I forgot that it was Easter this weekend and tried to schedule things for Monday. All the days are starting to blur a little bit.
I got very mixed up around scheduling sessions this week. I’m doing BlueJeans training with Margaret and Blackboard training with Mike this month. In my head, all the BlueJeans sessions were on Tuesdays and Thursdays so when it came to scheduling Blackboard we went with Mondays and Wednesdays. I had forgotten that we chose to stagger the BlueJeans to try and hit the most availability. Now that everything is in my calendar and I’m working on support documents I’m feeling like I might be getting a grip on it. Part of the problem was that I missed a couple of emails and was only looking ahead. If I’d looked back, I might have noticed the conflicts. I think it’s time to dust off the whiteboard calendar from my contracting days. I need a visual that isn’t outlook.
There’s a lot of information coming at us these days (at NIC) and some new, exciting developments and tools to learn. We have a major BB upgrade coming at the end of the month. It shouldn’t have too much impact on faculty who are going through enough right now. The interface doesn’t look a lot different but there will be a couple of new features, like the option to record audio for feedback on assignments.
There was more faculty support this week via emails and phone calls. Our web help desk access has been set up and I’m gently directly faculty there first. It feels like you’re turning people away but in the long run it will be much more efficient and will help us track the kind of requests we’re getting to target training. It’s quite interesting to see instructors embrace new tools and I like to see the ways they are using them. There are some really good questions coming in and I’m learning more all the time through helping.
I was able to work a couple of more hours in a day this week with the stat holiday on Friday. It’s weird to not have Margaret around this week to check in with. Hopefully this was a well timed vacation break for her because the next couple of weeks are going to be heavy with sessions for faculty.
We did a little WordPress/OpenETC run through Thursday and started planning for May. The April sessions are filling up. Got a little peek at what Kaltura is going to look like in Blackboard. Prepped a hand out and some notes for next week’s sessions. Looking forward to getting back into training people online. I used to really enjoy it.
Happy Easter