Eat Lunch, Talk Teaching

The Retention Fellows are sponsoring a lunch on September 9th in Woolsey Hall. The event begins at 11:30 am, and all faculty, students, and staff are invited. Space is limited, so if you would like to have a chance to hang out with peers and talk about teaching, you should register here. This lunch is part of a new series called "Teaching Matters," and the topic of the September lunch is, "Off to a Good Start."  Hope to see you there! 

The August ARC Lives on in Recordings

Let's face it, there is no "good" time to run a week-long training conference! No matter when we schedule it, there will be sessions folks would like to attend but simply can't. We understand, and that's why we record most sessions for later viewing. The recordings are now up on the session schedule page, so have a look now. Not only will you see recordings, you will also have access to resources that were shared during the live event.  To give you a flavor of what to expect, check out this recording of Monday's panel discussion, "What Will the Future Look Like, and How Do We Prepare Our Students For It?" featuring Amy Drassen Ham as Moderator and Min Xiao, Jaehwan Byun, Mohommad Najjar, and Robin Henry on the panel. It was great session: 

Nontraditional Grading Methods

John Hammond's ARC session on Nontraditional Grading Methods was absolutely fantastic. Did you get a chance to see it? If not, we wanted to make sure to highlight it here so folks have a chance. If you are interested in nontraditional grading methods, you might be happy to hear that Blackboard's upcoming Ultra changes will be much more supportive of many of these habits, so keep an eye on Teaching Today over the next few months for more information. In the meantime, here is John's excellent presentation: 

The Inclusive University 

I'm starting to think the tagline for the ARC should be, "come for the panels, stay for the training!," because our panels have become that good. For example, the Thursday discussion on "Inclusive University" was simply excellent. The panel was moderated by Jody Fiorini and featured Edil Torrez-Rivera, Aaron Austin, Valerie Thompson, and Jenny Pearson as panelists. If you missed it, do yourself a favor and make time to watch the recording. 

It's Time to Learn OneDrive

If you have heard people talk about OneDrive, but you are not quite sure what it is, now is truly the time to find out. Not only does OneDrive have a huge amount of storage (1 TB!), but it's a great way to share large files and work on joint projects.  Want to learn more? Great! Ali Levine has all the info you need to get started: 

Get Blackboard Help at OIR's Labs

Blackboard is a very powerful learning management system, but with great power comes great complexity (that's the saying, right?!). If you are feeling overwhelmed with your Blackboard shell, whether your courses are in the Original course format or the Ultra course format, the Office of Instructional Resources has your back.  If your question is quick, then shoot us an email: OIR@wichita.edu. If you need one-on-one help, no problem! That's what our come-and-go, online (Zoom-based) lab time is. You can grab the Zoom link on our labs page, and plan to join us any time between 1:00-3:00pm on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.  

What's Coming with Ultra Gradebook

Ultra course format is a streamlined, modern environment that students love. But let's be frank, it has not had all the tools that many professors are accustomed to using in their learning management system, especially when it comes to grading.  Anthology, Blackboard's parent company, has been working to fix that problem by tripling their development team on Blackboard Ultra, and it's leapt forward in the last few months. If you haven't seen what's been going on lately in Ultra course format, now is a good time to catch up. Luckily, we have an ARC session just for that! Fredrik Klemming, Anthology Blackboard's lead designer for the new grading interface joined the ARC in August to show you many cool new features, so have a look! (NOTE: this video will only play for people currently logged in to WSU's system): 

How to Tell if Your Class is "in Ultra"

If you email OIR with a request for Blackboard help, the first question we are likely to ask is "are you in Ultra or Classic Blackboard course format?" If you are not sure, the answer is probably "Classic Blackboard" but here's how to tell: Once you login to your course, if you see a wide, black menu bar on the left of the screen, your class is in "Classic" Blackboard. If your class has a lot of white space, no black menu bar on the left, and the course content showing in the middle of the screen, your class is in Ultra course format. This webpage, "Am I in Ultra?" provides screenshots and more information about the differences between the two course formats.

GTAs with Late Appointments Need Training

If there are any GTAs in your department who received their appointments late, especially if they received their appointments after the first day of school, please reach out to the Graduate School to learn about the mandatory training your GTAs need to complete. Thank you!