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Instructors as User-Experience Designers

In April, Dr. Constance Stanley of the University of Colorado gave a day-long workshop titled “50 Ways to Teach with Impact” to the Chicago Area Faculty Development Network. To my surprise, the workshop presented techniques grounded in user-centered-design best practices. The workshop was geared toward instructors teaching in a face-to-face classroom; however, many of the strategies could easily be transferred to an online class. As a former user-experience analyst and current instructional designer, I found the bent of the workshop to be a welcome integration of these two disciplines.

Whitney Hess wrote the blog post “Guiding Principles for UX Designers” for UX Magazine that went gangbusters in the Twitterverse. Her guiding principles correlate nicely with Dr. Stanley’s “50 Ways to Teach with Impact.” Let’s take a look.

Guiding Principles for UX Designers

50 Ways to Teach with Impact

Understand the underlying problem before attempting to solve it

Pre and post interviews

Make things simple and intuitive

Metacognitive activities throughout course

Acknowledge that the user is not like you

Administer VARK learning-style preference

Have empathy

Realize that the student is bombarded with information and pressure to multitask

By taking the student perspective and needs into consideration, the instructor becomes a user-experience designer of the classroom environment. Dr. Stanley provides numerous techniques that emphasize engaging the student at multiple levels so as to “hook” each student. This is similar to the best designs, which allow users easy and seamless access to a service or product.

Details on Dr. Stanley’s strategies:

Pre and post interviews: To get a feel for the prior knowledge and assumptions of the students, instructors require that students take an online survey with questions about the content at the beginning of the course. With the results, the instructor now “understands the problem.” Tweaking the content and its delivery to make it accessible and engaging for a particular class of students is “attempting to solve the problem.” The post interview gives the student a sense of “where they have come” and gives the instructor valuable feedback on their content-delivery choices or user-experience design.

Metacognitive Activities: Dr. Stanley stated that, “these activities ask the learner to observe ‘the way things are’ versus ‘the way I make them as a learner.’” In other words, students are put into situations that ask them to reflect on their process and understanding of the content. Examples of these types of activities are: self-assessments; selecting from a choice of activities based on their preferred modality of learning; or having a dialogue with peers about their understanding of the content. By creating these opportunities, instructors provide pathways for students to access the content in simple and intuitive ways.

VARK (Visual, Auditory, Read/Write, and Kinesthetic) learning preference assessment:Students and the instructor answer a quick sixteen-item questionnaire to find out their learning preference. The instructor receives the student results anonymously. By knowing the breakdown of learning preferences within a particular class, the instructor can adjust the delivery of the content to meet student needs. In addition, the instructor can be cognizant of his/her own learning preferences so as not to tilt the presentation of content towards that modality; thereby “acknowledging that the user is not like you.” The assessment is available at: http://www.vark-learn.com.

Influx of Information/Multitasking: Being empathetic to the bombardment of information students are faced with via text messages, e-mails, twitter feeds, etc. is essential in understanding the “user.” Designing a course experience that capitalizes on these devices and information streams encourages students to participate, because their frame of reference is being acknowledged. Rather than competing, play along with it. Poll Everywhere presents a content-related question to the student that is answered via text. Instructors can project the real-time results on a screen in the classroom or present them in an online collaborative environment. Multitasking and information overload are part of our students’ realities; so let’s use the very devices and technologies that vie for their attention.

The instructor as a user experience designer—I like that idea. Through the strategies presented by Dr. Stanley, instructors get a sense of the audience, their needs, and their preferences. Using these “specs” to inform the design of content delivery will lead to student engagement and participation. As one of the pioneers of user-experience design Donald Norman said, “Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right.”

“Online Class Boring You? Let Us Take It for You!”

“We can take your classes! We can help you in virtually any subject. Our experts can take any online math, science, or business class. We will work with you on a budget and a deadline and get your work done on time. Also, with our services we will not ask you to pay upfront. Our students only pay AFTER work has been completed. with our services we stand behind a 100% money back guarantee.”

