You can find our blog, Engage: Technologies for Teaching and Research, over at http://engage.digital.conncoll.edu
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Information Services is excited to announce the eleven faculty who have received the Open Educational Resources (OER) Exploration Grant for 2019. The grant includes a monetary award as well as staff assistance to explore and investigate open resources that can be used in courses in lieu of traditional textbooks.
The grant aims to reduce educational costs for students by providing free or low-cost learning materials that are available from day one of their classes. The cost of tuition is nearly $70,000 and financial aid spending has increased 3.4 percent at Connecticut College since 2017. In the 2018 New Camel Survey, almost two-thirds of the class expressed concern about their ability to finance their college education. This program will support Connecticut College’s strategic priority toward financial strength and explore new ways to make a Connecticut College education affordable.
The grant provides funding and support for pedagogical innovation. Open educational materials can be tailored to fit the needs of Connecticut College students and allows students to be active participants in the process of course content creation. In addition, OER expand academic freedom, giving faculty copyright-free options to produce personalized learning materials to meet the specific needs of our students at our institution. Faculty are untethered from the rigid structures and content produced by textbook publishers.
Congratulations to the following faculty!
Rachel Black, Anthropology
Luis Gonzalez, Hispanic Studies
Jillian Marshall and Jennifer Gorman, Psychology
Emily Kuder, Hispanic Studies
Kathy McKeon and Warren Johnson, Mathematics and Statistics
Luz Nick, Hispanic Studies
Yongjin Park, Economics
Maria Rosa, Biology
Ari Rotramel, Gender, Sexuality and Intersectionality Studies
I attended Monday’s Talking Teaching on “Office Hours and Email: Connecting with Students Outside of Class.” We mentioned two time-saving tools that faculty might find useful in managing their calendars and email: calendar appointment slots and email canned responses. Below are instructions for using both, pulled from our archives.
Although Google Calendar has changed slightly since our original post, the process for creating and using appointment slots is similar. One major difference is where to find the link to share with your students. Here are instructions.
1. Begin to create an event on your calendar, but select “Appointment Slot” instead of “Event.” You can then edit the duration of the appointment slots. Save (or if you want to add location and other details, edit that in “More Options”).
2. Share the link to your appointments. To find the link, open the event on your calendar and copy/paste the link for “This calendar’s appointment page” by right-clicking on the link and copying it, or opening it in another tab and copying the URL from the address bar.
Do you find yourself typing the same email response over and over again? Use a canned response! Simply, canned responses allow you to write text one time, save it and insert it over and over within Gmail. Canned responses are very easy to set up and use, take a look!
Are your students reading course materials on laptops or other devices?
Online annotation tools can support students’ close reading of texts in an online environment. These same tools can be used to support collaborative reading where students add annotations, questions, and discussion directly on the texts themselves! Intentional use of social annotation tools make texts come alive for students, create community, increase participation and comprehension, and, as a result, improve learning.
Join us Monday at our workshop, Close Reading Online: Social Annotation and Reading Tools. We’ll look at tools such as Hypothes.is, CommentPress, and RefWorks. We will also discuss criteria for selecting tools and consider issues such as privacy and accessibility. Register here, or feel free to drop in!
We are making great progress toward expanding the use of open educational resources at Connecticut College. After years of advocating for OER on campus, Information Services is currently offering an OER grant for faculty to fund the exploration, adoption, and creation of open access materials. Faculty may receive up to $1,500 to explore and implement OER, or a course remission to develop their own materials.
Creating OER is an exciting opportunity for faculty who wish to develop learning resources customized to their classroom and teaching needs. In addition to funding, the grant offers faculty help in finding non-restrictive licensing and alternative options to traditional copyright. Staff can help with Pressbooks and other platforms in order to adapt or create original OER. IS staff can assist in finding and evaluating existing OER that can be used as base or supplementary material for OER projects. We can also help integrate newly created material into Moodle and advise on strategies to engage students in the OER creation/annotation process.
