Stockton offers many courses in various formats including fully online and mixed hybrid. Often times faculty members are unaware or do not know how to use some of the many resources available for use in the e-learning environment. These resources include best practice guidelines and tools that help enhance the student and faculty experience in the distance education environment.

This Summer, an E-Learning Summer Institute will be held providing intensive e-learning environment training for up to 12 faculty members who are not only planning a new course offering but also those that wish to improve their current course. The institute will be facilitated by Dr. Mark Berg, Associate Professor of Psychology, with assistance from the E-Learning team and other Stockton faculty.

The objectives of the institute are as follows:

• Discuss success and pitfalls of teaching online or hybrid courses
• Outline and provide examples of best practice guidelines for the e-learning environment
• Introduce and instruct faculty members on the various e-learning tools available including the relevant campus resources available for help with the tools
• Set goals and outline milestones with faculty participants for integrating best practices and tools into existing courses or new courses
• Introduce faculty to templates on Blackboard that may be used to facilitate tool usage and organization
• Outline assessment tools for e-learning environments and choose a target tool
• Follow up with goal achievement and help with setbacks in a subsequent meeting during the semester.

Applications for the Institute will be open to all faculty members and will be evaluated based on the merit of each proposal and the potential for integration of best practices and tools into the applicants target course.

Priority will be given to faculty members teaching online or hybrid courses.

Participants will be expected to build new or improve a target course using the best practices and tools presented during the institute. Participants will also be encouraged to present the outcomes of their project at Stockton’s Day of Scholarship.

To view the complete overview and application for the institute, please visit the Summer Institutes page on the IFD website.

Views of the Instructor specific Blackboard video tutorials have more than doubled since the Fall 2014 Semester. With 35 videos produced exclusively for Stockton instructors, the number of views increased from 843 in late September of 2014 to 1909 views as of February 2nd, 2015. The statistics gathered indicate that the time users have spent viewing the videos can be equated to more than two full weeks of in-person training.

The most popular online training videos have been those targeted to users setting up their Blackboard course and copying in content from previous semesters.

The Blackboard specific tool with the most views was Blackboard Collaborate, the virtual classroom option built directly into the Blackboard system. Nearly 20 hours of video was viewed on that tool alone.

With the gain in popularity of on-demand training , the E-learning Office is continuing to produce more videos on various Blackboard related topics. In the next month, Grade Center specific tutorials will be made available to help instructors organize and calculate grades directly inside Blackboard.

With the recent weather related closings there has been a renewed interest in holding virtual classroom sessions. While Blackboard already has this capability via the Blackboard Collaborate tool, an update to be applied over Spring Break will make it easier for Microsoft Windows users to run the application.

The current version of Blackboard Collaborate requires users to have the Java Runtime software installed. This software no longer comes standard on newer computers, increasing the number of steps required to launch a Collaborate session on a Windows PC.

Computer Services will install the latest version of Collaborate on Blackboard during the week of Spring Break. This new version requires that only one software, the collaborate launcher, be installed on a Windows computer. Once installed, a user will be able to launch a Blackboard Collaborate session from any browser with minimal prompts.

The launcher software is already installed on all campus podiums and workstations, which will make the transitions as seamless as possible. For students and instructions with personal computers, new video tutorials will be available to guide users through obtaining and installing the software.

Blackboard Collaborate users on the Macintosh or iOS platforms will not be affected by the update. This update will also not affect the functionality or features of Blackboard Collaborate once a session has been initiated.

If you're viewing this month's E-Luminate newsletter on a tablet or mobile device, you may have noticed a more optimized layout. To accompany new University branding at the College, the E-Luminate newsletter will now scale content to fit tablet and mobile devices to better display text and images without the need to zoom or pan across the screen.

In addition, all images used in the newsletter will be optimized for retina (high resolution) displays, creating sharper images on supported devices such as the iPad and iPhone.