Session.
Our speaker for this presentation is
John Beck, a new who is Director of Academic Technology at the College of professional and continuing studies and john I know I just asked you.
The correct correct pronunciation of your name 10 minutes ago, and probably just butchered it so that just goes to show that I'm having one of those weeks so sorry about that. If I got it wrong, but
I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to you for your presentation on selecting technology first successful online learning.
Great. Go ahead and share that with everybody. Hello everyone.
And
There it is. Hi everybody I'm dr john book. And again, I'm the Director of Academic Technology here for the College of professional and Continuing Studies at the University of Oklahoma.
It is my primary job to make sure that our
Programs both live and online have access to our LM s which we are currently using his canvas, and so I have a great working relationship with
It and asked, they asked if I wouldn't mind doing a little presentation talking about some of the technologies that we use in our different courses. Now we have five bachelor's degree programs and five master degree programs that are 100% online and we are kind of going through a
metamorphosis. We originally the College of Liberal Studies and now that we've gone through this change, we've added more departments.
And what's the new departments and new missions. We've got a new name now professional Continuing Studies. So we're looking at adding more courses both live and online to our so we're going to be looking at some of the tools like I said that we use.
I want to talk a little bit about some of the different types of technology. And then as you can see, these are some basic examples that we use.
You will see some of them before. If you've gone to different conferences, you should be familiar with. Soft Chalk and so forth.
But somebody has other ones, you may not be familiar with like salsa, it's specifically designed for Canvas and I'm going to show a couple of things I know that Oklahoma State.
University, he's getting ready to roll into Canvas and I think other institutions in Oklahoma may start looking at that, overall, it's a great product.
And there's a great community out there that supports canvas, and so I hope to be a resource for you to. If you have any questions, and such, you'll be happy to email me and I'll be happy to work with those
So they get started here a little bit. What I want to talk about
His three different types of technology that we currently use is something what we call our freestanding are standalone programs, it's
It's a product that you would purchase, you get your license for it, it stays on your desktop or your laptop and you work with it and then you'll import that material into an our case, our LM s
Second one, I'm going to talk a little bit about his specific plugins that you build that you push into your to your learning management system and salsa.
Is a program that deals with syllabus and I'll talk a little bit about that and why we decided to go with that technology.
And the last thing I want to take a little bit about his web base and I say web base. It's either your log into a website, you're going to use that facility or that information and neither
Downloaded and imported into your course or there might be a possible of this plugging into
Your LM s and so forth. And then I want to give a shout out to Google Drive. There's a lot of things that we do with Google.
And they're keep getting better and better. They keep integrating things into the systems so much more. And so I want to show you a couple of things that we have done to help us globally make some changes and some challenges and so forth.
So first I'm talking about a Soft Chalk.
So Soft Chalk is a, as I said, as a standalone program. If you go to Soft Chalk cloud com you'll be able to get an account. Now they have a great
Education discount on of course they also build their there's their individual licenses or you can do an enterprise license that based off of your f t, we only did
It even though, you know, oh you has a lot more than that. That number definitely helps our college. And so we're able to do a lot more things what Soft Chalk is
It's kind of a hybrid of its, its own standalone kind of course shell. It is a ability to design different items that you can have internally or externally into
An LM s or so forth. And you can see here, this is the website, you can see down here towards the bottom, there's a list of all the different LM S is that it does plug into
I've been using this tool for a about oh my goodness 10 maybe 12 years now back when it used to be a free standing system where it didn't connect to.
Other LM S is now they've added this whole cloud issue and you're able to interact and so forth. So what I want to show a couple of things with Soft Chalk. First I want to do is I want to show you the capabilities, you have these things called lessons and you can build out lessons as
Activities, you can build lessons out as quizzes. These are all these micro little things that you can build, and I believe there's 22 different items.
That you can do. And the nice thing about this is, is that allows you to export it out and you can drop it into courses we use it in a couple of our undergraduate
General Studies courses quick little things to use
Some of them have to deal with like vocabulary. So if they're series of things that you want people to remember or to us. You can build these certain activities. We've gone as far as creating a little bit more interactivity using these items.
The far side that you can do with Soft Chalk is you could actually built a stand alone shell.