Hawaii Craigslist, 5-15-2011
http://honolulu.craigslist.org/oah/lss/2382899652.html

Well, obvious ethical issues aside, there is clearly a problem with boring online classes, at least in Hawaii. Unfortunately, the tools available to us in D2L to create online classes are limited. It also takes time and, seemingly, a lot of technical expertise to create engaging, interactive online material for students. As a result, we upload a combination of text-based lectures and slideshows to D2L, making it a parking lot for static content. In this blog post, I would like to introduce you to SoftChalk, an easy-to-use eLearning authoring solution that allows you to create, share, and deliver engaging, interactive content.

Introducing SoftChalk

The best way to introduce Softchalk is to show you a short lesson embedded right here in the blog. This is a complete lesson on learning Greek and Latin word parts and was created by an educator and shared with the SoftChalk community (more on that in a bit).

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As you can see, there are numerous activities mixed in with the delivery of the content, providing the students with the opportunity to become engaged with the lesson, rather than have the material simply delivered to them though a static lecture or readings. All of the content you see was created within SoftChalk and uploaded to a sharable content repository. The same module could be easily uploaded and integrated in D2L.

What is SoftChalk?

SoftChalk is a site-licensed software package that runs on both Windows and Macintosh operating systems. While it delivers complex, interactive lessons, there is a simple, nontechnical interface for module authoring. Here is a partial list of some of the features that you can build into a SoftChalk lesson or activity:

  • Text annotation
  • Six types of interactive self-check questions
  • Seventeen interactive activities and games
  • Images, audio, video, and media
  • Widgets
  • Polls and ratings (SoftChalk CONNECT)

The news gets better when you look at the different ways you can publish a lesson created with SoftChalk. Of course, you can certainly publish to D2L but you can also publish lessons as stand-alone Web pages, executable lessons on PC and Mac, or to SoftChalk CONNECT which is a sharable content repository under Creative Commons licensing. It is also worth mentioning that SoftChalk lessons are section 508 compliant for accessibility.

In short, SoftChalk allows you to create professional-looking lessons with no HTML programming required. You can choose the style, page navigation, and layout options. SoftChalk will generate a set of integrated lesson pages with built-in navigation and a professional-looking layout. Further, it will create a single file that you upload to D2L. If there are embedded assessments, you can extract a report of student performance from within D2L.

Need Ideas?

Are you short on ideas for your lesson? SoftChalk, from within the application itself, provides the ability to search content with its open technology partners, MERLOT, CONNEXIONS, College Open Textbooks, and the IMS Global Learning Consortium, as well as SoftChalk CONNECT.

SoftChalk CONNECT is a free repository for sharing open educational resources under Creative Commons licensing, allowing you to host your content in the “Cloud” for delivery anywhere. You can also create a private area on SoftChalk CONNECT for your own materials. If you only want to use one small feature of SoftChalk, you do not have to create a complete lesson; you can publish your activity as a widget and embed it in any Web page. Here is a sample accounting activity from the public area of SoftChalk CONNECT.

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How do I get it?

SoftChalk is site licensed by DePaul and can be downloaded from the Media Production & Training website at http://www.itd.depaul.edu/website/faculty/TechnologyTools/SoftChalk.asp.

You may want to visit both the SoftChalk and SoftChalk CONNECT websites for more information and additional demonstrations.

http://softchalk.com/

http://softchalkconnect.com/

Finally, if you need help with SoftChalk and want to know more about how you can integrate it into your online course, contact your FITS consultant, and they will probably call me.

Oh yes, one last thing. SoftChalk will release a new version this summer. The big news is that the published modules will also be compatible with mobile devices: smartphones, iPads, and other tablets with six new activities targeted specifically at these mobile devices. Fortunately, SoftChalk takes care of creating the proper content for each device; no intervention is required by the author.

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Studio in a Box: Getting Started with Audacity

In recent years, the increasing digitization of our world has given the everyday user the ability to do things at home that only the pros used to be able to do. While these capabilities have not gone unnoticed, we are not always aware of our new abilities—until someone lets us know they’re out there.

