Both students and faculty have access to their own Google calendars. By creating an advising calendar using a Google calendar, when students sign up for an appointment, it will automatically post on their personal calendars. Additionally, you can link the calendar within your Blackboard site for easy access. Let me show you how. Continue reading
Blackboard
Horizontal Rules to Break Content
When we talk about good Web layout, and student usability of courses, one of the main factors is the readability of the textual content that they are expected to learn and/or interact with. Any number of factors can hinder this usability – which include, but are certainly not limited to, images that, rather than enhancing the learning, become distractions with movement or irrelevance to the topic at hand; difficult to read fonts. Likewise, serif-style fonts (i.e. Times New Roman) are generally more difficult to read on a computer screen than their sans-serif (Arial, Tahoma, Calibri) cousins, as well as too much text filling up the field of vision.
Have You Tried a Little Merlot?
Have you tried a little MERLOT? No, not the wine, but the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching. MERLOT provides a Free and open online community of resources designed primarily for faculty, staff, and students of higher education from around the world to share their learning materials and pedagogy. MERLOT is a leading edge, user-centered, collection of peer reviewed higher education, online learning materials, cataloged by registered members and a set of faculty development support services.
Getting Connected at JCC!
Did you know that you have a JCC Gmail account? Yes, it is JCC’s best kept secret. Every Administrative user, Faculty, Adjunct Faculty, Staff member and Student has this email account for life (or at least as long as Gmail is viable).
We are piloting a new program in Blackboard called NetTutor
Online instruction is an important component to JCC instruction capability. We are working hard to continuously improve our online instruction. JCC has two programs that have been accepted as Open SUNY+ courses. These courses must meet a rigorous set of criteria.
In the fall, JCC will complete the second phase of an OPEN SUNY institution review focusing on online instruction. The Online Learning Consortium Scorecard will be used to assess our program. One of the criteria falls under student support and addresses tutoring. The scorecard recommends tutoring available for online students. To help provide this capability, we are piloting the online tutoring program NetTutor recommended by Open SUNY in addition to our JCC tutoring team. Continue reading