This content was published: February 13, 2020. Phone numbers, email addresses, and other information may have changed.
Increasing My Presence
Posted by Rondi Schei
Hi there! Those of you who know me realize how much I like tweaking my course and trying new things out. In this blog, I thought I’d share the top four things I do to create more instructor presence that is not tied to leaving feedback on assignments/discussions or responding to email.
Announcements
I post at least three announcements per week. I avoid posting more than five though. Five would be a rare occasion. I don’t want to overload the students with too many announcements, so I try to be judicious and space them out a bit. :) I do add some icons for a bit of personalization.
That’s me
I’ve scattered pictures of myself throughout the course. I try to use a variety of pictures in different places like my Questions? widget on Course Home or in the module descriptions.
Quiz Submission Views
I use submission views for my Quiz activities. I provide a submission view if a student got and A to congratulate them or to encourage them to try again. In those views, I had begun using emoticons for fun visual interest.
I played around one day with a new app that made an emoji of me based off a selfie. I probably spent too much time with it to be honest, but a few of the animated GIFs that were generated gave me an idea! Oh yes, you know where I am going and not because the picture is below. I replaced my emoticons with an animated emoji of me.
Intelligent Agents
I have an activity that is required but not graded. Students must complete one attempt on my Worksheets before they can access the Challenge Questions. The worksheets provide students with an opportunity to practice the math and graphing that are required on the Challenge Question assignments. I release a detailed answer key if they can get a 60% or better on the practice exercise. (Yes, I do make them work a little for it.)
Intelligent Agents lets me set up an automatic email that will be sent if a student doesn’t get a 60% on the worksheets. This runs every night and I have it set up to only send the first time it is triggered by a student on a particular worksheet.
I’d add a banner or an emoji to this as well, but Brightspace doesn’t embed the image inline with the text. Rather, it’s sent as an attachment. :(
What can you think up?
What might you do in your own class? The sky’s the limit! Well, Brightspace does have it’s own limitations, so maybe not the sky. But there is a lot of room to get creative! :)
Click on image to see animated version
About Rondi Schei
As the Course Development Program Manager for Online Learning, Rondi works with faculty to develop engaging instructional materials and design high quality online courses. more »
Thanks Rondi! Love the animated self-emoji! Good ideas!
Great post! I’ll definitely start using a few (or all). I did not know about Intelligent Agents, so look forward to exploring that tool. Thank you! ~ A
Hi Rondi,
Great job on this post! I didn’t know that the quiz Submission Views could create a reply with images, etc — I like the encouragement you are providing for them to take a quiz again and get a higher score, or just to congratulate them for a good score. Your selfie animated moji is cool too. What tool did you use to create it?
Once again, Rondi…Mind blown…
this is awesome. I want to learn to do all of this. Will you teach a little mini workshop soon? The instructions and links are great, would be fun to review it in person.
I agree with Ron … I had no idea you could customize the Submissions view.
Maybe have a session with people where we get to focus on just that?
(A sort of hands-on session.)
Rondi, I second previous posts in the accolades for your creativity… As well as the request for a workshops (perhaps also on RC campus) on given topics… What app did you use for the emoji-selfie?
Thank you, Rondi. I like GIFs, and I will try to create some!
Awesome post! Plus one on the request for the URL of the emoji-selfie.
What app did I use for the animated emoji’s?
The app I used was AR Emoji by Samsung. However, there are many apps available to create similar emoji’s. You can search your app store.
One word of caution with animated emoji’s, though. You don’t want to have it run on a continuous loop. If the animation doesn’t stop after a few cycles, you may need to run it through a GIF loop changer.
I used a free tool from EZGIF.com to fix my loop count: https://ezgif.com/loop-count. (It was quite easy to do, thank goodness! You don’t need to know anything about loop count for GIFs.)
These are great! I’m a conscientious grader who gives feedback, which sometimes takes longer than I imagine, so I love anything that can happen automatically and not take lots of extra time :)
Thank you!