A fully integration and we use that for our Navy et C program. So when those sailors have to go out to sea and they don't have internet access.
They can still take courses from the University of Oklahoma and it's all bundled together on one little package and it still gives them the interaction, like it's on a website.
But it is completely self contained and I can show a sample that minute but I just wanted to show
Some ideas of what the tool do so after you get an account and you're able to open up the account, you get this thing called soft Soft Chalk create. And in here you have a lot of power. There's a lot of different things that you can do. You can create
Your own styles and profile. So I created a University of Oklahoma. So every time I want to build out either a course or I want to use a particular tool. It will always dumped into my Oklahoma template. And as you can see, there's lots of different other templates that it can do.
And there's more and more than that, it will provide let me jump over here. So this is where I'm talking a little bit about activities.
As you can see, there's like 21 different assignments 21 different activities that you can do as of right now, most of these will work on a mobile device.
Soft Chuck is transitioning from flash into html5
The new soft Chuck 11 which will be out at the end of April should be 100% HTML five compatible, so we don't have to worry about browsers like
Chrome saying, I'm sorry we don't have flash capability anymore. But in the meantime, when that before that comes out. I'm going to show you a couple of things here. There's some nice activities that you can do this first one here is this drag and drop
And every single one of the assignments or or activities soft top does a wonderful job of you could see where has three different tabs, one of the tabs is how to
And they always give you one example of one will looks like online and also they give you some wonderful step by step tutorials. So if you've never had to do it. You never learned how to do it. Follow the tutorials. It's very simple. So what this particular tool will do is you can
In this case, we're going to create
A list of column A could be in my case is going to be animals and column B is going to be items that I associate with them. So what I have here.
Is just a notepad have dog and then I use
The bar and then I have ball. They have disciplining so I can create a text a notepad. I can put all these different items in here, turn around and I don't have to manually enter these in this, I want to. I'm going to import it in here just to show you how easy it is to import
So boom all the items are in here. They're imported are ready to go. So now I want to take a look at what does this activity really going to do for me.
I'm going to click OK. I'm going to save temporarily. And the nice thing about soft chocolate Gillies gives you a browser view.
So it's going to turn around that's going to create it. See how it dropped it into my template that I created. So this is just the generic
Here's a listing as as as drag items from the bottom into the correct slots so I can come over here and I say, Okay, if a baboons is going to swing.
Notice that if you heard the sound that little acknowledgement that you got it right. But if you turn around and do the wrong. It gives you the
sound that you did it wrong, and it drops back. And so this is a great vocabulary tool doesn't have to be a single word. It could be a sentence.
It can be definitions. But it's that repetitiveness with a particular assignment. Hey, I just want to make sure that students can remember different concepts and they do it in a fun interactivity that allows them to get excited about successfully.
Passing
And so you can also tell to reset and there's other options that you're able to do with this tool.
I can set up a show answers. If I wanted to, I can based on points, it can do a self test, which is another great thing that will integrate with Canvas, for example, or most LM S is
Is that you can set this up, where if you actually want it worth points that go towards the gradebook. You can set this up where it will dump that information integrates
Or if you just want to do it as a self test you can say, oh I over there were seven answer. So I'm going to give them seven points. So every answer they get correct, you know, they'll get a point and so forth.
To show that that's just one activity.
That is available, you can use here crossword
Same thing, I can put in different words I can put in sentences notice it has that important list. So I can go back and create I can go back to that same
List.
That I created a minute ago.
And I can import that in there. And then I can tell it to create the puzzle. So as it creates me the puzzle.
It will do its very best. It's going to look at all the words and this is going to try to generate the the most words with the
Than the letters that are the most yeah based off the letters that are there. So notice that three of them are coming up, because it's the best
Option, you can always click on generate a new puzzle and it will come up with another way you know code and others, another one. And here's another one. And there's another so you can decide
Which ones that were able to work and then whatever. That's the one. Then you'll be able to select it and then you'll be able to support that and push that out to
Your course. But this is great, it's a good opportunity then the nice thing about this is that
Down the road if you decide to change this semester after semester. You can either put it a whole new set of words.
Or you can just come in here and click on, you know, create a new puzzle. And I wanted to be a different design. And so that's a great feature that Soft Chalk allows us to do.
