Instructional Design Blog
Technology posts
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Ideas for Helping Students with Technology Limitations
One of the toughest parts of transitioning to remote instruction is trying to help students maintain access to all of your course content and assessments. With most students back home right now, many don’t have reliable Internet access. Or m...
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Strategies to Deter Online Cheating on Exams
Under normal circumstances, if a faculty member told me they were concerned about cheating during an online exam, the first thing I would do is mention two tools available to us: Respondus Lockdown Browser and Respondus Monitor. But these are ...
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Blackboard Test Basics
Now that everyone has a few weeks of online instruction under their belt, it might be time to post an online quiz or test. If you’ve never given an online quiz or test, it may seem a little daunting. And trust me, there really are tons of se...
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How to Add Users in Blackboard
Sometimes it may be helpful to grant access to your Blackboard courses to users who aren’t enrolled. A few examples include student employees who are grading assessments and colleagues who want to observe your class. The great thing is t...
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Shortcuts When Updating From a Template
Preparing a Blackboard course for a new semester can be a monstrous undertaking, so reusing content from a previous semester or a course template can save a lot of time. The only trouble is, you may need to make several updates before the cour...
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Alternate Uses for Blackboard Tests
I think we’re all aware of the capability to create and deploy tests in Blackboard, but have you ever thought about using the test builder for items that aren’t tests? Here are a few ideas you may want to incorporate into your own courses. ...
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Evaluating Publisher Content for Accessibility
As an institution of higher education, we are required by law to ensure that our course content is accessible to all of our students. This includes everything from the textbooks and publisher tools to handouts and exams. Unfortunately, publish...
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Use Qwickly to Post Content Across Multiple Courses [Video]
Do you find yourself spending time duplicating emails and announcements to send to several of your courses? I have a solution for you. We’ve added a tool called Qwickly in Blackboard that allows you to send emails and post announcements acro...
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Consider Adding a Calendar Tool
A few years back, I used to have several student workers who reported to me, and without fail, at the beginning of each semester, they would tell me with this great sense of accomplishment that they had entered all their major deadlines and exams ...
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Quick Tips Follow Up for Accessible CV and Syllabus [Video]
To follow up on all the great work this spring from faculty in our college, I put together this short video presentation with a few quick tips that are especially relevant to CV and syllabuses. There are so many things to remember regarding ta...
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Answers About Blackboard at ASU
As you are gearing up for the fall semester, it may be helpful to you to understand a little about how we use Blackboard at Angelo State. I’m not talking about a how-to or tutorial for anything, but just a little info about how Blackboard is str...
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Use a Course Prep Checklist
Sometimes course copy in Blackboard can be a lifesaver. If you or a colleague have taught a course before, copying over content from a previous semester gives you a great foundation to start from. But the tricky thing can be remembering all th...
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Preparing Lectures with Doceri [Videos]
When Dr. Saravanan Ramasamy, assistant professor in the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department, invited me to observe one of his organic chemistry lectures, I was interested in seeing his classroom technology in action. What I observed was so m...
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Understanding How Screen Readers Work [Video]
If you’ve been reading through the Accessible PDF series, you might be feeling a little exasperated with some of the extra steps required to create a PDF. To keep you from throwing up your hands and saying “Really, Jayna? Isn’t this a bit mu...
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Creating an Accessible Syllabus and CV, Part 2 [Video]
All right, so if you’ve made it this far, you should have a Word document that has been prepped for PDF conversion. I will briefly outline a few tips for exporting your document, but then we’ll go over how to interpret your accessibility repor...
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Creating an Accessible Syllabus and CV, Part 1 [Video]
Think of all the bazillions of different things you can do in a Word document. The options are limitless. But because we have that freedom, we don’t have an option for easily converting all documents to accessible formats. It’s important t...
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Using Top Hat For Student Engagement [Video]
A growing number of faculty in our college have adopted a product called Top Hat for use in the classroom. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Top Hat, the product allows students to use their cell phones as classroom clickers to answe...
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3 Visual Content Do’s and Don’ts
There’s no question that planning a new course, or revising an existing course, takes a lot of time and energy. But as you are identifying instructional strategies and determining course content, have you considered the role that good visuals pl...
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Using Blackboard Collaborate in Face-to-Face Classes
I know what you’re thinking — you teach face-to-face courses and maybe use Blackboard to supplement what you’re doing in class, so how could you have a use for Collaborate, right? In case you aren’t familiar with Blackboard Collaborat...
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Formatting Content Items in Blackboard [Video]
With new digital accessibility laws taking effect in a few months, it’s a great time to start talking about a few quick changes we can make to help improve our course content. One of our challenges with Blackboard is that we actually have to...
