Distance Learning E-News

Monthly Newsletter from CNM's Distance Learning Department                                                 May 2008

DL Leadership Team

 
 Xeturah Woodley
Executive Director

Brian Ditmer
Distance Learning Specialist

Rafael Martinez
Distance Learning Specialist

Patricia Vigil
Distance Learning Specialist

 

Robin Fernandez
Clerical Specialist

Ambrosha Miranda
Student Employee

 

  Contact Information:
Distance Learning Dept.
525 Buena Vista SE
Albuquerque, NM 87106
(505) 224-3317 – office
(505) 224–3321 – fax

 CNM's Distance Learning Site

What's Happening

Congratulations Robin!

Robin Fernandez - DL Office

Our own Robin Fernandez is graduating on May 2nd with an Associate Degree in Accounting

 Congratulations! We wish you continued success!

Blackboard HELP for Students!

Summer 2008 Introduction to Distance Learning Sessions (Drop-In Labs for Students)

Please remember we are offering the Intro to Blackboard for our students at the Montoya and Main Campuses.  The sessions will cover the following:

  1. Logging into Passport.

  2. Locating their course instructions on the DL Homepage.

  3. Creating their Blackboard ID.

  4. Logging into Blackboard: http://elearning.cnm.edu

  5. Self-registering into their Blackboard course.

  6. Briefly showing them how to navigate through the course.

  7. Encouraging them to print off their syllabus and other relevant course materials.

  8. Answering any questions they may have and providing them with helpful hints on how to be successful online students, e.g., login multiple times during the week, email your professor with questions, etc.

The sessions follow a drop-in lab format so we help students as they come to the labs. 
The sessions for Summer 2008 are scheduled as follows:
Monday
May 19		 Tuesday
May 20		 Wednesday
May 21		 Thursday
May 22		 Friday    
May 23		 Saturday
May 24
Main
Campus
10:00am-
12:00 Noon
Room MS103		 Main
Campus
9:00am-
11:00am
Room MS103		        
  Montoya
Campus
11:00am-
1:00pm
Room
I105		   Montoya
Campus
11:00am-
1:00pm
Room
I105		    
Main
Campus
3:00pm-
5:00pm
Room MS103		   Main
Campus
3:00pm-
5:00pm
Room MS103		     Montoya
Campus
10:00am-
1:00pm
Room
I105
Montoya
Campus
5:00pm-
7:00pm
Room
I105		 Main Campus
5:00pm-
7:00pm
Room
MS103		      





Please begin letting your students know about these sessions.  This will help the students feel comfortable with their online course.  For your convenience, you can download the schedule in WORD and PDF format.

BRIAN'S CORNER

Blackboard backup instructions & making your class available for 1st day of the summer term.

This is a reminder of the steps you need to take to assure a smooth transition from the Spring to the Summer term.

Here are the steps to properly backup your course shell at the end of the term.

1.  Back up your Blackboard courses as soon as your class is over (or NO LATER than Monday morning, May 5). Make sure you download the backups to your computer. For Blackboard - you are only allowed one backup to reside in the queue, but you can download one, delete the one present in the queue and make another if you desire.

2.  Make sure that your Blackboard Course will be available for self-registration by 8:00 AM on the day your class begins (Week of May 19, 2008).

  • Manage Course/Settings/User Manager/ Set Value True - this will allow users to register themselves as a Student in a section.
    Instructions in PDF Format

The Blackboard access policy: All courses must be open for self registration, unless otherwise stated, on the first day of the term the course starts at 8am. Please note that if a course is not open for self registration, it either must be populated by 8am on the first day of that class, or a username and password must be sent to all students in the course so that they may add themselves to the course.

Note to Web-Enhanced Faculty: If you are slated to teach one or more DL sections this summer, please keep in mind that your sections are not automatically rolled over from term to term.  You need to email me indicating which course and section you need to roll over.

Congratulations Lisa!
 Lisa Orick-Martinez

Congratulations to Lisa Orick-Martinez, who was recently elected President of the International Listening Association (ILA).

The ILA is a group of professionals from all research, academic and training areas who are interested in all aspects of listening. She was the First Vice-President, prior to accepting the leadership roll and has had the honor of working with some of the world leaders in the research and training of listening. Lisa is a full-time Communication Studies Professor at Central New Mexico Community College and has been teaching since 1991.

When I asked Lisa what it means to be a better listener she said, “most people think that because we are born with the ability to hear, that we know how to listen …and that’s not true.” Lisa went on to say that, “affective listening is a skill that can be learned.” “In the United States, we place more importance on speaking rather than listening,” she added. “Interesting,” I said.