Words word search
You know, there's another option here are secret word
This time I have just a sheet document that has just single list of items.
Same thing, click on here. Save.
And
Voila. Now it's created a word search. So here again, these can be a particular vocabulary words that you want them to find their able to search through the system and find them.
This is great at all levels. This is more than just k 12. This is good. K 20 I know there are lots of vocabulary words in English.
History science sometimes these activities make things a little bit fun to do so that it's not the same boring materials that the students might get time and time again online.
The last. Let's see. Now, the thing that you can do, which I've used and one of my courses is you can create a jigsaw puzzle and under the option, there's areas where you can describe you want them to do certain things. So I've set this up as a
As a activity slash assignment and one of our
Courses where I can choose the difficulty level of pieces. So I'm going to start off with, with four pieces just to make it kind of easy right now and then I'll show you how you can change it.
And then I'm going to upload the file here in a second. But what I've done in the past is have some type of question that they have to figure out what the answer might be. And then they put the puzzle pieces together and it gives them the answer.
Or we've also done it, where the puzzle piece, maybe a chart or a graph that they have to put together and then based off of that information they're able to solve the problem. So I'm going to run over here, I just have a couple of images.
There. This space one
Okay.
So I'm gonna save
And I'm going to put the puzzle on
And so this is the easy for piece puzzle. As I said before, you know, you can have a much more information upon the top or you can have
Directions and such. And all they have to do is just currently they've just drag they drop put the image together.
Now they got the image and then they can said we have graphs and charts and one of ours. So now they're able to see this. And then based off this information they're able to go answer some questions either in a quiz or in another assignment and so forth.
And let me just show you how crazy this can get over here and modify change that to at one pieces. Okay. Save.
And
So there you go. Look at that. If you're really in the puzzles. My goodness, I have no idea where that piece would start, but you can see
That
You know, you could get very elaborate with this particular piece here.
And flashcards and free a lot of LM s have their own built in flash cards. The activity flash cards that are here in Soft Chalk are pretty nice.
Again, I'm going to go in and I can import from that original multiple activities document that I created. And then I can set up or lamb parameters groups.
OK. So again, I could have either the term or I can show the definition first whichever when I want to do.
And then by guessing which one it is. I can tell it to show, and then I can move on to the next one. Move on to the next one and the next one, next one.
We have a professor that uses this and the science course. And so he has all these great formulas. So you see the image you so you can put pictures or images down here. So you see the chemical equation for, you know, particular
Chemical drew a blank. I'm sorry, like ammonia or something and then they would be able to say, oh, that's ammonia and they click on Show and The oh yeah I got it right.
Same thing. You could have worth points. You can have it as a self test, you could have it as a part of the actual assignments that tie back in two canvas or any LM s
So that
Soft Chalk. To give you an idea.
Of what it will do
I will show you an example.
Sorry, I have to change the system here for a second.
Bring it up.
So this is an example of Soft Chalk as a self contained unit that we have. So
Student would be able to click on this start here, which is an HTML start file and then this is where they would get so they would be able to go to the introduction.
And again, this would all be considered offline, but you could also have an online, but so they have the interaction. We've got PDF files. We've got videos that they can watch. We've got audio files. And so this is all 100% self contained
Within the unit here. And so this is a pretty cool idea of what Soft Chalk and the power of soft shock of what it will do
Plug into LM SS. So about a year and a half ago. Oh, you decided to move from desired learn to Canvas. And one of the things that
We've learned over the time is again canvas is a huge wonderful platform are so many different things that you can do with that. There are so many ways of tapping into the system itself to allow you to do so many different things and
Bring up
So if you logged into our, our instance of Canvas and those people who are familiar with it when you login you hit your dashboard. When you get to see some different courses and so forth.
I'm going to go ahead and click on one of the courses that I'm currently teaching and it's one of our history courses.
And inside Canvas is
They have a syllabus page and the basic syllabus page.
Show you.
What that looks like.
So inside Canvas. What it will do is on this top part here isn't as an area that you can edit.
You could put in with your own comments, your own information right appear and then down over here in this area is every time you create an assignment or an assessment and it logs.
