Showcase
ECE Professor Boosts Engagement with Creative Videos
Maqsood Mughal’s expertise with Open Broadcaster Suite (OBS), an open source software for creating and streaming videos, has been well-earned. After first hearing about the software during a KEEN (Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network) workshop in 2019, it again flew across his radar in 2020, during the Online Pedagogy Workshop. “Last summer, I took this online […]
SafeAssign gets a makeover!
In a previous post we discussed the how and why’s of using plagiarism detection software: https://wp.wpi.edu/atc-ttl/2010/03/18/avoiding-plagiarism/, if you have not read this post it is highly recommended to acquaint you with the world of plagiarism detection. In this post we focused predominately on the detection tool available here at WPI called Safe Assign. Safe Assign […]
Blackboard 9.1 Feature Spotlight: Discussion Board Enhancements
About Discussions The latest version of blackboard 9.1 brought with it several enhancements including a facelift in the Discussion Board. The Discussion Board has all of the old features we know and love with an all new interface! According to Blackboard: Highlights include: All posts on one page – all of the posts in a […]
Blackboard Feature Spotlight: Date Management
Setting availability dates manually has always been a bit of a hassle—you’d have to click the contextual menu for an item, edit it, and change the date there. That’s really time-consuming, especially if you’ve just migrated a whole new course site. Thankfully, a new Blackboard tool helps us shorten that process. The Date Management tool […]
Blackboard 9.1 Feature Spotlight: Test Exceptions
The latest version of Blackboard 9.1 introduces a long sought after feature – Test Exceptions! Have a student who needs extra time? Would you like to control the way feedback is displayed in a granular fashion? Well now you can all on one screen! When deploying a test you will now have access to two […]
Echo360 Acquires ThinkBinder, an online collaboration tool for student project teams
Echo360, the company that powers WPI’s lecture capturing technologies, published a press release late yesterday announcing their acquisition of ThinkBinder, an online collaboration tool intended for student project teams. ThinkBinder allows teams to have private, group-only discussion boards, file repositories, whiteboard space, and video chats – all hosted in the cloud – for managing project-related work. This news is hot […]
Taking Classes with Google Glasses: Wearable Computers and Higher Education
Ok Glass, show me the future. With the first set of Google’s shiny new specs being sent out to the handful of lucky applicants, it’s only a matter of time before students and instructors end up with a pair over their eyes in a class. And while it’s tempting to label the lenses as just […]
Blackboard 9.1 Feature Spotlight: Spaces
You’ve set up your profile in the brand-new release of Blackboard. Great! Now, what are you going to do with it? One option is to set up a “Space”, which is essentially a tiny social organization with very basic features. Anyone can create a space if they have a Blackboard account—it doesn’t matter if you’re […]
Teaching Naked: a Review
Disclaimer: If you found this blog post by Googling, you may or may not be in the right place since the title of this blog post, and the book being reviewed, may seem somewhat… “controversial”… However, I assure you that the only thing that you might find that is even remotely controversial, but certainly not […]
The MOOC and You!
Communities of Practice have been long standing features at Higher Education Institutions; Journal Clubs, Special Interest Groups, User Groups, and even Study Groups are all examples of how we come together in academia to form focused groups interested in learning and developing together. I do not think that anyone out there would argue with me […]
