Reading Time: 2 minutes Standing at my trusty stand-up desk, I again pondered the beginning of this post. Yearning to recapture the muse from my last blog post, I leveled up my music selection to Snarky Puppy’s Trinity and again directed my web browser to chat.openai.com. After acknowledging ChatGPT’s stability warning due to heavy usage, I asked my question: “what are the top three teaching and learning issues with ChatGPT?” ChatGPT provided the following: 1. Bias and ethical considerations: ChatGPT is trained on large amounts of text data from the internet and can reflect the biases in that data. This could potentially impact the accuracy and fairness of responses provided…
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ChatGPT: The New Frontier
Reading Time: 2 minutes Sitting at my stand-up desk, I mused about the beginning of this post. Thwack! The idea came to me like a bug playing tag with my windshield on a South Dakota interstate in the middle of June. I would use ChatGPT, a freshly minted artificial intelligence (AI) chat robot. I asked Siri to play the theme from the movie Inception and carefully steered my browser to http://chat.openai.com. With Hans Zimmers’ electronic sound garden in the background, I placed my cursor in the chat box and typed, “Write a 300 word introduction to Servant Teaching.” ChatGPT began working on the query and produced, word-by-word, six paragraphs. I…
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Beginning of the Semester Reminders and Tips
Reading Time: 2 minutes Welcome to the start of a new semester! Today we’re going be chatting about some tips and reminders to make this first week (and the rest of the semester) easier. We know there’s a big gap between semester starts, so it’s easy for some of these things to slip your memory. Combining Canvas sections You may be teaching multiple sections of the same course but want to combine all your students into one section so you have a single place to work on the course. Canvas makes it simple to combine those multiple sections into one. A brief note: you’ll need to combine them before students…
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Final Thoughts about Vegas
Reading Time: 3 minutes I was raised in Ohio and have never lived outside of it. So Las Vegas was a cultural experience for me, to put it lightly. Here are some of my final thoughts on the conference and Vegas, complete with pictures. Panel Presenters and Audience This was the panel and the audience for our presentation on how our institutions reacted and pivoted to COVID-19. Also: researchers are now starting to look at how that rapid transition has made a lasting impact on education. I attended several sessions on educators’ and students’ perceptions of education (both online and face-to-face). It will be interesting, to say the least, when…
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Lessons from Vegas: Rapid Course Design with Project-Based Learning
Reading Time: 2 minutes While I was in Vegas, another session I attended focused on instructional design. A group of designers from Utah Tech University faced the daunting task of developing or redesigning 175 courses as part of 14 new online programs. And they had to finish it in nine months. Oh, and did I mention there were only four designers? Because there were only four designers. It was clear they would need some help. Their solution was to equip their faculty with the skills and tools needed to design courses. For their instructional method, they decided to employ project-based learning. As an aside: project-based learning is an excellent teaching…
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Lessons from Vegas: The Digital Florilegium
Reading Time: 2 minutes Florilegium is a medieval Latin word that is a combination of flor (flowers) + legere (to gather). The term is first seen in print as a title of a book from 1590. The book was a collection of engraved pictures of flowers. That tradition continued through the 1600s and even today through printed books or curated collections. However, that’s not really where florilegium gets its roots. “Jared, that was a horrible pun. Also I’m lost.” I know. I’m getting there. Florilegium is a reading practice used by medieval scribes as early as the 5th century. It referred to the reading of a manuscript and gathering (legre)…
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Lessons Learned in Las Vegas
Reading Time: 3 minutes I know what you’re thinking…what a bizarre title for a post. Especially on a blog that is part of Cedarville University. You would be right in thinking that if I had not attended the AECT (Association for Educational Communications and Technology) convention in Las Vegas last month. I was invited to be a part of a panel with some other Boise State doctoral students and alums to discuss how our professions changed in response to COVID-19. So I figured that while I’m in the area, I’ll attend some sessions and see what I can bring back to share. This month, I’ll be sharing some of the…
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Kaltura: Creating Videos, Editing Videos, and Creating Playlists
Reading Time: 3 minutes Now that you know how to add existing videos to Kaltura and share those videos, we’ll turn our attention to some additional tools Kaltura provides. Creating Videos using Express Capture and Kaltura Capture Kaltura Capture is already downloaded on classroom/lab computers as well as tech cars. For personal devices, install Kaltura Capture through my Media according to these instructions: download and install Kaltura Capture. With Kaltura Capture, you can capture a screen through either Canvas or Kaltura Media Space (video.cedarville.edu). You have two options: Express Capture and Kaltura Capture Express Capture: use for brief video announcements. Now allows for screen sharing/capturing for up to…
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Three Tips for Writing Clear Content
Reading Time: 2 minutes Now that we’re a few weeks into the semester, let’s revisit a topic that fits into just about every aspect of a course – creating clear content. Whether you’re writing a quick note for your students or a longer piece to use in your course, you’ll need your message to be easily understood. Including just enough information to be clear without over-explaining can be a fine line to walk. Let’s look at some tips for writing content that will keep students focused on the concepts and not slowed down because of word choice or structure. 1. Write with a clear purpose. Know what your goal is…
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How Can My Students Do Presentations in an Online Course?
Reading Time: 2 minutes Having students give presentations is easy enough in a face-to-face class – everyone is present and there’s few technology considerations that have to be made. But once you swap to an online format, a once-simple assignment gets more complex. How can students record presentations that include sharing a screen, video of themselves, and audio? How can students submit their videos so that just the professor can watch them? How can they submit videos so that their peers can view and comment? We’re going to walk through all the options so you can choose what is right for your course, and then we’ll also provide resources for…