Important tasks:
Communicate immediately and regularly
Have course materials loaded into the Learning Management System (LMS)- Blackboard
Provide instructor-focused learning (lectures/videos)
Encourage interaction and engagement
Create assignments, collect them, and grade them
Provide online assessments
In the event of a campus closure, it is very important to communicate to your students right away. Give them information about:
For assistance with general Blackboard questions or help, please email CTEIHELP@rush.edu or call 3-CLAS.
For immediate assistance after normal business hours, you may call 312-563-2527 (3-CLAS) which will direct you to Blackboard’s 24x7x365 support. They will be able to assist with basic support and troubleshooting.
For Zoom’s 24x7x365 support, call 888.799.9666 ext 2 and see: https://support.zoom.us/
Getting started using Blackboard (covers the navigation menu, best practices, creating a module, and adding content). Video (10:40 minutes)
How to upload a file. Video. (< 1min)
How to create an announcement. Video (2.38 minutes)
How to create online discussions. Video. (4.08 minutes)
How to see what students see in your course. Video. (2.23 minutes)
How to send an email within Blackboard. Video. (1.52 minutes)
How add a ‘tool link’ to your course navigation. Video. (3.04 minutes)
If you already have lectures written for courses as Power Point files, those can be used in a pinch for an online version of your class, but are not ideal as stand-alone “lectures” since they’re used for you to lecture in class.
Thus, if you have Power Point presentations, the next best thing is to create a video lecture. You can use Panopto or Screencast-o-matic. Please use previously-recorded Panopto lectures if they already have closed captions available.
Use Screencast-o-matic if you do not have a captioned Panopto video. Please contact CTEI@rush.edu if you need help getting access to either of these tools for lecture recordings.
In an emergency situation, even a written lecture is fine. Just save it as a PDF file.
You would add any one of these to your ‘basic learning unit’ as an item in Blackboard.
How to add a Panopto lecture to a Blackboard learning unit
How to create a screencast with Screencast-o-matic (video)
How to add a Screencast-o-matic video to a Blackboard learning unit (video)
How to turn on & edit closed captioning in Screencast-o-matic (video)
When students move to an online format, learning should not be self-paced or lonely. Find ways to encourage student interaction and engagement with the content you’re presenting them with or the content they are supposed to read. There should be a value (grade) associated with these activities.
Some ideas here are:
Participate with your students in these activities
Discussions overview. Video. (2.35 minutes)
How to create an online discussion. Video. (1.46 minutes)
This section provides an overview of how to create assignments in Blackboard, view submissions, grade, and give feedback. It is not suggested to use email for assignments.
How to create an assignment in Blackboard (video)
How to create a rubric in Blackboard (video)
How to grade using a rubric (video)
Grading assignments (video)
Grade using audio feedback (video)
Create a rubric (video)
Use rubrics to grade your students’ assignments A rubric is a scoring tool used to evaluate graded work. Rubrics help ensure consistent and impartial grading and help students focus on the assignment’s expectations.
Formative vs. Summative
Formative assessment: monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by instructors to improve their teaching and by students to improve their learning. Done DURING the course and typically lower stakes. Designed to support student learning and ensure that content is understood.
Summative assessment: evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional unit by comparing it against some standard or benchmark.
Authentic Assessment:
Authentic Assessment is simply assessment that translates into a meaningful experience for the student and requires APPLICATION of learning to a project in some form. While multiple choice exams are important, they do not always measure a student’s abilities. Sometimes authentic assessments will draw out a student’s understanding more thoroughly because they are based on real world situations. According to Grant Wiggins (1998), an assignment is authentic if it:
Wiggins, Grant. (1998). Ensuring authentic performance. Chapter 2 in Educative Assessment: Designing Assessments to Inform and Improve Student Performance. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp. 21 – 42.
Four Guiding Principles:
Using these questions to guide you, determine what kind of assessment you might wish to use. Assessments should:
You can use many forms of assessment besides tests/quizzes and written papers! Consider using:
How to create a quiz/test. Video (5.32 minutes)
Examsoft and Examity
Some assessments need to be created with more rigor. In these cases, many instructors like to use the following tools:
Note: you will need to be logged into O365 with your Rush email and password to access the content in the link provided.