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BC Post-secondary digital literacy – some takeaways for instructors

Instructors, staff, and administrators from Douglas College have been engaging in discussions of the future of digital learning in B.C.’s post-secondary education system. Here are some highlights from 2024 digital literacy events that will directly impact Douglas College and changes being asked of individual college instructors.

Emphasis for ethical, accessible, and responsive use of technology

Maha Bali’s powerful keynote talk “Nurturing Socially Just Distributed Care Ecosystems in the Digital Learning Strategy” emphasized the importance of compassion. Link to Maha Bali’s education blog, and the Digital Literacies category

image from Maha Bali’s Digital Literacies webpage

Professional Development Opportunities

Establishing a Professional Development Hub – dialogue facilitated by Melanie Latham, TRU
BC Campus Events page is a great place to look for upcoming PD opportunities, and access past event archives. Programs like the Facilitating Learning Online (FLO) series, the EdTech Sandbox series, and the Challenge Series offer training to enhance digital teaching skills.
Here is a good example to consider:
10 GenAI Challenge Series Inspired by the creative approach of the Agora Challenge Bank, BCcampus Open Education challenges, and past digital literacy Twitter challenges, BCcampus is excited to present a series of Generative AI in Education challenges! This open series is designed to build critical literacy around GenAI in a fun, engaging way, helping participants not only develop practical skills but also gain a deeper understanding of GenAI’s transformative potential in higher education. Join us for 10 interactive challenges that will expand your capabilities and critical perspectives on AI in learning! This is a self-paced, asynchronous, not-facilitated challenge series designed by Lucas Wright.
Integrating GenAI in Assignments and Assessments (artifacts from the workshop).
- The workshop recording for your reference
- Presentation slides and the workshop worksheet
- A custom GPT bot designed to help review and reinforce the workshop content

Supporting Digital Literacy Development with Open Educational Resources

The BC Digital Literacy Hub is a public, online collection of Open Educational Resources designed for instructors in post-secondary institutions in British Columbia. The goal is to help educators, including learning and teaching staff, integrate digital literacy materials easily into existing courses and improve their own digital literacy skills. In collaboration with the Ministry of Post-secondary Education and Future Skills, BCcampus developed this collection to support the implementation of the B.C. Post-Secondary Digital Literacy Framework. The collection was created for educators with the support and guidance from educational professionals across the province. Link to recording
The Digital Literacy Challenge was an eight-week asynchronous challenge to help participants expand their digital literacy toolkit. The resources are designed to help incorporate the eight competencies outlined in the B.C. Digital Literacy Framework into teaching practice, and how to support student success through digital literacy.

Enhancing Digital Equity

In the Digital Learning Strategy Forum session titled The Landscape of Merging Modalities and Planning for Multi-Access Learning Pathways, Valerie Irvine of the University of Victoria presented their experiences with merging modalities in the post-secondary classroom. With her method of multi-access learning, Irvine has successfully taught post-secondary students who were learning remotely, on-campus, blended, individually, and in groups. Dr. Irvine encouraged participants to consider the various obstacles to learning, and the different ways minority groups prefer to learn. Read this background article to learn more.

Ethical and Accessible Technology

Mindfulness of ethical and accessible considerations when using educational technology. Mitra Manesh, from the UCLA Center for Mindful Awareness, facilitated a workshop on Mindfulness & Technology on May 15, 2024. Link to notes Mitra provided
Protection of Indigenous knowledge and intellectual property. Transcript from the “Weaving Indigenous Ways of Knowing into Digital Literacy” session hosted on August 26, 2024 by BC Campus
Ensuring digital content is accessible to students with disabilities. Please contact the Douglas College Accessibility Services for support with this competency.

Impact on Individual College Instructors

The BC Digital Literacy Framework, Strategy, and ongoing related events are intended to have significant impact on how instructors approach their teaching practices.

