expectations for student participation in the discussion forum. Also, consider incorporating discussion board posts into the formal class grade.

An Alternative to D2L's Discussion Board:
If you are adventurous and want to try an alternative to D2L's online discussion forum, another option could be Piazza. Let us know what you think!

Embedding Video in D2L

Many of you are using D2L and digital video clips in your classes. Rather than simply linking to videos from your D2L page, consider embedding them into D2L.

In D2L, go to Content > New Topic > Create New File > Insert Stuff

The OIT page also has a tutorial on using the "Insert Stuff" option in D2L.

Contact Courtney if you want us to help walk you through this process!

Students in Need of Technology Resources

Checking Out Technology:
CU students can check out laptops from the Norlin library for 2 hour rental. The policies and more information are available at the UCB Norlin Commons website.

ALTEC is also open and willing to assist your students who are in need of equipment such as digital cameras or camcorders. Our Multimedia Library (Hellems 159) is open M-F and there are attendants on duty to help students access these resources.

Computer Labs:
ALTEC also has two computer labs that are open M-F. If you want to hold a computer class, consider reserving either our Mac classroom (Hellems 145) or our PC classroom (Hellems 152). When it is not being used for classes, the door to our Mac classroom is open for CU students. More information can be found at the ALTEC website.