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Turning a Syllabus into an Online Course on Brightspace
Apr. 24, 2020—by Stacey M. Johnson, Assistant Director for Educational Technology If you will be teaching online, how do you plan to convert your course plan into a clean, easy-to-follow Brightspace course? The course plan or syllabus is the blueprint of your course, but now you have to construct the virtual structure according to the plans you...
Troubleshooting the Brightspace Quizzes tool or the Respondus Lockdown Browser – Trending Topic (April 2020)
Apr. 23, 2020—If you are using the Quizzes tool in Brightspace to conduct some end-of-semester assessment in your course, the CFT is here to help. And now, thanks to Lead Instructional Technologist Paige Snay with input from the rest of the support team, our ever-growing On-Demand Resources page also features a troubleshooting guide that you can use...
Developing Online Assessments of Student Learning in a Hurry
Mar. 25, 2020—by CFT assistant director, Stacey M. Johnson Faculty, are you thinking about how to develop online assessments of student learning in a hurry? At Vanderbilt most courses meet face-to-face, but with campus closed through the end of the spring 2020 semester, we are all rethinking assessments. The CFT has resources to help. This blog post is...
Video processing slowly? Here’s some help.
Mar. 19, 2020—If the speed of video processing is a problem… Video isn’t always necessary or even the best tool for the job. Lots of other technologies are just plain more accessible to everyone but especially to students on unreliable wifi. Read our blog post about low-bandwidth alternatives to video here. If you are using Kaltura, here...
Low-Bandwidth Teaching Tools on Brightspace
Mar. 17, 2020—by CFT assistant director, Stacey M. Johnson Video-based tools (like Zoom and Virtual Classroom, the two video conferencing tools available in Brightspace, or Kaltura Media, the video creation and storage tool) can be very useful for recreating the classroom experience in an online format. However, some faculty and students might not have access to the consistent internet...
Asynchronous Teaching Tools on Brightspace
Mar. 13, 2020—by CFT assistant director, Stacey M. Johnson With both Zoom and Virtual Classroom available in Brightspace for live video conferencing, many faculty will be moving their face-to-face classes online in a very literal sense, doing similar activities as usual that happen to be conducted video conferencing. However, for some faculty, moving their courses online means...
Accessibility and Remote Teaching
Mar. 12, 2020—by CFT assistant director, Stacey M. Johnson Accessibility in an online environment is essential. All students should be included and valued as our campus transitions to remote teaching through the end of the semester. Some Brightspace tools that will help are: If you will be creating recorded lectures or other video with Kaltura Capture this...
Putting Your Course Online in a Hurry
Mar. 6, 2020—by CFT assistant director, Stacey M. Johnson Faculty, are you thinking about how to put some of your course content online in a hurry? Perhaps to deal with unexpected events? At Vanderbilt most of our courses meet face-to-face, however, if you find that you need to make adjustments in a hurry to best serve students...
How can I make my Brightspace course more accessible?
Oct. 28, 2019—by Stacey M. Johnson, Assistant Director If you are interested in making your Brightspace course more accessible to your students with disabilities, we have a few resources that you might find useful. First, read through the CFT Teaching Guide on Creating Accessible Learning Environments. This will provide great background to the issue of accessibility and...
Make your Brightspace course homepage work for you!
Aug. 7, 2018—When you (or your students) first click on a course from the main landing page in Brightspace, the default first page is a homepage that has the announcements tool and the calendar tool pre-loaded. However, the default is not your only option. In fact, you have quite a bit of control over what your students see...