Take audio recording, for example. Software to record audio in single and multi-track formats has been available on computers for a long time but has usually been the domain of expensive software packages such as ProTools, Logic, or Adobe Audition. Software like this gives users the ability to do at home what used to require purchasing studio time and hiring an engineer; Grammy-nominated artist Moby recorded his first major album in his own house. However, he was still doing so on professional-level equipment with professional-level software.

So what’s the average user to do if he just wants to record some audio without taking out a second mortgage to pay for studio gear? Recently, these capabilities have come to the average user, sometimes for free. The open-source movement has made great strides in advancing everyone’s application libraries through widely available free software. This time I’ll talk about Audacity, for those who want to get their feet wet in the world of audio.

Audacity is a free, cross-platform, open-source audio recording and editing application that was originally developed in 1999 at Carnegie Mellon University. It is surprisingly powerful for free; in fact, it rivals the expensive programs in its features for recording, mixing, and processing audio. I included it on my list of downloads for students in my Music in the Electronic Medium class, since students could record at home or continue editing files they had produced in class on other software. The price point was appealing to them too, since most college students can’t afford a 700 dollar audio recording suite for only a couple of courses.

Let’s get started. First, download Audacity. You can get that here: http://audacity.sourceforge.net. Also, while you’re at it, download the LAME MP3 encoder, from this link: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/faq?s=install&i=lame-mp3. The LAME encoder will allow you to produce MP3 files with Audacity. Because the software is Open Source, they cannot by law include the ability to produce MP3s, since that is a patented, proprietary format; instead, you install this separate piece and it takes care of the rest.

Once you install and open the software for the first time, you’re presented with a blank canvas:

It looks pretty daunting at first, but it’s a lot easier than you think. A couple of things to point out here:

The recording selector is at the top right-hand side of your screen. It is most likely set to “Internal Microphone,” but your preferences can change depending on what sorts of sound devices you have installed. For instance, you may be able to record from an attached microphone, or select the sounds from your computer as a source. Pull down the box to select what you’d like to use to record. Many computers and most laptops now have pretty good built-in microphones, and for most simple voice recording, a microphone like this is more than adequate.

The recording buttons are at the top left-hand side of your screen. Once you’ve selected your recording device, hit the red Record button and you’re off and running!

This image shows a recording being done. You can see two audio waveforms in one track; these are the left and right audio channels, so you are recording in stereo. There are a few things to pay attention to while you are recording as well.

The moving red lines you see while making your recording are the volume levels. A thin red line marks the loudest sound in the track; a thin blue line marks the threshold at which the sound will begin to distort. Ideally, you want your sound to be as close as possible to the blue line without or only very occasionally going over it. You can use the microphone volume control (located farther right) to adjust your recording volume if necessary. Just press the orange Stop button when you’re done.

If you want to add another track, just push the Record button again, and it will begin recording a new stereo track for you. You’ll be hearing your first track at the same time though, so before you record, you may want to Mute your first track (see image).

Now comes the slicing and dicing part. Let’s say you want about half of what you just recorded. Click on the audio timeline in your track at the place you want to start cutting, and drag the cursor along the track until you have the rest highlighted.

Hit Delete, and it’s gone.

So now what? You’ve got some audio you like and might want to share with someone. It’s time to create an audio file. First, we must make a distinction between Saving and Exporting in Audacity. If you simply choose “Save As…” you will end up with an Audacity project file. This is not an audio file, but the information saved from your recording session. Basically, it is the links to the tracks you have recorded and all of the data you have created. Audacity also creates a folder in the same place as your project file for all of the raw data. Neither the project file nor the stuff in the folder is usable unless you have Audacity, so this isn’t the option to choose if you want to make an audio file. Furthermore, if you take the project file somewhere and don’t have the data folder too, your project file won’t do you any good either, because it won’t be able to find anything you’ve done. It’s like that PowerPoint presentation with all the great sounds that you copied to another computer for a presentation and none of the sounds worked! However, it can be a good idea to save project files, especially if it’s something you might come back to later to edit. You might want to add some more tracks to a recording or some effects to the sound. You can’t do that if you don’t have a project file.

