Iowa State University

Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching

Course Revision

Many of us spend summer revisiting and revising our courses and preparing new ones. This link will give you guidelines and structure, a helpful advantage toward enacting these changes: Preparing or Revising a Course.

Rewriting Your Final

With final exam preparation underway, guidelines for test construction are particularly useful for many of us.

For a quick list of advantages, disadvantages and recommendations for constructing  exam questions, see: Designing Test Questions

Tech Tip:
 
As you develop assessments and upload text from Word documents into Blackboard, remember to use the Mashup Tool to avoid problems caused by hidden XML and CSS code in Microsoft Word.
See Blackboard Learn: Pasting Content from Word to learn more.

Plagiarism Prevention

Preventing plagiarism in your course can start with a discussion about properly citing sources. An open conversation about what counts as plagiarism can go a long way toward preventing it.
For more, see Teaching Guide: Dealing with Plagiarism


Tech Tip:

SafeAssign is a tool within Blackboard that is designed to help detect plagiarism.
To learn more about this tool’s capabilities, see SafeAssign.

See: Using SafeAssign for a video tutorial of the process.

Collaborative Learning in the Classroom

Peer-to-peer teaching enables students to engage with course content on a deeper level and can positively shape student attitudes. For recommended group work strategies, procedures and assessment techniques see: Collaborative Learning: Group Work and Study Teams

Tech Tip:  Improving Student Learning Online 
As courses incorporate more online components or move to an entirely online format, students may be challenged to stay on task. See What Makes a Successful Online Student? and share these helpful suggestions with your students.

Getting to Know Your Students

Recognizing your students by name is a helpful tool for classroom management and for increasing student engagement. 
See How to Remember Names and Faces for a step-wise method of learning students’ names.

 
Tech Tip:
  Video Tutorials for Blackboard Learn
Lynda.com provides several dozen brief video clips to help instructors get up-to-speed in all of the most frequently used tools, features, and functions of Blackboard Learn.
To access the tutorials and files, simply login to Lynda.com with your Iowa State University NetID and password. Once you are on the Lynda.com site, look under the Software menu and select Blackboard, or Search for Blackboard.

ThinkSpace: A Multipurpose Instructional Tool

ThinkSpace provides a framework for developing multiple aspects of your course such as designing rubrics, marking up papers, peer editing, creating scenarios and complex problem-solving components, and constructing ePortfolios. Students can be enrolled individually or in teams.
To learn more about how faculty are using ThinkSpace at ISU, please view our CELT ThinkSpace Introduction seminar.

Please contact Holly Bender if interested in learning more about ThinkSpace.

Tech Tip:  Five Tips for Submitting Final Grades from Blackboard Learn

  1. You can calculate Final Grades by using Total or Weighted Columns.
  2. If you want to adjust the Grading Schema (e.g., 94% to 100% = A, 90% and less than 94% = A-, etc.) that Bb Learn uses, see Changing the Grading Scale.
  3. An Extra Credit column works correctly only if you specify 0 points possible. See Adding and Calculating Extra Credit.
  4. You can change an individual student’s Final grade, but you can’t do it directly in a Total or Weighted column. See Making Adjustments to Individual Grades.
  5. Lastly, you must use ISU AdminTools to submit Final Grades from Bb Learn, but you must first Set the Final Grade Column as External Grade.

Team-Based Learning

A Team-Based Learning (TBL) approach to teaching enables students to work toward common learning goals through intentional exercises encouraging collaboration. This instructional strategy transforms large classrooms into small, supportive learning environments with an atmosphere of engagement, community and common purpose. TBL is equally effective within the small classroom environment as well. Reflections on TBL Course offers student perspectives on the benefits of the TBL experience.

Tech Tip: Multiple Choice Test Template
Microsoft® Office provides an easy-to-use tool for creating a paper-based multiple choice test or survey. Visit Multiple-choice test or survey kit to view this downloadable template.

 

Writing Multiple-Choice Exams

Learning-centered multiple choice exams use straightforward language and rely on student synthesis of course material rather than common knowledge.
See Writing Good Multiple-Choice Items for tips toward making your tests better learning tools.
 

Tech Tip –Multiple-Choice to Promote Discussion

Using multiple choice questions to assess student learning can be accomplished outside of exams as well. Visit Multiple-Choice Questions You Wouldn’t Put on a Test: Promoting Deep Learning Using Clickers to learn more about ways to encourage discussion in your classroom with technology.