Instructors are expected to:

Incorporate Digital Literacy: Integrate digital literacy frameworks into curriculum, and ensure students are well-versed in navigating digital environments.
Participate in Professional Development: Take advantage of professional development opportunities to enhance digital teaching skills and stay current with technological advancements.
Utilize (and contribute) Shared Resources: Use shared educational resources and technology to improve the quality of teaching materials and reduce costs.
Support Digital Equity: Support initiatives that promote digital equity, ensuring all students have access to the necessary digital tools and resources.
Ensure Ethical and Accessible Use of Technology: Be mindful of ethical considerations and ensure their digital content is accessible to all students, including those with disabilities.

By embracing these changes, instructors can contribute to a more inclusive, equitable, and high-quality digital learning environment.

Links

BC Post-secondary Digital Learning Strategy

Integrating Digital Literacy in Your Classroom: Skills, Stories, and Strategies (2024 ETUG Spring Workshop)Link to BC Campus recordings archive

Using Blackboard Groups to Create Sign-up Sheets

If you have ever used a paper sign-up sheet for something like choosing a time to meet or selecting a group project theme, you might consider using Blackboard Groups to do the same thing online. Here is how you can do that in Blackboard Original and with Blackboard Ultra.

Blackboard Original

Screenshot of the video — Click here to watch the video

Go to your course and scroll down under Course Management and click on Users and Groups and then Groups.
Move your mouse over Create and under Group Set choose Self-Enroll.
Give it a name and a description. It might be something like Group Project Themes or Meeting Times or something like that. You can give more details in the Description area.
Next to Group is visible to students, choose Sign-up Sheet Only.
Uncheck everything under Tool Availability.
Uncheck Allow Personalization.
Give a name to the sign-up sheet. It could be the same as above. You can also put in the instructions.
Put in the maximum number of students for each item.
Put in the number of groups. The number of groups times the number of members should be equal to the number of students in your class.
Click on Submit.
If you haven’t added Groups to your menu, do that now. Go to the top of your menu and hover over the plus button at the top. Choose Tool Link, give it a name for the menu, choose Groups in Type, check the Available to Users, and then click on Submit.
You will want to now edit the name of each group to match the theme or date or whatever else you are wanting them to choose. Click on Groups and then click on the grey button next to the name of the first group. Choose Edit Group.
Rename it and then click on Submit. Continue doing this for the other groups.

Blackboard Ultra

Open your Ultra course and click on View sets & groups under Course Groups in the left-side menu.
It might open a new group set automatically. If it doesn’t, click on New Group Set in the top-right corner.
Where it says New Group Set and the date along the top, click on that and give your group set a name and hit the enter key on your keyboard.
In the top-right corner, click on Hidden from students and then choose Visible to students.
Next to Group students, choose Self-enrollment.
You can give your group set a description and you can choose when students can access it.
Choose the number of students per group and check off Hide enrolled members if you don’t want students knowing who is in each group before they select.
Right above New Group 1, there is a plus symbol in the middle of the screen. Click on that to add new groups. Add as many groups as you would like. The number of groups times the number of members per group should equal the number of students in your class.
Click on the name of each group to edit the name to the theme, time, or whatever else you are wanting them to select. You can also add a group description for more details.
Click on Save.

Setting up your Blackboard Grade Center

I was starting to set up my Blackboard course for next semester and I thought it might be good for me to take you through how I set up my Blackboard Grade Center before I open the course to my students. I recorded a series of four videos to take you through each step and I posted them below. Please let me know if there are any other videos you would like recorded on using the Grade Center and I can work on adding those to this list.

Click on the images below to watch each video.

How to use Hypothesis in your course

In September 2021, Douglas College started a pilot project with Hypothesis to add their social annotation tool to Blackboard. Anyone with a Blackboard course can now add a Hypothesis document to your course and students can work together to annotate the text. This pilot project will continue until the end of the Winter 2022 semester [Update: This has been extended once again for the 2022-2023 school year].

