When to Use?
This article is a resource for faculty that are participating in the First Year Learning Communities program. It provides instructors with a consolidated list of specific approaches and technologies for developing content in their Blackboard Learn Ultra courses.
Procedure
Our eLearning Technologies team includes Instructional Designers, Instructional Technology Project Specialists, Digital Media Developers, System Analysts, and Graduate Assistants dedicated to eLearning at GVSU. You can find your assigned eLearning Technologies liaison on our eLearning Technologies Support by Colleges website or by using the eLearning Liaison Search Tool.
While you're welcome to reach out via email or phone, you can also use our Service Portal to submit a request for a consultation appointment—which will be automatically sent to your assigned eLearning Technologies team member.
The eLearning team will be available to help with Blackboard Learn Ultra, as well as other eLearning Technologies tools. Our training comes in various formats to meet everyone's scheduling needs. Our eLearning Training and Webinar page has a complete list of upcoming professional development opportunities and on-demand session recordings or access the Blackboard Ultra Instructor Orientation course site to review Blackboard’s features at your own pace.
The IT Service portal contains an extensive collection of knowledge base articles where faculty, staff and students can immerse themselves in all types of technology related self-help articles for learning more about Blackboard Ultra tools, capabilities, and best practices.
Microsoft has announced that it will discontinue Flip (formerly Flipgrid) beginning July 1, 2024. Flip has been a popular tool with Grand Valley faculty and students. As an alternative to Flip, the eLearning team supports both Panopto and Padlet for creating assignments that allow students to record, edit and share video content for collaboration and feedback.
Padlet is a versatile and intuitive visual board that can be shared with students and used for posting images, audio, and video content. It can be used as a replacement for Flip discussions or as a stand-alone collaboration tool where students can work on assignments and collect resources.
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Panopto is GVSU’s cloud-based video solution that gives instructors and students the ability to create, manage and deliver high quality video presentations and content directly in their Blackboard courses. Panopto can be used in any assessment (Assignment, Discussion, Form, Journal or Test) where students have access to the “Content Market” tools.
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A journal provides a personal space for students to communicate privately with their instructor. Journals are ideal for individual projects and reflection. Students can post their opinions, ideas, or discuss and analyze course-related materials and content.
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Hypothesis is a powerful social annotation tool that can be used to make student reading visible, active, and social in your Blackboard Ultra course. It provides instructors with the ability to support student success by placing active discussions right on top of their course readings, allowing both instructors and students to add comments and start conversations in the margins of a PDF, GVSU Save eBook, JSTOR article or website.
Whitt Kilburn, Professor of Political Science at GVSU explains how Hypothesis has transformed his student's reading.
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With Google Docs, you can create and edit text documents right in your web browser—no special software is required. Multiple people can also work on a document at the same time, you can see their changes as they make them, and use comments, suggestions, and action items to offer feedback.
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Google Sites is a powerful, yet simple tool for creating websites. With Sites you can share information, collect ideas, collaborate on projects, or develop an ePortfolio.
Example Sites Assignment:
Dr. Julia VanderMolen in the CHP School of Interdisciplinary Health has used Sites as part of an assignment in many of her courses. Students are required to find and evaluate credible and appropriate web resources to support his/her health topic and then develop and create a web presence as an advocacy strategy. The assignment was part of a study that she and Professor Ranelle Brew conducted to evaluate the perceived value of creating a health literacy and health advocacy web-based resource to address core health literacy and advocacy competencies.
Instructors who teach multiple sections of the same course or even different courses may prefer to manage those sections through a single parent course. After merging the courses, a new Blackboard site is created containing the enrollments from the separate sections. The decision to merge depends on the number of common assignments and whether it makes sense to merge different sections so that students can work more easily together.
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Service Portal Request:
Instead of merging course sections, it may be more practical to have each instructor added to the other’s course as a Teaching Assistant. A course’s instructor of record can request to have another instructor added to their course by using the User Addition/Removal Request form and designating one of the following roles/levels of access.
- Instructor - access to all areas of the course, can change privileges, access to grade center, receives emails from students who email “instructors” via the Messages tool. Profile picture shows in left course menu.
- TA - Users with the Teaching Assistant role have access to most of the course. If the course is unavailable to students, teaching assistants may still access the course. Teaching assistants can't remove an instructor from a course.
- Grader - access to the grade center and assessment part of the control panel, cannot edit course content except to make tests available.
- Course Builder - add/modify/delete content from the course site, access to the documents part of the control panel, cannot access grade center, can view Users & Groups, can create Grade Center columns with Batch Create Grade Columns tool.
- Student - no access to the control panel or grade center, access to student roster, and all available tools in the course
Service Portal Request:
If you are planning to pilot your course at a later time but would like to get started on creating its content you can request a template course to immediately begin that work. Templates are simply courses that are requested by faculty that can be used to develop a framework for structuring your course and the elements that will be included.
Service Portal Request: