Summer Rosters are now available!

You can now view your Summer class roster.

Please go here, https://at.ccconline.org/faculty

Login using your SID and Vista Password.

After logging in please click on "Online Roster"

You can find student e-mail addresses on the roster. Please remember that most colleges have moved to the system e-mail address for students, so we are dependent on students remembering to check their system e-mail account or forward that account to another external e-mail address.

Please contact myself or Frank Vazquez, frank.vazquez@cccs.edu, if you have any trouble accessing your roster.

Thanks!
John

Join us this evening

While you wind down and your having your evening dessert, join Al Turner for a webinar on Communicating with Students

Where: Online via Elluminate. Participants may access beginning at 6:30 PM MT.

FRCC Elluminate site on May 13, 2009: http://elm.elluminate.com/FRONTRANGE/

Or, use this direct link: http://elm.elluminate.com:80/FRONTRANGE/join_meeting.html?meetingId=1240344754861

I'll be having orange sherbert... how about you?

Student Survey Results

Hey everyone! Results of student surveys for Spring term are now available at the faculty gateway. Go to https://at.ccconline.org/faculty/login.php and log in to see your results. Please be sure to review your results and let your program chair know if you have concerns.

Note this from the Faculty Wiki: "The QA process requires that faculty receive a 3.5 or better in each section (on a 5-point scale). Sections where only a small percentage of the students returned the survey or extremely small sections are looked at on a case-by-case basis."

Your program chair will notify you if there is a concern regarding your survey results.

Join us for an Evening Webinar

Per faculty request, Gold Star Faculty, Al Turner, is offering an evening webinar! Join us for Communicating with Students on Wednesday, May 13, 2009 - Beginning at 7:00 PM MT.

The online teaching environment uniquely challenges us to effectively communicate our expectations, teach content, and be responsive to student needs in and out of the classroom. CCCOnline Gold Star faculty, Al Turner, will share the lessons he's learned about positively communicating with students in an online classroom. Turner will share his tips, tricks, and techniques for making the most of his discussions, e-mails, announcements, and grading techniques in his Political Science and International Relations courses.

Where: Online via Elluminate. Participants may access beginning at 6:30 PM MT. Please see "Preparing for Live Attendance" section above.

FRCC Elluminate site on May 13, 2009: http://elm.elluminate.com/FRONTRANGE/
Or, use this direct link: http://elm.elluminate.com:80/FRONTRANGE/join_meeting.html?meetingId=1240344754861

Testing Email

Hi Everyone-

We need to test our email system and make sure we are reaching all of you still. In the not to distant future your program chair will email you to ask if you saw this email. Obviously if you are reading this you do see it and we are communicating with you.

If email from us suddenly stops appearing in your inbox remember you can always go to the blog to see what we have to say. CCCOnlinefacultynews.blogspot.com.

Happy end of the semester!

Lisa Cheney-Steen

Help With Technical Course Issues - ProfHelp

Faculty -

In order to expedite your requests for technical assistance, please keep these points in mind.

1. Log in to the Faculty Gateway site at https://at.ccconline.org/faculty/login.php to access the ProfHelp form when requesting technical assistance.

Because we use this ticketing system to track technical issues, ProfHelp staff will only be able to provide technical assistance if your request is submitted via this form. Emailed help requests will be returned to you asking that you submit your request via the proper system.

2. Do not submit your requests to the 24x7 helpdesk; that helpdesk is designed to provide assistance to students, and your ticket will simply be re-routed to ProfHelp, thus delaying the process.

Thanks!

Donna Welschmeyer
Associate Academic Dean

Spring Grades Due May 7

Dear Faculty;

It's that time of the semester, Spring grades are due no later than Thursday, May 7, 2009.

Please follow the directions below to enter grades for your courses. If you have any questions regarding grades, please contact me (john.schmahl@cccs.edu).