Let’s Export this to an audio file now. Choose FileàExport. A save dialog box appears, and you can choose the file name and destination. Pull down the Format box at the bottom to pick what kind of file to create.

You may see a number of different options depending on the programs you have installed. The most commonly used choices, though, are AIFF, WAV, MP3 and WMA. MP3 is usually the best choice for sharing audio with people, because it presents a combination of pretty decent audio fidelity with small file size. I know there are audio purists that will disagree with this choice, and it’s true—if you’re looking for the absolute highest quality sound, you should be picking WAV. However, you’ll pay for it with the storage it takes up: a typical MP3 file is about 1 megabyte per minute of recording, while a typical WAV file is more like 11 megabytes per minute.

This has been a very quick and dirty overview of audio recording in Audacity. There are many, many more features in the program, including variable speed playback, effects, mixing and mastering tools, and even advanced features like audio spectrum analysis and the ability to add metadata to exported tracks, so that your media player will display what it’s playing automatically (no more of that 01 Track 1 stuff). Audacity is powerful and a lot of fun to use, and with a price like free, you can’t go wrong. I encourage all of you faithful readers out there to give it a try; I think you’ll be glad you did. You just might surprise yourself, so go get creative!

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The Instructional Technology X-Files: Enchanted iPads, Magical Clickers, and Online Courses that Beat Face-to-Face

“Students performed 20 percent better in the hybrid version of this course compared to the face-to-face sections taught by other instructors.” When I heard this statement during a presentation at the Educause Learning Initiative Annual Meeting in February, I did something I rarely do: I closed my laptop, looked straight at the presenter, and stopped multitasking for a full twenty minutes.

I find most educational-technology conferences are a lot like an episode of the X-Files with a cast made up entirely of Fox Mulders. Everyone wants to believe. There are a lot of technology cheerleaders and a lot of iPad sightings, and no one seems to notice that Dana Scully—the skeptical, pragmatic agent designed to bring Mulder back down to Earth—has gone missing. So when someone offers up a bold promise backed by actual bar graphs, I take notice.

The presenter, Professor T. Warren Hardy from the University of Maryland–Baltimore County (UMBC), stated that his students performed significantly better on their final exam largely due to his use of online self-assessments. Upon hearing this, I immediately put on my Agent Scully trench coat and asked myself why his conclusions could be off.

  • Was his final exam easier than the one used in other sections? No, all sections take the same final exam.
  • Did he give his students an unfair advantage by using final exam questions in his self-assessments? No, the final exam is designed by other members of the department who are not currently teaching the course. To ensure a level playing field, the instructors have no knowledge of the specific questions that will appear on the final exam.
  • What if he’s just a better instructor than the faculty teaching the other sections? That might hold water if it wasn’t for the fact that Professor Hardy’s students scored considerably higher than his own past students after he converted the course to a hybrid format with online self-assessments.

Of course, I’m sure there are other variables that might impact the validity of Professor Hardy’s findings. Yet, after hearing the unique steps that UMBC’s economics department takes to ensure a rigorous and standardized final exam for the five-hundred students who take ECON 122 every year, I felt the 20 percent difference on Hardy’s final exam scores were hard to dismiss.

In addition to praising his students’ performance, Hardy’s co-presenters from UMBC noted that his course was a regular in the University’s list of most-active Blackboard courses. Hardy attributed his students’ extensive and frequent use of Blackboard largely to his course’s reliance on adaptive release. Adaptive release refers to a set of restrictions that can require students to view and interact with certain online content and/or assessments before new instructional materials are made available. In Hardy’s course, students were required to access learning materials and complete quizzes for each module before subsequent modules could be accessed. Hardy and his colleagues believe this approach helped students pace themselves and decreased the odds that they might skip vital content needed to succeed on the final exam.

