OIR Says Farewell and Good Luck!
Dr. Freh Wuhib, WSU's Senior Instructional Designer and beloved helper in all things, will be leaving the university for a position at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. She will be taking over as Operations Manager for the Stevens Institute of Artificial intelligence. We are so happy to see her move forward in her career!
Please join us in saying farewell to Freh. She has helped and trained so many in the last few years. Freh's last day is Friday, June 17.
If you were one of Freh's "regulars," please reach out to us at OIR@wichita.edu with your questions!
We're Happy, are YOU?
We here in OIR are quite happy with how the May ARC turned out. Our overall attendance was 117 people attending 39 sessions. If you missed the event or a particular session, you can find all recordings here, at our May schedule page. We also have a request of all our attendees, ! This will help us make decisions about upcoming ARC events.
Plan for the August ARC
The August ARC events will take place August 15-19, which is the week before fall classes. We have a tentative schedule already, and soon you will be able to look at sessions on our August schedule page. We will also offer a new list of LinkedIn Learning challenges, so if you have any great LinkedIn Learning courses you'd like us to share, let us know by emailing OIR@wichita.edu. Here is our general program plan:
- Monday: Advanced topics and a visit from Rick Muma
- Tuesday: Advanced topics and a visit from Shirley Lefever
- Wednesday: New GTA onboarding and other GTA training as well as introductory training for new instructors
- Thursday: Microsoft training and other useful technical training
- Friday: Open lab time in the morning! Get help setting up your class
Metacognition Training Helps Students
In May, the ARC hosted Dr. Moriah Beck, who discussed leveraging metacognition techniques in her classes. Wow! What a session! If you missed it, you missed a lot, but not to worry because we have a recording:
Myths About Teaching and Learning
One of the regular requests we get for the ARC is for a session on good teaching practices. We try to meet that need in a variety of ways. In May, we took on the topic of "myths" about teaching and learning, and we had a great time with it. If you missed this popular session, now's the time to catch up:
WSU Gives You Space
If you work with video or rich image files, or if you simply have a lot of PowerPoints on your computer, you may find yourself running out of storage space on your device. Not to worry! You have oodles of free space available to you through various cloud services that WSU provides. Would you like to learn more? Ali Levine has got your back!
It's Time to Understand OneDrive
You've probably heard about OneDrive lately. It's a feature of Office 365, and in addition to providing you cloud storage, it also makes collaborating on documents and other projects very easy. If you are an instructor, you can also leverage OneDrive in Blackboard, and that functionality will only improve over time as we pursue improved integrations between the two systems. If you are not using OneDrive, now is the time to learn how and make the switch. You will be glad you did:
What's Changed? What's Coming?
In OIR we hear two complaints about Blackboard: It changes too often, and it doesn't change fast enough. Both complaints make sense. It can be frustrating to come back to campus after a break and find that your Blackboard content looks different or behaves in a new way, seemingly without warning. It's equally annoying to have spotted an opportunity for improvement in Blackboard and have to wait months to see it implemented.
We here in OIR try hard to get the word out about changes in the platform, and we make that information available in Teaching Today, at the ARC, and sometimes via WSU Today. If you ever have a question about a change (desired or otherwise!), send us an email to OIR@wichita.edu. If you would like to know more about the exciting changes on the horizon for Blackboard Ultra, we have a .
Grad Students LOVE Theory (and so should you)!
As part of the ARC's ongoing focus on teaching, this May we offered a session on learning theory. GTAs, new instructors, and student-facing staff may really enjoy this talk. We focused on Constructivism, Connectivism, and Behaviorism. If you've ever wondered why "measurable student learning outcomes" focus on behavioral change, this session might put that in context for you, and if nothing else, the crazy "thumbnail" for this video is amusing!
LinkedIn Learning in Your Grade Book!
Do you use LinkedIn Learning in your classes? If so, you'll be delighted to learn that LiL now integrates to the Blackboard gradebook. You can now assign a LiL class to your students, and when they complete it, they will automatically be awarded points from Blackboard. To hear about this new feature as well as some other improvements in LinkedIn Learning, take a look at