The use of OER in classes can provide an avenue to incorporate open pedagogy into the curriculum, a practice in which students are partners in the creation of course materials. The lessons lead to renewable assignments that can be built on throughout the term and into future semesters. As creators of information, students in these courses gain a greater understanding of the rights and responsibilities associated with information ownership. Practitioners of open pedagogy embrace collaboration, student agency, and authentic learning. This open educational practice leads to greater student engagement as well as reducing the cost of a college education.
Below are two interesting examples of faculty created OER:
Teaching faculty (full-time, part-time, lecturer, and visiting) at Connecticut College may apply for an OER grant. Individuals, teams, Pathways, and departments/programs are encouraged to work together for a unified adoption of OER. Faculty may only receive one grant per course. See the Call for Proposals for more details. Proposals are due Thursday, February 14, 2019.
Please direct questions to Ariela McCaffrey (x2103), research support and outreach librarian.
Time to add our workshops to your calendar! You can find the full list of workshops online and find a print copy in your mailbox. All workshops are open to faculty and staff. Registration is recommended, but is not required so stop by if you schedule allows. Refreshments are served!
Creating Online Coursepacks – Register
Monday, February 4, 3:00 – 4:00pm | Advanced Technology Lab
The library offers many services to help you create online coursepacks that are completely free for your students to access and can be easily integrated into Moodle. We’ll provide an overview of our print and electronic book and journal collections and share several ways that we can help you locate and adopt freely available content, including open educational resources. Bring your syllabus and build a list of resources that will supplement current course readings or replace old material.
Close Reading Online: Social Annotation and Reading Tools – Register
Monday, February 11, 3:00-4:00pm | Advanced Technology Lab
Are your students reading course materials on laptops or other devices? Online annotation tools can support students’ close reading of texts in an online environment. These same tools can be used to support collaborative reading where students add annotations, questions, and discussion directly on the texts themselves! Intentional use of social annotation tools make texts come alive for students, create community, increase participation and comprehension, and, as a result, improve learning. In this workshop, we’ll look at tools such as Hypothes.is, CommentPress, and RefWorks. We will also discuss criteria for selecting tools and consider issues such as privacy and accessibility.
Tools in a Flash: Google CourseKit – Register
Wednesday, February 20, 11:30-12:00 | Advanced Technology Lab
New this semester! Introducing Google CourseKit, a plugin for Moodle that facilitates assignment submission using Google Drive. CourseKit integrates into Moodle allowing students to submit assignments in Drive, and allowing instructors to provide feedback, while also integrating with the Moodle Gradebook.
Digital Connecticut College: Making WordPress & Omeka Sites, and More – Register
Wednesday, March 6, 3:00 – 4:00pm | Advanced Technology Lab
Learn how to make your own websites using Digital Connecticut College. Digital Connecticut College provides students, faculty, and staff with the opportunity to register a domain name and create a digital presence through various mediums such as blogs, portfolios, and wikis. You can easily install open source applications such as WordPress, MediaWiki, Drupal, Scalar, and Omeka to your own domain, and use this space to develop class projects, share your research, and create your digital identity. At this workshop, we will help you get the process started, and show examples of the types of projects that you can create.
Promote and Preserve Your Research with Digital Commons – Register
Wednesday, April 3, 3:00-4:00 | Advanced Technology Lab
Digital Commons is a free electronic archive of the research and publications of Connecticut College faculty, students, and departments. It can be used to ensure easier access to your journal articles, provide a venue for other unpublished scholarship like conference papers, store and publish datasets, or deliver newsletters to a wider audience. In this workshop we will explain the advantages of using Digital Commons, demonstrate its analytics capability, and show the wide range of faculty and College publications gaining wider audiences through Open Access publishing. We can also show you how we determine what of your published research may be reproduced in Digital Commons. Bring a cv or list of recent publications and we can check it for you in the course of the workshop.
On January 1, 2019, thousands of creative works published in 1923 were released into the public domain. This is the first time in 20 years that new material entered the public domain, including literary works, periodicals, dramatic works, movies, musical works, artistic works, and choreography. Now, every year on January 1st, a new batch of material will be released – next year it will be works published in 1924, and so on. Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain explains why, and also includes a list of creative works now available to the public.