Perhaps even more impressive than the student performance in Hardy’s initial hybrid offering was the fact that his hybrid students continued to score higher than their peers in subsequent course offerings. In addition, when the course was offered fully online in the summer of 2010, students scored even higher than those in previous hybrid sections.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how much of the improved student performance was due to the online self-assessments, adaptive release, or other unique aspects of Hardy’s online course design and teaching style. However, his findings clearly show that low-stakes knowledge checks and conditional release of content can have a significant impact on student performance. While I still consider myself a skeptic, even Agent Dana Scully had to admit once in a while that supernatural phenomena do exist. Whether it’s the wolf-man, alien abduction, or online courses that prove more effective than face-to-face, the truth is out there and we owe it to our students to keep digging.

Additional Resources

Add a Pinch of Classroom, a Dash of Online—Blend Well

I had the opportunity to attend the Sloan-C Blended Learning Conference in Oak Brook, IL, last week, and as with most education conferences, it’s left my mind full of questions—some answers, but mostly questions. There was a panel discussion on the second day, and some of the most interesting pieces related to research on blended learning conducted at the University of Central Florida (UCF).

Blender

Joel Hartman, Vice Provost at UCF (and EDUCAUSE Leadership Award winner) related some of the key findings from the study of about two million student evaluations taken over several years.

  • Overall, student satisfaction was higher for blended courses than for either face-to-face or online. (At UCF, blended means “courses that combine face-to-face instruction with online learning and reduced contact hours.”)
  • Regardless of format, a course has a 97 percent chance of getting an excellent overall rating if these three items receive excellent ratings: ability to communicate information, interest in student learning, and concern and care for students.
  • For blended courses, the student success outcomes used to be about 14 percent higher than face-to-face or online. Now that gap is much smaller, most likely because strategies from blended are being used in face-to-face and online courses, blurring the lines between the three types.

A phrase about blended learning that I heard at the session that has really stuck with me is “classroom-enhanced online instruction,” as opposed to “web-enhanced classroom instruction.” As students realize that valuable learning opportunities can occur online—on their own schedule and in their pajamas if they wish—they naturally begin to wonder, “Why am I driving/walking/riding to campus?” With blended courses, the in-class time has to seem “worth it”—full of the types of activities that are best done in person and not the types of activities that are better accomplished online. In each discipline these activities will be a little different, but I would like to think and read more about general principles for how to best take advantage of face-to-face time and online time when designing a blended course.

Even though I didn’t win the Samsung Galaxy tablet, the conference was enjoyable and gave me a fresh perspective on course design and teaching. I highly recommend viewing the slides from the keynote address for some thought-provoking statistics and arguments about higher education today and where it needs to be in the future.

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Ready, Set, Act: Running Your Show in the Classroom

The sound so vibrant and rich, the tone so vivacious, the gesture so pulsating, and the emotion so poignant and touching, it brought tears to the eyes of the audience as they listened to the recitation of the “poem”—or what they thought was a poem.

“It was done in Russian by a renowned actor from Russia,” my father said as he described the performance, conducted by a visiting Russian actor to his theatre troupe in China in the 1950s. Although none of the Chinese audience could understand a single word of it, they were completely mesmerized by the presentation—until one of them raised the question: what is it saying in the poem?

No, it wasn’t a poem. With a short pause, the actor revealed, through an interpreter, what he was reciting—a restaurant menu!

So with all the feelings and passions he could project, he was reciting something like cabbage rolls, fish sautéed with onions and mixed with hard-boiled chopped eggs and, oh, potatoes mashed then mixed with eggs and smetana!

This story came to my mind as I started to plan for this year’s DePaul Annual Faculty Conference with colleagues from the office of Teaching, Learning, and Assessment. The theme we selected for this year’s conference is teaching as an act of body and brain. Inspired by Nancy Houfek’s philosophy and practice of using theatre techniques to enhance teaching (see the video below), we decided to bring her to DePaul as a keynote speaker to talk about the power of acting or how to induce tears by reading a menu.

As Nancy points out, the techniques used by actors to captivate an audience can very well be borrowed by professors to engage students in the classroom. Yet in our daily practice, we as teachers often focus almost solely on the content and leave the delivery of the content to chance.

