Welcome to the latest OAT Update, produced by the Office of Academic Technology at CSU Stanislaus
Issue Contents
New Announcements
Reminders
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New Announcements
Evaluating Papers Flagged by Turnitin's AI Indicator
Note: This session will be presented by Turnitin's customer engagement team.
11:00am - 12:00pm, Monday, April 29, 2024
Register Here
About the Session
What happens after the AI indicator has flagged a paper as potentially containing generative AI content? This session is for those who may be reviewing student papers that have been flagged for AI, including student conduct administrators and instructors. If you can benefit from the example of a working model of paper evaluation designed to highlight other signals of AI as part of a contextualized review of student papers, and have experience with the ins and outs of the AI indicator, this session is for you.
Special guest, Marilyn Derby, Associate Director of Student Support and Judicial Affairs at UC Davis, California, will share with us a possible method for evaluating student papers which have been flagged for AI generative content.
Additional Resources
In advance of the session, we recommend reviewing the following:
Registering is one of the only ways to receive a link to the archived session, so please be sure you register, even if you cannot attend.
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New VoiceThread: Simpler, More Accessible, More Powerful
10:00 am - 11:00 am, Tuesday, April 30, 2024
Register Here
Join VoiceThread staff as they introduce an updated look and feel for VoiceThread, one of Stan State's most popular academic technology tools.
In this session, participants will see a full tour of the new VoiceThread interface. We will review the changes to the media player, including jump commenting, bulk actions, and the "one conversation" setting.
We will also see the improved VoiceThread homepage and learn how to access assignments.
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PDF and Video Annotation Assignments Using Discussions Plus
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm, Wednesday, May 1, 2024
Register Here
It's already well known that Discussions Plus is a better way to configure traditional graded discussion activities in Canvas. Did you know that PDF annotation and video annotation assignments are also easy to set up using Discussions Plus?
About the Session
In this webinar, attendees will first be introduced to Discussions Plus and shown how to create PDF annotation activities, where an instructor uploads a PDF file that all students then mark up. By seeing and engaging with their classmates' annotations, students get a deeper understanding of the content of the document. Instructors can even "pre-annotate" a document with question prompts placed at important spots in the text and students can all reply to those prompts. Student annotations are gradable in SpeedGrader!
Next, we'll explore the video annotation tools available in a discussion. Discussions Plus allows students to upload short video files into their posts, and those files can be annotated by other students to provide commentary and feedback that is synced to the video's time line.
Additional Resources
Attendees may find the following support documents helpful to review before the webinar:
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Reminders
AI Tools for Teaching & Learning Course
The Online Course Services department at the Chancellor's Office is offering three instances of their popular "AI Tools for Teaching & Learning" course this summer.
- Summer Session 1: May 27 - June 16, 2024
- Summer Session 2: June 24 - July 28, 2024
- Summer Session 3: July 29 - August 18, 2024
Course Commitment: 3 weeks, 20-25 hours, online, asynchronous.
Cost: Free!
Register now to save your seat.
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Summer 2024 OCS Professional Development
The CSU Online Course Services department is offering several free courses this summer for tenure-track and lecture faculty. All courses are 3 weeks in length, online, asynchronous, and require 15-20 hours.
Registration opens April 1.
Courses:
- QLT Introduction to Teaching Online Using QLT
- QLT Advanced QLT Course in Teaching Online
- QLT Reviewing Courses Using the QLT Instrument
- AI Tools for Teaching & Learning
Course information and registration
Questions? Contact ocs@calstate.edu.
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Generative AI Syllabus Statement
The discussion of AI in education has taken two paths. In one, instructors are exploring how they can actively incorporate some aspect of AI into their teaching and their course design. In the other, instructors are concerned about how students should be allowed (or not) to use AI in their course work.
Providing a statement about AI usage in the course syllabus is important in both cases. The following tool developed by Chris Heard at Pepperdine University aims to help you craft a draft of a statement that works for you.
Generative AI Syllabus Statement Tool
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Moodle End-of-Life Time Line
At the conclusion of the spring 2024 term, OAT will begin winding down the Moodle server currently being hosted by OIT. The following time line was approved by the Academic Technology and Learning Committee on 02/19/24.
- No active courses will be allowed on the platform following spring 2024.
- Moodle will remain available for users to login for document retrieval, grade book retrieval, course backup, etc. through May 31, 2025.
- Moodle will be shut down and unavailable on June 1, 2025.
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Informal QLT Course Assessments for Summer Courses
All instructors who are teaching asynchronous online courses this Summer are invited to have their course informally assessed using the QLT rubric. QLT consists of 52 'objectives' spread across 9 categories of best practices in online course design. It was assembled by a collection of CSU instructional designers and faculty members and was most recently updated in 2022.
After requesting an assessment, OAT will review the course with the QLT rubric and send the feedback to the instructor only. A follow-up consultation to discuss the assessment can be scheduled if desired. This is a great way to get a second pair of eyes on your course for constructive feedback!
Email oatsupport@csustan.edu and specify which course you're interested in. Content should be in a regular Canvas shell.
Additional links:
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Ally Accessibility Gauges
Ally is the automated accessibility checking tool that is installed within Stan State's Canvas system. This tool makes it easy to spot accessibility issues with your course materials and ensure access for all students. There are two main purposes of the Ally tool:
- Scan every piece of content/document/image in a course and gauge its accessibility. Instructors are then guided through steps to address the accessibility issues. The severity of issues (and the lack of issues at all!) are indicated by a color-coded system of gauges.
- Provide students with alternate formats for most content, and even language translations in some cases. Alternate formats may be PDF versions of documents, spoken audio versions of documents, etc.
Gauge Colors & Access
Ally uses a small gauge icon next to each piece of content or image to represent its accessibility status. The colors correspond to those on a traffic stop light:
The gauges are only visible to instructors. Students never see the accessibility status of an item. Instead, they only see a small "download" icon next to each item that allows them to access alternative formats for the item.
More Information
Learn more about Ally and accessibility.
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