Got a little relief from sessions this week as enrollments have slowed down for now. We don’t all need to be there for small groups. Mike and I did our first Blackboard Basics and it was good. We had instructors from trades, business, health care, and student employment services. We covered what the LMS is and what they can do with it.
I met with the trades consultants while we worked out development shells and where to store ‘master’ content. I spent some time cleaning up helpdesk tickets in the afternoon and met with Ashley from trades to talk about what course shells we needed for forestry. Mike was a life-saver in course creation. If that’s too hyperbolic, he was definitely a time-saver.
Tuesday Mike and I did our Blackboard Content and Assessment sessions. I’ve been helping a couple of instructors who are co-teaching and had a quick look at their course. We’re going to meet to talk a little about organization because I think I can help them. I set up some time with the trades consultant to do a walk through of the sample course. I finally got to work on that a little and decided to do a screen cast in Kaltura to add to it. That took a few tries just getting used to the settings but I’ll keep practicing.
Got to learn a lot more about Kaltura on Wednesday. I discovered that my screen cast from Tuesday ended up with no audio so will have to go in and figure out what happened there. I sat in for part of the Bluejeans moderator session with Margaret because it looked like there were quite a few people. I met with the instructor mentioned above and we worked through some ways to organize content.
I found out why there was no audio in my screencast. It does work but for some reason you have to click the speaker button first to make it play. I’ll try some more and see if there is a setting I hit by accident. I had a little frustration creating and saving the screen casts. I did some editing and tagging and then lost them, couldn’t click some buttons because the window they were in wouldn’t fit my screen, and a couple of things like that. It will get easier with use.
Lots more Bluejeans/Blackboard sessions on Thursday and a couple of short meetings and help desk tickets in between.
Friday was a little bit lighter and I was able to help a couple of people to clear up some tickets but couldn’t get into helpdesk again to close them. Next week is shaping up to be BlueJeans intensive. I’m lookging forward to changing up the workshops to be a little more hands on. People will feel more comfortable, and confident, with the tools once they are able to create something. Like my Kaltura experience, hands on practice, try, sometimes fail, try again…
A little post-script. I went into the course where I’d been helping with organization and the instructor has done a fantastic job and I felt so proud of him…. seems a bit silly to me but it really does look good.