Content is critical, but without gaining the attention of your audience, it won’t come across. While the story of menu reading is a bit extreme, it does convey a very strong message: sometimes when it is done extremely well, the presentation can overpower the content! Even if we can’t go that far, it can at least help us capture the attention of our students.

There is a common attribute shared by the profession of acting and the practice of teaching: both require a high dosage of passion. We teach largely because we are in love with it. The difference between us and actors is that they seem to know better how to make that passion visible—through their voice, gestures, and body languages. We teachers, on the other hand, rarely make any conscious choice about the nonverbal messages that we convey, especially when we are in the classroom.

On May 6th, following Nancy’s keynote speech, DePaul Theatre School professor Natalie Turner-Jones will lead a practical workshop exploring theatre-based techniques that can be applied to the classroom environment. She will explain why the way we use the classroom space, gesticulate to make a point, move, breathe, or pause all convey a clear message to our students and how making conscious choices in these areas empowers teachers to create an engaging and playful learning environment.

So, if you haven’t yet, please mark your calendar for May 6th’s DePaul Annual Faculty Conference and registers online at http://teachingcommons.depaul.edu/Conference/registration.html

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Strategic Planning: Technology for the Whole University

Now that the transition from Blackboard to Desire2Learn is complete, it is time to start looking forward to what additional functionality or systems faculty need to be effective and efficient in online teaching. To this end, I have been spending some time in the last couple of weeks pulling together a list of faculty to participate in a focus group.

Gathering names is always a tricky business, and one thing that I have become increasingly aware of is that in any strategic-planning process, it is important to listen to all voices, not just those who are the loudest. This is especially true when looking at technology adoption. Often it seems easier to go back to those faculty with the most to say, those who are already strong advocates, or those that are friendly to new technology. While it is easy to listen to the early adopters and technologically savvy, to do so at the exclusion of other voices runs the risk of alienating your primary audience.

Those early adopters are often at what we refer to as being at the bleeding edge of technology. Wikipedeia defines bleeding edge technology as being "so new that the user is required to risk unreliability, and possibly greater expense, in order to use it." While it is important for there to be people out front experimenting with the possibilities, this is not where most of your users (nor the institution) will be, for obvious reasons.

When you add technology into the mix you also find that some faculty are more hesitant to voice an opinion because they don’t feel as though they are as technologically savvy or competent. While these individuals may not be able to recite a list of technological solutions to a problem, they often have real needs that can be expressed regardless of the solution. When gathering requirements from faculty, it is important, therefore, to take the specific technology out of the conversation. For example, instead of asking faculty "what other technology would you like to see the university adopt," ask questions like "what would you like to be able to do with your class that you currently can’t," or "what frustrates you about the technology currently available to you," or even more important, "why are you not using this tool?"

The "why are you not using this" question can be just as important if not more important than the "what do you need” question. For example, if the goal of the university is to have 100 percent participation in the use of the learning management system, it is important to find out why some faculty choose not to participate. Let’s not assume that we know the reasons or that if we build it they will come. Instead, we need to hear from all the voices about what is working, what isn’t, and what the true need is.

It is important to remember that any planning process should always include feedback and input from all stakeholders not just those with the most to gain (or lose) and that planning requires compromise between these same stakeholders—adoption should not alienate the greater population for the benefit of a few or vice-versa. We must always remember to listen to the voices of all users before making our decisions.

DePaul Instructors Talk about Teaching

The most recent video posted on DePaul’s Teaching Commons features Mary Frances DeRose of the School of Public Service. The video focuses on what she’s learned about how to teach statistics since first arriving at the university.

Difficult Courses: Statistics, produced by videographer and animator Heather Banas, joins a growing number of short videos about teaching available in the Teaching for Learning video archive. Each video features DePaul faculty members—from a variety of disciplines—talk about how they teach.

I am not an objective observer. By way of honesty, I was privileged to produce some of the first videos for the DePaul Teaching Commons website. But, as a sometime qualitative researcher, I also can’t help seeing this archive as a growing collection of data! And have, therefore, noticed some themes!