What implications could the release of these materials into the public domain have for scholars and teachers? All public domain materials can be remixed, revised, translated, and explored in in new ways. For example, the literary works listed in this document can now be scanned (if they are not already available in Hathi Trust) and shared. Students can engage with the online texts in new collaborative ways – asking questions, discussing passages, and adding annotation to enhance understanding. Scholars can more easily perform new analysis of the texts using data mining and data analysis techniques, not to mention include rights-free images in scholarly publications. Artists and musicians can draw on previous works, remix and adapt them, creating new works that respond to the present. Literature can be translated into new languages, making them available to audiences for the first time. Books and short stories can be transformed into screenplays for the stage and film. In short, works in the public domain foster creativity and innovation by building on our cultural heritage.
Read more about Public Domain Day 2019:
What will you do with the newly released works?! Contact us with your ideas!
Yesterday we held a workshop to introduce Digital Connecticut College. Thanks to everyone who attended!
Digital Connecticut College provides students, faculty, and staff with the opportunity to register a domain name and create a digital presence through various mediums such as blogs, portfolios, and wikis. You can easily install open source applications such as WordPress, MediaWiki, Drupal, Scalar, and Omeka to your own domain.
Although are are the beginning stages of rolling this out to the community, we can share some ways faculty, staff, and students are already using Digital Connecticut College.
Contact Diane Creede, Lyndsay Bratton, or Jessica McCullough to create your domain and get started! If you have an idea, feel free to contact one of us. We can work with anyone regardless of your experience with technology.
This blog post was written by Rigoberto Reyna, who worked as the Instructional Technology Student Assistant last summer. He is a junior and a member of the Social Justice & Sustainability pathway. In the post, he reflects on the use of an ePortfolio in the thematic inquiry course. Thank you, Rigoberto!
As a sophomore I was introduced to the concept of Pathways. In the Pathway you will ask a lot of questions, discover answers, and piece them together. In order to keep track of your progress, an online portfolio helps you organize your ideas and thoughts. This is where the Digication portfolio plays its part.
Digication is an online portfolio that allows you to save your animating question and the assignments that you worked on throughout the semester. By having it in one place, you can see how your thinking evolved with your learning experience.
In my case, I took Professor Garofalo’s Pathway about Social Justice and Sustainability, and the portfolio allowed me to keep track of my initial thoughts on the subject. It was very interesting and shocking to see my portfolio at the end of the semester, because I could not believe how much I changed in just one semester. I then realized that learning and thinking are not something that can be described as linear. I was convinced of this because I added to my Digication portfolio throughout the semester. As I learned new information my views on the subject changed as well. Not only did I see my own changes, but I was also aware of how my fellow classmates dialogued with each other and asked for suggestions.
In the end, we had to create a final presentation for our animating question in the portfolio. We got together in our writing groups and had constructive conversations about our animating question(s). We referred back to the writing samples that we had in our portfolio in order to have evidence for our arguments.
As a rising junior I am aware that my ideas and thoughts digital portfolio will definitely change by the time I am a senior. I did learn that Digication is a very creative tool that allows you to express your ideas in a website-like portfolio that facilitates the expression of your thoughts to your classmates and professor.
If you would like learn more about digital portfolios, don’t hesitate contact me.
Want to try that new quizzing app in class, but the fee stops you? Did you learn of an exciting new tool you can use in class, but just need some funding to get you started? Instructional Technology still has DELI mini-grants available!
The mini-grant program provides funding for faculty members to explore and experiment with digital technologies to enhance teaching and learning. Faculty members may request up to $300 to support the purchase of software or hardware that will be used in one or more courses.
Proposals are accepted on a rolling basis year-round, and decisions on awards are made once a month by the Instructional Technology team. Find a full description of the program, requirements, and eligibility guidelines in the Mini-Grant Call for Proposals.
Image credit: No Known Restrictions: WPA Poster: Health Care Even Without Money, 1939 (LOC)
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