Tag Archives: tips

Updating Your Syllabus in myLesley

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In this episode, Agent L helps faculty easily update their syllabus AND all the links to it their myLesley course.

BenBen Friday: Hi, Agent L. No time to talk now. We will have to grab coffee some other time. Must run.

Agent L: Ben, what happened? Why is everyone so busy?

Ben: A new semester started and faculty have uploaded their updated syllabi to their myLesley courses.

Agent L: That’s great! They are sharing their syllabi digitally instead of on paper. … Isn’t it…?

Ben: Yes, but they’ve linked to the syllabus from multiple places in their online course site. All of those links need to be updated with the new file. It’s a lot of work to go through your course to find and update them all.

Agent L: Ummmm…. Ben…. there’s a much easier way to do this.

Ben: What? How?

Agent L: We can overwrite the old syllabus file with the new one in Course Files. All the links to that file will be updated to the new file in one step. Here, let me show you.

Log into the course you need to update. Then go to the Course Management area in the left-hand menu.

CourseFiles  agent L

Click on Content Collection and then the Course ID for your course. It’s elis_training_2014 for this course. This will open up the Course Files area of your course. It contains every file (documents, images, videos) uploaded to your course.

Locate the syllabus file in the list. Now click on the gray arrow at the end of the file name. Select Overwrite File from the menu that opens.

overwrite file

Click Choose File and locate the updated syllabus document on your computer.

choose file

WAIT! THIS STEP IS IMPORTANT!
The new syllabus MUST have the same file name as the old syllabus. The contents of the document can change, but you will need to save the new syllabus with the same name as the old one.

YES NO
old file name Syllabus_English101.docx Syllabus_Fall2015.docx
new file name Syllabus_English101.docx Syllabus_Spring2016.docx

Once you have selected your updated syllabus file, click Submit.

That’s it. All the links to the syllabus will now download the new one.

Ben: You mean we don’t need to tediously go through the entire course and change all the links. We only need to replace the file.

Agent L: Yep. As long as the new syllabus has the same file name, it will work perfectly. It also works with reading lists, study guides, rubrics, images… any file really.

Ben: Wow! That’s great! Maybe I have time for coffee after all.

 

agent LTo learn more about how to best take advantage of your Course Files, see Blackboard’s Best Practices on Attaching Files. For more myLesley tutorials, visit the Agent Support Site.

12 Days of Learning: Online Course Design

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Atomic Learning has created the 12 Days of Learning, a series of articles designed to kick off resolutions to keep learning in the new year. We thought this was a great idea and have decided borrow (shamelessly steal) it and do our own. Today’s post looks at planning and designing an online course.  

When designing an online course there are several key elements you will need to consider. You will need to reimagine your course activities focusing on pedagogy first and technology second. It’s important to align your learning outcomes to your assessments and activities and pay careful attention to the selection of technology to achieve those outcomes without having it become about the technology.

Planning Your online course
This video from the University of New South Wales in Australia walks you through some useful strategies to begin planning your online course.  


 

Overview of the Course Design Process
This VoiceThread provides a brief overview of the eLIS course design process we use with Lesley faculty.

12 Days of Learning: Designing Presentations

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Atomic Learning has created the 12 Days of Learning, a series of articles designed to kick off resolutions to keep learning in the new year. We thought this was a great idea and have decided borrow (shamelessly steal) it and do our own. Day 8’s resource focuses on improving your presentation design.

We’ve all sat through boring, tedious presentations with too much text in too small of a font that we couldn’t read from our seats. So much so, that “Death by Powerpoint” is a thing.

Don’t do that. Instead, review these Atomic Learning tutorials on Effective Presentation Design below.

 

Effective Presentation Design

A. Presentations: What You Need to Know 

B. Getting Started

C. Communicating

D. Telling the Story

E. Getting Ready for Delivery

F. Resources

 

 

12 Days of Learning: Library Tips

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Atomic Learning has created the 12 Days of Learning, a series of articles designed to kick off resolutions to keep learning in the new year. We thought this was a great idea and have decided borrow (shamelessly steal) it and do our own. Today we’ll look to our colleagues at the Lesley Library.

Keyword Searching in Library Databases
Learn how to use keywords, AND, OR and truncation to create successful and more powerful searches in the library databases.

 

Scholarly Sources and Evaluating Information
Learn more about how to determine if a source is scholarly and will it be a useful resource.

For more assistance with these topics, check with Ask a Librarian.

 

12 Days of Learning: VoiceThread Doodler

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Atomic Learning has created the 12 Days of Learning, a series of articles designed to kick off resolutions to keep learning in the new year. We thought this was a great idea and have decided borrow (shamelessly steal) it and do our own. For our Day 4 post, let’s look at VoiceThread and the Doodler tool.

The Doodler tool in VoiceThread allows you to annotate your image or slide in VoiceThread using your mouse (or finger if you’re using a mobile device) to draw on the presentation area. It’s as if you had a pointer to direct the viewer’s attention to a specific area of the slide. All doodles will play back in time to your recorded voice so you can describe the detail you’re highlighting. Use the Doodler to annotate charts and images, sketch out a diagram or show someone how to solve a tricky math problem just as if you were with them in person. However, they can play it back as often as they need to in VoiceThread.

View the short overview video about the Doodler tool in VoiceThread below and access VoiceThread’s documentation for more information.