The eLearning Team continues to assist faculty through the QM course development process for courses being taught online. For an overview of the course development process, visit our Development Process of Distance Education Courses page.
QM Courses Certified
The following two courses have been QM certified since the last DEITC meeting in November of 2022.
Top Hat Campus Wide Deployment
Top Hat has fully launched free of charge for TAMIU students starting this Spring 2023 through the end of the Fall 2023 semester.
Single Sign on (SSO) was successfully implemented to help with the creation of student accounts and secures students to log in with TAMIU credentials. It also assists with grade syncing from Top Hat to Blackboard. Dr. Mitchell sent an email to all faculty encouraging faculty to take advantage of these great tool especially to assist with taking attendance easily and quickly.
Adding the Top Hat Course Launch in your courses is a very necessary step in order to get your Top Hat course and Blackboard course connected. This same link will allow students to connect to your course and to identify them and sync them with Blackboard.
If you or your college/colleagues would like to schedule an individualized or group training, contact the eLearning Team at elearning@tamiu.edu.
Dr. Coronado discussed the marketing for programs moving to an accelerated online format that was launched the first week of January. The following programs will be delivered in 7-week sub-terms starting March 20, 2023.
- RN to MSN
- MS Bilingual Education
- MS Special Education
- MS Curriculum and Instruction with a specialization in Master Teacher
- Educational Diagnostics Professional Certificates
This Spring 2023, the official move to the new look of Blackboard was made. Why did we update? This was an inevitable next step in moving forward with Blackboard. Blackboard is more focused on updating this newer version as well as making Blackboard now fully accessible and ADA compliant.
Keep in mind that the course content and look within Blackboard did not change. Courses are still in "Original" view. The themes customization (colors) is now meant to be more streamlined to a more consistent color scheme on all courses due to meeting accessibility standards as well. The major changes are on the Institution Page of Blackboard, and the navigation menu is now on the left side of screen.
Feedback from both faculty and students has been mostly positive. Students like that it is a seamless look from the Blackboard App that they were already used to. There have only been a few minor concerns.
Blackboard Base Navigation video and training sessions are available to faculty. Moving to the full Ultra experience is on the roadmap within the next two years.
Acadeum
The Course Exchange Program (CEP) was previously used across the Texas A&M System for course-sharing. Now, the Texas A&M System started an agreement with Acadeum, a third-party course-sharing vendor, that allows institutions to offer their courses to other institutions through their platform. Students in need of a course not being offered at TAMIU may participate in Acadeum based on their Advisor's recommendation.
An Acadeum training will be provided to lead advisors only on the process of CEP. They will be the only ones that will have access to the website and be allowed to recommend students for this CEP. Student would then fill out a Laserfiche form to apply and submit to their advisors for approval.
Concerns regarding Artificial Intelligence (AI) Tools
The next generation of AI writing tools is here. Faculty have noted about students using AI technologies, such as ChatGPT, for their writings and essays. As David Adamson, AI scientist at Turnitin says, "It's going to be transformative, perhaps it will be the graphing calculator of the language arts." It is best for our faculty to know the capabilities of AI and let students know that they are aware of these tools.
We have approached our vendors about their current efforts for AI writing detection. Turnitin already has an AI team working on updating their software. Check out these links from Turnitin: Sneak preview of Turnitin’s AI writing and ChatGPT detection capability and How teachers can prepare for AI-based writing.
PROF Center - Spring 2023
Workshop sessions below are in AIC 125 from 2:00 - 4:00 pm CST. More
- February 24, 2023 - Publication Strategies: To discuss strategies for junior faculty who are starting to publish and the challenges of dealing with academic journals, assessing journal quality (including avoiding predatory journals), and dealing with frequent rejection at high quality journals.
- March 31, 2023 - Grants and Publications: Discuss how faculty should select an academic journal to maximize their chances of promotion and tenure. They will review how the Scimago Journal Ranking web site can be a powerful tool in deciding how to disseminate your research. Speakers will share insights into what promotion and tenure committees' value as significant scholarship. While this workshop targets junior faculty, all students and faculty are welcome.
Next Meeting
Next DEITC meeting will be held on February 27, 2023.