Watch some of the videos and see if you don’t agree:

  • Theme One: Some assessments are worthwhile, some are not.
  • Theme Two: Real world examples engage students.
  • Theme Three: Make good use of students’ time in the classroom.
  • Theme Four: Use multiple techniques during class to address the varying abilities among students.
  • Theme Five: Create opportunities for immediate feedback.
  • Theme Six: Create opportunities where students can view their progress.

In the statistics video, I was particularly impressed by one assignment used by DeRose: returning to the same journal article (one selected by the student) several times throughout the quarter. Over the course of the class, students realize how much they have learned. An assignment to match all six themes!

An upcoming opportunity to hear DePaul faculty talk about teaching—this time live and in person—is the DePaul Teaching and Learning Conference, May 6. Register today!

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Google Cloud Connect or: Shouldn’t This Have Been Built into Word in the First Place?

When you’re preparing your course materials, you’re probably using Microsoft Office—Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. And depending on the size and complexity of the files you’re working with, you may want a better way to manage them then leaving them in a folder on your computer.

Google to the rescue!

Cloud Connect (highlighted)

Google Cloud Connect is a free plug-in for Microsoft Office that allows you to sync any of the Office documents you’re producing on your computer to your Google Docs account. And while this tool isn’t intended specifically for creating instructional materials, it’s been so useful to me that, well, I just had to share.

What do you need?

What does Google Cloud Connect do for you?

  • Cloud Storage – Every document you create or open and save on your computer is saved both to your computer and to your Google Docs account. That means if you need to work on it from another computer, you can just go to docs.google.com and download it.
  • Version Control – Every time you click save in Word, PowerPoint, or Excel, Cloud Connect will save a new version of the document. Did you ever delete something by accident and then save the file? Or edit a document only to realize that the previous version was better? Version control can solve these problems. You can access old versions, listed by date, from directly within Word, PowerPoint, or Excel.
  • Collaboration – Just like Google Docs, Google Cloud Connect allows you to share your documents with others just by entering their email address. Your collaborators can edit the files simultaneously, and if you both edit the same part of the document at the same time, you’ll be able to decide which version should be used.

Why Google Cloud Connect rather than other cloud-based options?

  • Dead Simple Setup – Once you install the plug-in, just keep doing what you were doing. Every document you open and save in Word, PowerPoint, or Excel will go to the cloud. All of your version control and collaboration can be done from within Office—not on an external website.
  • It stays in the Microsoft Office format – If you’ve shied away from using Google Docs as your primary productivity suite because of all the formatting options afforded to you by Word and PowerPoint or the learning curve of a different set of programs, don’t worry. These are Microsoft Office files getting saved to the cloud. They aren’t converted to another format.
  • Edit Offline – You don’t have to be connected to the Internet to access your files, because they’re also on your computer. You’ll be able to sync any changes to your Google Docs once you have a connection again.

There are other tools out there that have similar benefits—Dropbox, Google Docs proper—but the little unobtrusive bonuses that Cloud Connect gives without making you change, well, anything about the way you work make it a winner for me.

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Desire2Subscribe2Discussions

A new version of Desire2Learn, D2L 9.1, has been released, and will soon be replacing our current version at DePaul. There are several systematic and aesthetic changes to the new version but one that will excite most teachers and students is the option to subscribe to discussion forums. With a simple mouse click, teachers and students will no longer need to check their courses for new discussion posts on a daily basis; the new posts will come directly to them.

In D2L 9.1, when you go to the discussions section of a course site, there are star icons on the left of the forums and topics list. By clicking on a star icon, you will be signing up for automatic e-mail updates whenever a new post is made to the discussion you subscribed to. A window will pop up asking you if you are sure that you want to subscribe to this forum and showing you the e-mail address that the notifications will be sent to. To change the settings of the subscription, click “Subscriptions” on the left-hand menu bar. From here you can choose how frequently you want notifications to be sent. For more options, click “Notification Preferences.” In this section you can change the e-mail address that the notifications are sent to if the default address is not one you check frequently.

Subscriptions to posts will be huge time savers for teachers and especially students who might have five classes each with several discussion forums. Students will no longer need to enter each course for updates or run the risk of missing a new post.