That's four points and it shows up in the calendar, it shows appear in the syllabus and it shows up under assignments or discussions and quizzes and so forth. What
What we found lacking, and what the original Kansas was was a better syllabus product we felt that it didn't really help us integrate to what we really wanted it to be.
So one of the things that we did.
Is that we went out to
The cannabis community.
And those people who are members of the or who have Canvas. And if you've not been to Canvas community, you definitely need to go there. This is a great place to get resources to get information.
Everything from as an admin to an instructional designer to a teacher to a faculty member
There's so much information here, people ask about your questions. People get help if you want to change something in Canvas. There's a way of process.
You get enough votes, you'll be able to see you'll see when the changes come place come through. But this is a great, great opportunity to show you that. So to show you what we've done in our what salsa does
Is salsa integrates into Canvas. We're allows us to create a platform where we can have our basic information that you would see in the standards syllabus.
It's here. Are we put in our outcomes are resources of what activities. We're doing basic breakdown of grades are learning outcomes for this. And then, of course, our boilerplate.
Teaching philosophies to our policies and so forth. And then down here. Here's what I was showing you a minute ago. These are all active assignments quizzes discussions and all this interacts with in Kansas. So what salsa does is
This is a template that we have. We turn around and we created these areas that can be edited and areas that can't be edited.
To give us a flexibility. Now what normally what's what's salsas designed to do is, that's for that faculty member, or that teacher to create their own syllabus.
And then I want to walk you through real quickly how you connect it to your LM s and then how it shows up into while you're he saw how it shows up on a canvas. But what we at my college. The college
decided that we wanted to be able to provide a standard look and platform and also the information that the provost requires us to have in our syllabus. So my department.
works very closely with the Department of academic programs where they oversee the content. We all receive the technology we've worked together on trying to
Help our faculty to streamline the work that they have to do in the work that we do. So we're able to go in here, we're able to edit all most of this information. Notice this is not editable, which is fine because it's a standard information.
Go into our outcomes. We can create more and more outcomes. We can turn around and add additional sections. If we wanted to in this, which is great. Same thing with our resources.
We've allowed edited area of resources you can as many resources as you want you can add additional against sections and settings for those
This is where we put our activities grades. This is great. This is where we go ahead and we put in different you know this is our assignment you know one unit to. And the nice thing about this is, every time.
You do something and automatically adds over here, I can continue to expand it, add more notice that once I go past
100 it will automatically go through and set up our percentage and point value that you have to do that now there's some setup behind the scenes that we set up what are 90 at 70 and 60, you know, we'll do
But this is a great WE LOVE THAT THIS features there so we can add as many items as we want. We've had fat, you know, and it doesn't matter. The point value.
It will just continue to do the calculations for us. It's where we put in all our different assignments, you know, this is where we put our outcomes.
And then our boilerplate. Well, this is great. We can build this once we don't have to build a multiple again we can go in and make changes if we want it to globally affect the different things that we do.
Once we've built out this particular item.
Then what we need to do is we have to connect to our LM s. So, this is behind the scenes shaking the hands, and so we just click on it, it's going to ask me to verify who I am. I office a yes I me
Now, what it does is it goes in and it looks in we build all of our courses in pre production area so we we use that standard
Rotation that a lot of computer programmers. What do we have a dev system where we develop we play with we see how things are go when that's done we rolled into our pre production.
Which is the last final cleanest version of that particular course. And then we roll that into production, which is the course that the students see and by you'd be able to have that process we're able to to eliminate
Changes that are problems that may flare up because we missed something, and then being able to roll that same content into multiple sections.
It's a lot easier for us to process that. So once it's done. Again, you can see that all of the different pre production courses that we have, I can assign this to
So I've got a course I've called john test. And so now I've clicked on it and you'll see here it says john test is linked to it now.
I go ahead and I click on save. I wanted to save it does a timestamp last thing I do is I tell it to publish. And when I publish a couple of things. One,
It's going to give me a special HTML view of the item and I just created. It's also going to give me the edited look of that. So if I want to go back and make some edits. I can click on here also it gives me the message that was sent to Canvas. So if everything turns out right
I should be able to jump back over to my dashboard should be able to go into john test, I should be able to click on syllabus. Sorry, wrong button.
