Using Twitter to attract students/instructors

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been tweeting about our training courses for online instructors. I can't say the response has been overwhelming, but I have gotten a few clicks and at least one student so far. I'm sticking with it, but here's the information about our classes -- all of them are free:

Our Spring quarter Moodle classes for instructors are now available:

104MSCC79 - Creating and Teaching Your Moodle Course, face-to-face, 3 meetings, starts April 12; 6-8 PM – covers everything needed by an online instructor to get their course ready for the first time.

104MSCC80 - Creating and Teaching Your Moodle Course, online, 3 weeks, starts April 13 – same as above, but online.

104MSCC77 - Teaching Online with Moodle, online, 4 weeks, starts May 5 – this class is open to anyone who might be interested in teaching online, not just UCR Extension instructors; no previous experience required and you don't need to be scheduled to teach. The goal for this class is to attract more potential online instructors. Final project is to produce a proposal for an online course.

104MSCC81 - Producing Media for Your Online Course, online, 3 weeks, starts May 11, how to create your own media and add it to your online course (audio, video, narrated presentation); requires a microphone or a way to record audio. This is a new course, suitable for anyone teaching online, new or experienced.

Instructors can register online using the course ID (e.g. 104MSCC77) or by contacting Student Services:
Tel: (951) 827-4105 or (800) 442-4990 toll-free
E-mail: register@ucx.ucr.edu

Questions: contact Brian Reilly - breilly at ucx.ucr.edu

Comments

Blackboard Podcasts

I've been searching for podcasts about Blackboard and have come across a few. Some are too site-specific while others could use a little more polish before I would recommend them to others. However, one podcast I did find to be useful and high quality is Teaching with Blackboard by Jason Rhode at Northern Illinois University. Episode 5, posted last week, discusses how to incorporate RSS feeds into Blackboard using Feed2JS , a website and tool for converting an RSS feed to JavaScript which can be copied and pasted into your Blackboard course. This gives you a relatively easy way to add dynamic content to a course. For many instructors, RSS may be a foreign language, but I think if you listen to the five minute podcast, you will learn enough to get the idea. If you want more, Jason's previous podcast covers RSS and podcasting in more detail.

QuickSource Guides to Blackboard

The Resource Network in Harrisonburg, Virginia, publishes fold out guides to various software applications like MS Office, WordPerfect, Adobe Acrobat and more. They have student and instructor guides to BlackBoard for $4.00 each. Prices are lower if you buy in bulk. I got mine yesterday and they look nice and are easy to read. Each one covers the important things you need to know to use Blackboard as a student or instructor. They are also available through Amazon.com for $4.95 each.

Avoiding lost work in Moodle

When students are working in our installation of Moodle, there are some common ways that their work can be lost. Because Moodle doesn't save what you've written until you click Save (assignments) or Post to Forum in Forums, anything that interrupts your connection to Moodle can lead to lost work and frustration. Interruptions include computer problems or network outages or disconnections. If you are writing anything longer than a paragraph, it's a good idea to use a text editor to do your writing and then copy and paste into Moodle so no matter what happens, you won't lose any of your work. If you combine your use of a text editor with an online backup plan, you'll have a secure backup of all of your work even after the class ends and you can no longer access it (see below). You could use a word processor like Microsoft Word, but you may need to save your work as plain text first to avoid seeing formatting errors when you copy and paste from Word into Moodle. A

Technology & Instruction for UNEX

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