To give you an overview of Hypothesis and how it can be used in your course, David Wright graciously offered to record a video with me to take us through how he has used it in his own classes.

If you are interested in learning how to add it to your course, here is a short video on how to do that in Blackboard.

More information on the Hypothesis pilot can be found on DC Connect.

Get a public link to a Kaltura video

If you want to share a Kaltura video outside of your Blackboard course, you will need to get a public link. Here is a video on how to find that public link to share with others.

Open your Blackboard course into a new browser tab

With the changes to the Blackboard navigation, some faculty have mentioned they would like to open their courses up in a separate window or tab. Watch this short 2.5 minute video on how to do this.

Download a copy of a video in My Media on Kaltura

If you have ever wanted to download a copy of a video you have in My Media in Kaltura, this is how you can do that.

Create a sign-up sheet in Blackboard

If you ever wanted to create a simple way for students to choose a meeting time with you without leaving Blackboard, you can do this using the Groups function. This video demonstrates how it works. At the end of the video, you can click on the hotspot on the screen to take you to another video that goes step-by-step through the process of doing this yourself.

Getting started with Kaltura

What is Kaltura?

Kaltura is a video hosting service we have access to at Douglas College. It works in a similar way that YouTube does, but it is hosted in Canada and has a number of security features that restrict who has access.

Why does Douglas College use Kaltura?

As mentioned above, the privacy and security features help the college maintain privacy compliance. It also is a lot less expensive than hosting the videos using Blackboard or other cloud services. In fact, our Blackboard access only has 500mb of storage space per course. That might be enough to host one or two videos at most on Blackboard. Kaltura gives users a lot of space to host their videos without worrying about taking up Blackboard space.

What are some of the main features of Kaltura?

Other than hosting streaming video, Kaltura also has:

machine-generated captions that can be manually edited;
a way of recording videos and screencasts;
the chance to create interactive videos with questions;
the ability to bookmark different sections of videos to give users the ability to skip to different parts of the video;
a video editor;
the tools to create video playlists;
and more!

What is the difference between My Media and Media Gallery?

This can sometimes be confusing for new users, but it basically goes like this.

My Media = a personal space for each user to host their own videos. No one other than yourself has access to this space.

Media Gallery = a space within each class that everyone in that class has access to. This is where the teacher, and even the students, can share videos they are hosting in their My Media space with the rest of the class. No videos are actually stored in the Media Gallery. It is only a space to share videos.

How do I access the My Media space?

The easiest way is to create a My Media link in your course module area. When someone in that class clicks on the link, either teacher or student, Kaltura looks at who clicked on it and directs them to that person’s own My Media space. No one would be able to access your My Media space except you.

Here is how to add a My Media link to your course module page.

How do I add videos to My Media?

There are two main ways of getting videos to My Media: upload and record.

Here is how you can upload a video to My Media

What is the difference between Express Capture and Kaltura Capture?

There are two ways to record video with Kaltura.

Express Capture is a simple webcam video recording that doesn’t require any installed software. It simply uses your web browser (e.g. Mozilla Firefox) to record a webcam video with sound.

Kaltura Capture is a program you download from Kaltura and install on your computer. It can be used to record screencasts, videos with both a webcam and screen recording. It then uploads those videos to your My Media section of Kaltura.

Here is how to use Express Capture

Here is how to use Kaltura Capture

How do I add captions to my videos?

Kaltura can create machine-generated captions of your videos which can then be edited. The captioning has increasingly gotten better as more people use the service. After saying that, you will likely also want to edit the captions after Kaltura has done its job.

Here is how you can add machine-generated captions and then edit them.

Hopefully that will get you started with Kaltura. In a future post, I will share how to take advantage of the more advanced features of Kaltura.

Send an email to everyone in your Blackboard course (Douglas College email address)

To email everyone in your course, you can use the email function within Blackboard. It will email your students using their Douglas College email address.

Click on the image below to watch the video (39 seconds).