Gearing Up!

Please do not reply to this message. If you have questions or comments, please email me directly at donna.welschmeyer@cccs.edu. Thanks!

Fall Session I is very quickly approaching, and I know everyone is busy wrapping up summer tasks and trying to get ready for the August 30 start date. Here are just a few notes of interest and reminders for you.

Email

We continue to work on getting CCCS email access straightened out for everyone. This process has been complicated by a variety of factors that are, unfortunately, out of our control, so we appreciate your continued patience as we work out the kinks! 

TurnItIn

As you may remember from Karen's August 4 post, there is now a plagiarism checking tool available in the course dropbox. Liz Dzabic will host a webinar on this tool in September. We did discover yesterday that if TurnItIn is enabled in a course, duplication of that course somehow turns the tool off, so you will need to enable it again in the duped course. The folks at TurnItIn are working to fix this bug.

Course Verification and Ready

Please remember to verify course content of duped courses within 72 hours of duping and to note them as "ready" when you have completed the course readiness checklist items. We will do a thorough check of courses during the course readiness checks that begin on Thursday, and will notify program chairs of any items that need attention.

Authentication Assignment

Remember to set up a graded, content-based assignment (not a syllabus quiz or similar assignment) that is due prior to census date (the last day to drop).

Bloggers

Many thanks to our summer Faculty Voices bloggers. If you haven't check out those blogs lately, please do! I thoroughly enjoyed reading them, and I think you'll find some great information there.

Portal 

While the portal has had a few growing pains in the last few days due to heavy use at the compuses, I'm still very excited about it! I really like having that one location for all my links and logins, though I still occasionally forget to to there to get everywhere else.

Training and Professional Development

Remember that you need at least one professional development activity before the end of the calendar year, so be thinking about upcoming activities, including tomorrow's webinar on "Second Language Writers" and the upcoming fall faculty conference.

Thanks to you all for a successful summer term, and here's to an exciting fall term!

Donna