When I asked Lisa how I could better my listening skills, she said, “stop talking.” “Concentrate on what the person who’s talking is saying, not on what your reply is going to be.” “Ah,” I said, “I’m listening to what you’re saying.”

To learn more about the International Listening Association visit their web-site at: www.listen.org

Lisa is married to Joey Martinez and they are the proud parents of Ripley and Scout, their rescued dogs.

DL Faculty Spotlight

Kathy Demitrakis 
 
Kathy Demitrakis,
Psychology Instructor,
School of Communication, Humanities & Social Sciences
 

Kathy is one of our most prolific DL Instructors.  She teaches Introduction to Psychology PSY 1105. 

Here are a couple of answers Kathy provided us in her interview.  Make sure to click on the link below to read the entire interview.

Question:   If you could change one thing about your online courses, what would it be and why? 

Answer:
I have the same concerns about retention and academic success in my online courses that I do in my face-to-face classes.  Being better able to address these concerns would be a positive change.

Question:    Knowing what you now know about online instruction, what advice would you give to brand new instructors

Answer:

Because you are not “visible” to students, it is helpful to remember to be patient and to give students the important information for the class in many different forms and via several available channels.  I write my syllabi in time for them to be posted by the distance learning office at the start of registration so that students who take my class have all that information (policies, requirements, due dates) prior to the start of the term.

Kathy Demitrakis' complete interview

Announcements
Blackboard Scheduled Maintenance Outage

The outage will be on Saturday May 10th starting at 6pm till midnight.  The outage will affect all services at CNM besides Blackboard (elearning) including: mail, web, registration & Passport. 
 

Instructional Technology Council

During the next few months, the Distance Learning Department is hosting a series of professional development audioconferences for faculty members that are interested.  The audioconference presentations are put on by the ITC (the organization responsible for the eLearning Conferences) and they feature speakers from across the nation.  Here are upcoming sessions that are being made available for our online, hybrid and web-enhanced faculty members:

1. Tastes Del.icio.us! Instructional Uses of Social Bookmarking
 May 6, 2008 - 12:00pm-1:00pm (MST)
Main Campus JS401C
Presenter: Britt Watwood, Center for Teaching Excellence, Virginia Commonwealth University
 
2. Multi-Modal, Interactive Language Learning
May 13, 2008 - 12:00pm-1:00pm (MST)
Main Campus JS401C
Presenter: Li-Lee Tunceren and Susan Benson, ESL Instructors, St. Petersburg College

3. Predicting and Ensuring Student Success in the Online Classroom
June 10, 2008 - 12:00pm-1:00pm (MST)
Main Campus JS401C
Presenters: Michael Nagle, Professor of History and Political Science, Dr. Amy Wojciechowski, Professor of Business Studies, West Shore Community College		  

All audioconference sessions will take place in JS 401C (LRD Conference Room in the Library) on the Tuesdays listed above. Seating is limited so if you would like to attend, please drop a quick email to Robin Fernandez (rfernandez14@cnm.edu) so we can have handouts for you.  Again, the next session will be on May 6 and we’d love to see you there!  Thanks!		  

Teaching Tips
American with Disabilities Act Compliance and Your Online Course

by Patricia Vigil, DL Specialist


"Section 508 was enacted to eliminate barriers in information technology, to make available new opportunities for people with disabilities, and to encourage development of technologies that will help achieve these Patricia Vigilgoals.” (http://www.section508.gov)

Everyone who uses technology does so in a variety of different ways. It may seem that technology is set up in a way that everyone follows the same methods to accomplish specific tasks. But this is not necessarily true; take for example the use of the computer in your online courses. Students and faculty may have a variety of learning styles and methods of retrieving the information provided on the screen. For students with disabilities certain software, hardware, and assistive resources are needed within online courses. There are a variety of assistive technology devices that can be used to meet the needs of these students (i.e. screen readers, voice recognition software, text-to-voice and voice-to-text software, close-captioning).  In addition to these assistive devices, the web pages also need to be designed suitably so students with disabilities can access the information.

In the Online Instructor Certification (OIC) course the following link was provided http://www3.baylor.edu/~Sharon_P_Johnson/ada/index.htm .

This link provides you with a compliance guide. The second link provided was watchfire, which checked your web pages for compliance. This service is no longer provided through the watchfire website. The following websites can now be used to check the compliance of your web pages http://www.tawdis.net/taw3/cms/en, http://wave.webaim.org/ .

There is also a checklist that is provided by the Web Accessibility Initiative as a reference document. This checklist can help guide you through the steps that can be taken to become ADA compliant in you online courses. http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/full-checklist.pdf

 

 We'd love to hear your feedback about our newsletter.  Please send comments to martiner@cnm.edu