Once you have submitted your grades, we will pull a daily report listing the grades and they will be entered into Banner for the students. Grades will not be viewable by the students until the day after they are entered.

If you have any students needing their grades earlier, please contact John Schmahl, john.schmahl@cccs.edu or Roxanne Manske, roxanne.manske@cccs.edu.

To submit final grades:

go to the online Grade Book here, https://at.ccconline.org/gradebook/input/

Login using your Blackboard Vista login credentials

Select the appropriate section

If you are missing any section(s) or have extra section(s) listed, please contact John Schmahl, john.schmahl@cccs.edu.

Enter the appropriate grade for each student, accepted grades are listed below

Remember, developmental courses (those with course numbers under 100) must use the developmental grades, see below

**All students on the grade roster must be given a grade, even if they have not participated in the section**

Enter a Last Date of Attendance for any students receiving a grade of “F”

Click “Update” and return to the menu to select the next section if needed

Approved grades

Standard courses (course numbers 100 and above, e.g., PSY 101)
A
B
C
D
F (must include last day of attendance)
I (must include incomplete contract)

Developmental courses (course number less than 100, e.g., MAT 060)
S/A
S/B
S/C
U/D
U/F (must include last day of attendance)
I (must include incomplete contract)

Missed the Webinar today!

Tired of your students overusing wikipedia? Would you like them to find more scholarly resources?

At our webinar this morning, Mary Cash shared some important and valuable information about library resources for you and your students. She also discussed some ideas for incorporating information literacy in your assignments and courses.

Visit the archive of this session and others at http://faculty.ccconline.org/index.php?title=TPD_Webinar_Archive

Webinar: Research and Writing Tools @ Our CCCOnline Library

Mary Cash, CCCOnline Library Specialist and Instructional Designer, will facilitate a webinar on Tuesday, April 21, 2009 at 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM.

Tour the CCCOnline Online Library and our Research and Writing Toolkit. Explore online databases and other tools that can help students with their writing. Discuss strategies for encouraging learners to use available library and other scholarly sources of information and develop information literacy skills through coursework!

Access: Participants may enter at 9:30 AM. Access on 4/21/09 from the Elluminate Schedule: http://elm.elluminate.com/FRONTRANGE/ Or, use the following link to open the session from here: http://elm.elluminate.com:80/FRONTRANGE/join_meeting.html?meetingId=1238775170746

E-See you there!

Have You Moved?

You have a lot of details to take care of when you move or otherwise chance your contact information. Please be sure that one of those details you take care of IMMEDIATELY includes providing us with your new contact information (address, telephone number, and email address)any time you make changes! We need your current contact information on file in case we need to contact you OR send you something via snail mail (such as desk copies and those all-important birthday greetings).

To change your contact information, please email carol.verver@cccs.edu. Carol will send you the correct forms. Also, please note that if you get a PERA form from someone other than CCCOnline to use for your address change, even though it indicates that you can make your changes on that form and mail or fax it to PERA, please do not do so! They do not forward that information to us.

Send the form to Carol, and she will make sure that it is taken care of. Thanks!

Student Survey

The student survey will be available some time later today, April 13. Please encourage your students to complete the survey, which will be open until April 24. At that time, the student survey will close and the digital content survey will open.

Thanks!

Anti-Plagiarism Software

Interesting article on the efficacy of anti-plagiarism software programs -- talks about 2 studies that show both Turnitin and Safe Assign to be of limited use.

"If there's a value in these applications, there's a value in a very limited context," said Lang, director of the university's first-year composition program. "I think at one level we suspected that they wouldn't be as good as potentially advertised. … But we were surprised at just how many things were flagged that would never be labeled plagiarism in context."

The Texas Tech research showed that of 400 student papers flagged for further review, only two were found to be plagiarized.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/news/top-news/index.cfm?i=58004

From Barry Dahl via Twitter.