And there it is. A minute ago, there was nothing there. And now it's here. And the reason why this is showing it this way is because I didn't put any data into this box. If I would have put data, then it would automatically close this.
For us so salsa it right now it's in this is not something we created this is something that, you know, Utah State University, which works very closely with Canvas or headquarters is in Utah.
They worked very closely with Canvas building out this tool and a gentleman left the university to open up his own business and he had
The rights to this particular tool. He is, this is now this is still in beta. So we're kind of using it, you know, wild wild west here.
Hoping that it doesn't break on this, but there's going to be a final version should be out sometime this year. It's got some major updates.
It's been great. We've been working with the developer giving that person insight and what we've been able to do and changes that we want to do for the system, but this is a really great opportunity for us.
Allows us to interact with Canvas, a little bit better. There's a secondary tool that's called syllabus tracker, which once you put something into
The canvas, then you're able to go to what we call the syllabus tracker and it will then bring up previous terms and current terms Silla by and you'll be able to look at that and if I quickly go here.
soloists tracker.
You'll see two
All the colleges
And retrieve data what so syllabus tracker here is showing us each one of the degree programs that we have. It tells us how many syllables.
Are currently running an active. So we have there's 216 out of 238 so 90% of our syllabus pages have content.
20 to do not have content. And so they're in red. And that can be because of different reasons.
And then the system will break down each individual program and show us the syllabus. So the ones with green check marks. This is great. So you hover it and it takes you a link to that syllabus and
Then if you want to go directly to the course I can have this arrow and it takes me there. And the last thing is it tells me who the instructor is so this is a great tool that our advisors are using now.
And the students will show you multiple instructors so student calls up and say, Hey, I'm really interested in taking
Ellis TD 1003 but I really like a copy of the syllabus. Great. They'll i'd structure our advisors come here that they can come over here, they can click on the few syllabus that could download it.
So they click on it brings them up into a print mode. I can save it as a PDF. I can print it out as a Word document, send it to that student and they have the information that they need for the syllabus.
And so that's a great tool and a great opportunity that we've taken something that is built into Canvas and able to
Exploit it and use it. And this is just one of many different things that can be plugged into a canvas site.
And speaking about Candace
Back.
So I'm gonna talk to you about as these web based thing. So I mean, Google Drive. Everybody likes Google. Google is a great integration with Canvas. That's a great integration with a lot of different things. And what we've been able to do
Is
To dashboard.
Let me go.
Should be our test system. Yeah. Okay. So this just shows you this is an example of one of our templates that we use for our undergraduates administrator leadership program.
So what we wanted to do is we wanted to figure out a way of being able to make global changes being able to do what we need. So we don't have to touch every single class and go back
So we turn around and we created our Google Drive and then inside our Google Drive. We have a canvas folder inside the folder. We have our different programs and so
Then each of our programs we have common buttons.
And so we build out all these common buttons. We put them here in Google Drive or we have specific programs.
Are graduate and here they're different courses.
And it shows their imagery
Like the ones here this imagery and all these button imagery. So what we've done is we turn around, we, we built some tools we created this so we threw it in our Google Drive, then we turn around and inside our Google Drive, we get
The shareable link.
This work.
So we turn around. We grab are shareable link.
And all we need is this code here. Okay. Because what we've done.
Is inside all of our pages.
On our HTML editor.
Here is image. So it's going looking for a Google. It's going to our Google Drive. And here's that code right there.
So if I don't like or, for example, when we had to change from going from the College of Liberal Studies to the College of professional Continuing Studies
Instead of going into every single course and having to change this header showed up on all these different pages.
All we had to do is go into our Google Drive. Grab the new item uploaded into Google and then it, push it out and then all of these globally changed.
We can do the same thing for any of these buttons. We can do the same thing for the the college to of course title. We can even do the same thing for our side banner and so that is really helped us. So when we're processing out hundreds of classes.
Were able to do it at a very easy rate.
We also use tabs in our course. And so if we just need to make some changes. Again, we can go into our Google Drive. We can make our changes globally.
