Meet the learners in UAF’s edX courses
Over 16,000 learners have chosen to enroll in AlaskaX courses from UAF through the edX platform. Learn how these courses are reaching learners around the globe and sharing UAF’s expertise with the world.
What I love about PlayPosit
UAF Associate Professor of Art Mareca Guthrie teaches Beginning Drawing, which consistently has close to 100 enrollments. She has been experimenting with interactive video for several years and shares eight things she loves about PlayPosit.
Courses on AlaskaX reach across the globe
UAF instructors are reaching a global audience through course offerings on the edX platform. Learn more about developing and delivering AlaskaX courses in this Teaching Tip.
Existing online courses not immune to COVID-19 changes
Courses that were already being taught online were not immune to the rapid changes brought on by COVID-19. After all, online courses exist in the world of humans and that world was not normal.
A Swiss Army knife for video
Kaltura MediaSpace provides a rich set of tools and features for staff, instructors and students to create video. Learn how to make the most out of what it offers.
Autocaptions are new in Kaltura
Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Ethical ramifications. IRB application. Supercontinent Pangaea.Sit in a few classes at UAF and these are terms you may hear. These are also terms that have been accurately transcribed by the new autocaptioning feature in Kaltura, UA’s...Use Zoom videoconferencing in your courses
Many UAF instructors rely on Google Hangouts or Blackboard Collaborate Ultra to facilitate synchronous sessions in their courses. There’s a new tool on the block: Zoom Meetings. Let’s run through what can be accomplished by meeting in Zoom, the new videoconferencing...Streamline video creation with Kaltura Personal Capture
Kaltura Personal Capture is a video creation tool that replaces Kaltura Capturespace. Learn how faculty, students and staff can use Personal Capture to quickly create professional video presentations.
Make your videos interactive with PlayPosit
Adding interactivity has the potential to allow students to better understand your video content. PlayPosit is a tool that allows instructors and students to add quizzes, polls, discussions and extra information to an existing video.
How UAF instructors are improving accessibility
What does it mean for an online course to be accessible? How do you begin to make it accessible? Many UAF instructors have already gone through the journey of addressing accessibility in their courses. Here, several of them share their experiences on the challenges and benefits.
Sharing the responsibility of accessibility
If you are teaching an online course at UAF, you have a clear support structure to provide reasonable accommodations for students. Here, UAF eCampus and UAF Disability Services detail available resources and the responsibilities that are shared with instructors.
Three tips to untangle Blackboard notifications
Customizing notifications in Blackboard allows both instructors and students to better manage their online educational experiences.
Simplify video with Kaltura MediaSpace Go
Student-created video is a great way to increase engagement and presentation skills. However, recording and upload options could be simpler. The mobile app Kaltura MediaSpace Go solves this by letting students and instructors upload, view and download video using their mobile devices.
Spark student communication with Flipgrid
In the experience of teaching online, we often miss the lively nature of a classroom discussion. The asynchronous nature of discussion boards don’t replicate this well. Flipgrid is a relatively new tool that solves part of this problem through structured video-based discussions.
2. Prompting Inquiry: Assessment Strategies
EPIC: Home Activities Discussion Case Studies Resources How do we know whether students are picking up what we’re putting down? Assessments help evaluate student understanding. And what else can they do? What other purposes can they serve? Can some, sometimes,...6. Instructor Presence
EPIC: Home Activities Discussion Case Studies Resources Your presence in your online course is a huge contributing factor to student engagement and success. You can demonstrate your presence in a variety of ways — from creating short, customized videos to...Turn your videos into video quizzes
Creating a video for your course is a great way to engage students and clearly explain content. But how do you keep students watching, and how do you make sure they are grasping the concepts you’re explaining? Kaltura’s Video Quiz feature is a low-stakes and easy way to interactively enhance and further break down a video for student understanding.
Encourage student video creation in Kaltura Mediaspace
Your students have options for demonstrating their knowledge and expertise via video. Kaltura MediaSpace, conveniently integrated with Blackboard, offers a way for students to record, share and store their video demonstrations of content mastery.
“New language developed in UAF linguistics course”
“Nix fadstälnaw r’idi chyai” means “Let’s explore somewhere new’ in Fosk, a language constructed by students in a linguistics course at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Create dynamic video presentations with Kaltura CaptureSpace
Kaltura CaptureSpace is a screen recording and presentation tool available free to all UA students, staff and faculty. Learn how to use it for your class.
Caption your course videos to benefit everyone
Video captions benefit everyone and make a video more useful as well as accessible. Making your videos accessible with captions meets the needs of all students.
Through the Learning Glass – Studio Tour
A taxonomy of course videos produced by UAF eCampus Video can be an important part of a rich online course, particularly for increasing instructor presence and delivering domain knowledge. It’s also something that students now expect to see in a sophisticated...Collect student viewing data in Kaltura Mediaspace
Kaltura Mediaspace, UAF’s video and media delivery platform, gives users greater control over their videos than similar platforms (like YouTube). Instructors can view analytics of videos they deploy from their media gallery inside of Blackboard.
Publish videos to your course with Kaltura Mediaspace
In this Teaching Tip we introduce Kaltura Mediaspace, a new option that gives UAF instructors a lot of control over how a video is presented in their course and how students interact with it.
Use a learning glass to deliver engaging lectures
The “Learning Glass,” sometimes called a Lightboard, is a large piece of glass ringed by LED lights. When fluorescent marker is applied to the surface of the glass, it catches the light from the LEDs and glows clearly and brightly. An instructor can take advantage of this and draw from behind the glass, allowing the audience to see them and their written work at the same time.
UAF eCampus recently installed a Learning Glass unit, joining institutions such as Northwestern, San Diego State University, and University of Florida. Several UAF instructors have already created videos that are being used this semester.
Anticipate the needs and challenges of your online students
Nearly everyone alive today has experience as a student in a traditional, brick and mortar classroom within a traditional classroom paradigm. How many of us have experience as fully online students? There are few basic ways that online instructors without such experience can bridge that gap and accommodate and empathize with the needs of students.
Set up a student Q&A discussion board
Setting up a discussion board designed to allow your students to communicate with one another may lower the number of emails you receive. It will empower students to ask each other quick questions, and it might get them talking. Make sure students know it is a resource that becomes more useful with their active use. As students continue to interact they build relationships which benefit them both during the course and after. Read this teaching tip for ideas on how to implement this type of discussion board.
Linguistics Meets the Art of Language Creation
UAF Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics Robin Shoaps wants to bring conlang enthusiasts and the field of linguistics closer together. She is currently developing a new course at UAF, titled “Elvish, Klingon & Dothraki: The Art & Science of...Teaching language online offers unique opportunities
A well designed and delivered course in any subject area can benefit from a focus on interaction and student contribution. Foreign language courses can be successfully taught online, as well as make more effective use of a teacher’s valuable time. Avoid the managerial teacher-talk of the face-to-face classroom and find more time for students to produce language and engage in one-on-one discussion with the instructor.
Read from a script to make videos accessible
It’s always a good idea to use a script or an outline when shooting a video for your online course. Your speech is more deliberate, and the script ensures that you are on message and do not repeat yourself or wander off topic. But there is another excellent reason to use a script when creating a video. The script can accompany your video as a transcript, and thanks to YouTube’s auto-timing caption feature, it can also serve as closed captions.