Lisa Cheney-Steen

A Fellow Instructor Needs Some Help

An Exploratory Study of Best Online Teaching Practices in Undergraduate Higher Education Degree Programs of For-profit Institutions

Greetings Faculty Member:

Rufina E. Butler is a doctoral student at Northcentral University majoring in Higher Education Leadership. She is conducting a web-based survey for her dissertation research investigating best online teaching practices of undergraduate faculty at for-profit institutions, and their perceptions of online undergraduate degree programs offered at for-profit institutions. To achieve this purpose, this research will explore faculty’s beliefs of what characteristics of best practices in teaching online exist, investigate the relationships of these characteristics with the best practices adapted by Keeton, Scheckley & Krecji-Griggs, 2002, and provide a framework to understand the characteristics of teaching undergraduate online programs at for-profit institutions. Much of the distance learning research has been devoted to comparative studies of distance and traditional classroom education, and is with the assumption that traditional education is the ideal mode of educational delivery and serves as the gold standard against which all other forms of alternative education should be measured.

The lack of documented evidence of best practice models in for-profit institutions offering programs 100 percent online has prompted this study. With the continued growth of online programs and for-profit institutions, there is a need to identify best practices in teaching online at for-profit institutions and what best practice characteristics contribute to effective teaching.

Rufina is seeking faculty who teach online distance learning and who have taught at for-profit institutions to complete a survey. Your participation will be extremely valuable in examining best practices. Participation in the survey is completely voluntary. The results of the survey can be submitted to any faculty wishing a copy. Possible benefits of this research include contributing a better understanding of online faculty members’ pedagogical philosophies about for-profit institutions online/distance learning programs and what elements of best practices currently exists.

The survey will require approximately 15 minutes to complete, and is completely anonymous. The survey will expire ___April 15, 2009 ______. Please make sure you have time to complete the survey as partial responses are not counted. The survey can be accessed at http://www.questionpro.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=1184312 . Please contact the survey administrator, Rufina E. Butler at rbutler0323@msn.com or her Committee Chair/advisor, Dr. Linda Gaughan at lindagaughan@ncu.edu, if you have questions.

Thanks for your assistance!

Rufina E. Butler
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Education
Northcentral University
Email: rbutler0323@msn.com

Retrieved from "http://xpnyc.org/index.php?title=Survey_Requests"

March 27th Webinar on New Designs for Assessment

Hi Everyone,
I hope you enjoyed the beautiful spring weather this weekend! While we hibernate a bit longer this week, please consider joining us for a webinar on New Designs for Assessment with Alice Bedard-Voorhees from Colorado Mountain College and Karen Kaemmerling of CCCOnline. We will focus on designing assessments that evaluate course objectives, encourage student originality, and allow students to focus on topics that are most relevant to them, and more! The webinar will begin at 1:00 PM on Friday, March 27, 2009. The Session opens at 12:30 PM.

Access from one of the following links:
· http://elm.elluminate.com:80/FRONTRANGE/join_meeting.html?meetingId=1233878178637
· From the date 3/27/09 at the FRCC Elluminate site: http://elm.elluminate.com/FRONTRANGE/

No RSVP is required and if you can’t make it, we will record the session for you to listen to when convenient. Also, you might check out this slide presentation by Alice Bedard-Voorhees and Lisa Marie Johnson on Letting Them Show What They Know: Tech Tools for Assessment . It has some great ideas that you can start thinking about before the webinar.

Midterm grades

Hello Everyone-

This time of year you sometimes have students who need an official midterm grade. Usually it's the student athletes, but also students who are applying to other programs need an official midterm grade.

If a student asks you for an official midterm grade go ahead and send the grade to John Schmahl (John.Schmahl@cccs.edu) or Roxanne Manske (Roxanne.Manske@cccs.edu). Either of them can post it to Banner. That way the student can order an official transcript with the midterm grade included on it. You will probably need to let the student know that they should order the transcript also.