And then they show up here. So, it's amazing. We love Google. We love what it's able to do on top of that inside of of Canvas. There is a lot of
What they call is their, their API calls their, their ability to write a particular javascript goes in, grab some content out of Canvas and back out or push it put content into those
Well, the community that I had showed you a lot of people have written their own programs. A lot of them use
The Google they use Google Sheets to do things. So for example, this is a great Google Sheet. This allows us to go in and we can update I go to one place
I login with Canvas. I set up all of my API configuration. So it'll work the way I needed to work logs into our instance of Kansas.
And then I can turn around and tell it to pull on once you go get specifically from a course this information. So it shows up here and I can publish pages I can turn off pages. I can go and open up
I could do discussion counts and tell it to go through the system for this particular course. How many people have done this.
How many have done, how many we've asked him to do three per, per three per discussion. All of this sits up in Google pulls it out easy place for us to go and that's that I can't say enough about how wonderful we've been able to integrate Google with Canvas.
Yeah.
The last thing is this go animate. We had our former vice president of outreach. A really liked to get into the whole avatar stuff and the interactions. And so we found this company here called Go enemy and that it really cool. You're allowed to
Say crazy create your own will show you there's different levels of area of environments that you can build
Jump into here. Yes, enable my flash, they are getting ready to go to HTML five. So that's one thing that
I know this is all flash right now. And once html5 program will eliminate that need which would be great because then we'll have no problem crossing over from PC to Mac and so forth. But what it's doing here is
So I can choose an office. I can choose different types of office locations and so forth.
I then can turn around and I can add different characters. If I wanted to, by dragging them in and dropping them in. I can make them taller or shorter than I can have them do things. There's actions. So if I want them shopping I can turn around and change what their avatar is doing.
No programming, folks. I just click on a lot of certain things also. The great thing about this is that you can add dialogue.
So I can use my microphone on my computer, I can record something on my iphone and upload the file the audio file onto this and I can build out a nice interaction. So I'm going to show you some examples of what we have done.
To
Alright, so
This was a last slide, and a presentation that our vice president did and
Recorded elsewhere. We turn around, put it together and built it out here and we're able to export that put them into a powerpoint presentation and go from there. Let me show you another example of what
We've been able to do. We had an instructor. She's halfway done with this.
There's no audio for this at this time she hasn't recorded it, but let me play it. So you get an idea of what she's done so.
Instead of, you know, a normal video of who she is and what she does, she thought she would try to put together a, you know, this type of thing. So if there was audio, you would hear her talk about these different things. So you can see where she's from what she likes to do
Where she's been when she graduated. So this is a lot of fun. This is a lot of great active
Things that you can build out again as I showed you earlier, it wasn't programming. It wasn't building anything. It was just literally plugging playing putting in these different things.
That would work. And so this is a great tool. It's not too expensive, but it is one of many different things out there that can be used.
In one last video to show is
Yeah, this you could do a classroom routine. It's not very long. But you can do some great animation with this so
So I wanted to make sure that I gave plenty of time for people to ask any type of question about what they've seen are different types of technology already questions about different ways we may have integrated things into Canvas and so forth. So let's take a look.
I don't think
Just a reminder to everyone Mike's or disabled. So if you have a question, please type it in the chat box.
John while we're waiting to see if we have any questions.
You may have a slide on this, but in case someone has links to connect with you later on or watches this as a recording what would be the way to reach you.
Good point. Here, let me make sure I will put it back on to
There we go.
Whoops.
There we are. So that's my email address and then that's my direct line into my office, you'll be able to contact us, but it is a great
Technologies, fun, fun technology has been great. I've been doing this for
I've been an instructor and dealing with online for over 15 years been dealing. You know, I've been here to you for three years before that I was at the University of Florida for 13 years
There's so much advancements are going on. I just came back from a conference where we were talking about virtual reality and how close that is for
Online Learning and the ability to build out different virtual or even just three dimensional modeling of different items.
So we're going to take a look at some of our science courses, take a look at some of our criminal justice courses to see what else we can do to enhance that online experience for our students.
Any questions come up
Doesn't look like we have any questions at this point.
This was a great presentation. A lot of fun stuff in there. I really want to go out and make a little animation and myself now. So that's
That's really a neat thing. So thank you so much. JOHN for this great presentation. And you can all see there, he john has email and phone number up so thank you once again for for joining us for this and I hope to see everybody over the next couple of weeks.
Great, thank you all.
Thank you. Bye.
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