(Banner has a field for midterm grades which we don't normally use, but is exactly what these students need.)

Best,
Lisa Cheney-Steen

Information from Payroll

Good Morning,

The Federal Tax tables in Banner have been updated to reflect the changes from the Federal Stimulus Package. This change will affect the amount of Federal Income tax withheld and may increase your net pay beginning with the March payroll.

If you would like to change your W-4, please contact Randy Macy at Randy.Macy@cccs.edu.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding your pay advice, please fee free to contact the Payroll Office.

Thank you

Paul Grisdale
Director of Central Payroll
Colorado Community College System

Payroll Dates

Hi Everyone-

Hope those of you on the front range haven't been blown completely away yet. It is windy where I am!

I have payroll information from Randy Macy:

Today is census day for spring session two. Contracts for bonus students and partial classes will be done the first part of next week. Bonus contacts will first appear on your March 27th paycheck.

And a little more information for those of you teaching this summer:

Because of payroll deadlines the first pay check for summer semester will not be until July 1st. Because spring session con contracts end on May 22nd that means no one will receive a paycheck in June unless we spread the bonus contracts out farther (through June 5th).

Unless I hear from a majority of faculty by Monday, March 9th, that you want your bonus contracts to end on June 5th, all bonus contracts will end on May 22nd. I’m sorry, but all contracts must end on the same date – we cannot end some on May 22nd and the rest on June 5th.

You can email Randy at Randy.Macy@cccs.edu if you have an opinion on the June paycheck.

By the way, credit hours were up 36% for spring two over last year. Wow!

Lisa Cheney-Steen

Hippocampus Blogs

The warm weather is calling us outside, but I suspect some nasty cold weather is around the corner. When it turns cold again, there is a wealth of information on the web about teaching online. Today I would like to highlight a project that I’m involved with: Hippocampus Teaching Blogs. I focus my posts on techniques for teaching History online. They also have content experts for

Teaching Biology
Teaching Math
Teaching Physics
Teaching History
Teaching Political Science

Happy Reading!
Karen Kaemmerling

Spring Training

Ready for some fresh ideas for your courses? Check out Spring training opportunities available for registration now!

Course Mapping March 23-April 3
This session introduces the concept of course mapping, explores the relationship to CCCOnline Design Process, develops understanding of the components of a course map, and provides faculty an opportunity to begin mapping a course by completing a course project and peer reviewing maps of others.

New Designs for Assessment Webinar March 27th at 1pm with Alice Bedard-Voorhees and Karen Kaemmerling. This webinar will focus on designing assessments that evaluate course objectives, encourage student originality, and allow student to focus on topics that are most relevant to them, and more! No registration required for webinars.

Measuring What Matters March 30-April 10
This session provides you with the opportunity to examine your assessment processes. You will have a chance to learn about the various uses of tools for assessment and begin thinking about adapting some for your courses right away!

E-Portfolio Training April 20-24
This training session will introduce you to the resources available at the E-Colorado.org website, which includes the E-Portfolio program. Receive an E-Portfolio login, learn how to upload and enter data into forms and use templates to create E-Portfolios for a variety of purposes

Just in Time!

Hey Everyone!

It's the first week of a new term and a few of you might be looking at teaching tasks that you haven't thought much about for a few weeks. If there are a couple of small things you can't remember exactly how do do the right resource might be waiting for you on the "Just in Time" resource page on the Faculty Wiki - http://www.faculty.ccconline.org/index.php?title=Just-in-Time!_Resources.

LisaMarie added a topic to that page earlier this week with an example of a "Video Hello". So if you have been thinking about adding a welcome video to your course here are directions and thoughts about that process - http://www.faculty.ccconline.org/index.php?title=LM%27s_Example_Video_Hello.

And here's a very early Save the Date! This year's faculty conference will be Friday, September 25th. So put a giant exclamation point over that day in your date book and plan to attend!

best,

Lisa