An Apple A Day Keeps The Doctor Away
Now that Spring is springing, it’s time to run
through a routine checkup to ensure that your
Blackboard course is going to stay healthy.
First, if you haven’t yet made your course
available to students, you should. (Click
here for instructions). Assuming your
students are able to get into your course site, you
may want to take a look at how and when your
students are using the course. Course Statistics are
available, as discussed back in
episode 73 and shown in the online
video demonstration. You may also want to
examine the Performance Dashboard, as mentioned back
in
episode 69, which can easily show when the last
time each student access the course was.
Now that you have a pretty good idea of how and
when your students are accessing your course, you
should also go through the exercise of backing up
your course site. To do this, just follow the
instructions in the online video demonstration for
Archiving Your Blackboard Course (Click
here for instructions).
At this point you should feel confident that your
students are using your course, that you have a
backup of your course saved, and that all things
Blackboard are working well. If for some reason you
don’t feel this way, feel free to contact Blackboard
Technical Support at
onlineclasses@palomar.edu or extension 2862 and
we can try to help you.
Giving Tests and Quizzes in Blackboard: Tips
and Suggestions
Many online instructors give at least some of
their tests online through Blackboard. In this
Teaching with Technology segment I’ll offer some
ideas regarding online testing that others have
found useful. And by the way, I know at least a
couple of instructors who teach only on-campus
classes who had their classes take one of the
required tests online. In both cases, the
instructors missed a couple of classes and didn’t
want to use another class period for a test.
Changing the test design a bit and having the
students take the test online solved this dilemma
and was a big hit with the students.
Here are some of the issues that frequently come
up with online testing along with tips and
suggestions for implementing them.
Issue: I can see some advantages in giving
some tests online but I’m worried about cheating.
Suggestions to minimize cheating:
- Structure the online class to employ many
small online tests or quizzes – it’s extremely
unlikely that someone could arrange to have all
of them taken by another person.
- Structure online tests to emphasize higher
order thinking – such as applying concepts -
instead of using all multiple-choice items.
- Use multiple-choice items but randomize the
test items so each student gets an equivalent,
but somewhat different test (Blackboard permits
pulling questions randomly from a pool of
questions).
- Create timed tests so that students don’t
have time to look up answers.
- Instead of showing a complete page of test
items, require students to answer the question,
click “Submit,” answer another question, click
“Submit” and so on.
- Enter html code that prevents students from
printing or copying test items. If the following
code in entered into the Instructions area of a
test or quiz, students will be prevented from
printing, copying, or pasting test items. If
you’re interested in this send me an email and
I’ll send you step-by-step directions.
- Require students to take the online tests in
a supervised setting (i.e. Sylvan Learning
Centers).
Issue: I want students to see the correct
answers to an online test but only after all
students have taken the test – can I do this?
Answer: Yes, absolutely. You can set up
the test so that right after a student completes the
test he/she will either see nothing or will see the
score only – no correct answers. Later, after
everyone has finished taking the test, you can go
back and modify the test settings so that, when a
student clicks on his/her grade in the gradebook, it
will show the completed test, his/her answers, and
the correct answers.
Issue: I want to set up a test such that
students can take it multiple times and I want to be
able to see the answers for each attempt – can all
the answers be saved and viewed by me later?
Answer: When students are allowed to take
assessments multiple times, the grade entered into
the Gradebook can be any of the following choices
that you specify:
- Grade of Last Attempt,
- Grade of First Attempt,
- Highest Grade,
- Lowest Grade,
- Average of Grades
Most Best Practice recommendations suggest that
Blackboard tests can be most advantageously used
when they are one component of an overall assessment
system. In other words, while Blackboard offers a
sophisticated testing module, it is best to
emphasize other ways to assess student learning as
well.
Persistent URLs to Journal Database Articles
I have created a screen video, linked below, that
demonstrates how to create persistent URLs which
link directly to journal articles in the journal
databases at Palomar College. These URLs can
be used in Blackboard or on a web page, and permit
access to the articles in the colleges electronic
research databases, from on or off campus. If
the user is off campus, an authentication process is
invoked for the first instance in any browser
session that one of these links is clicked.
Students or staff from off campus use their Palomar
authentication credentials (the same user name and
password used for eServices and Blackboard) to
access these articles. There are several
advantages to using persistent URLs:
- There is no need to xerox and distribute
articles in class or to convert the article to
PDF format and place it in Blackboard (an
activity that is probably in violation of
copyright anyway, unless special permission has
been obtained);
- Students can be directed specifically to the
articles the professor wants them to read;
- Since the links are persistent, they can be
copied from semester to semester to new
Blackboard course shells and they will still
work. They will only cease to work when
either the online database changes the base-URL
(and the whole idea is that that will not
happen) or the college ceases to subscribe to
the database.
Not all of the databases subscribed to by the
college permit the use of persistent URLs, but the
primary ones do.
Recently the library, who maintains the
subscriptions to these electronic databases and
manages access to them, has changed the means of
off-campus access recently. From on-campus,
access is as it has always been and requires no user
name or password. From off-campus, however,
the databases are now accessed via a proxy server
which passes user which authenticates users based on
their Palomar login credentials, that is, their
Active Directory (eServices and Blackboard) username
and password and then confirms them as an
authenticated user to the database program.
For students, this means that their 9-digit
student ID number should be used as username, and
whatever password they have set in eServices should
be used as password. This also means that when
persistent links are created to articles within the
journal databases these links now need to be
prefixed with the Internet address of the
authenticating proxy server, with a login specifier
attached. This prefix is:
http://prozy.palomar.edu/login?url=
To build a persistent URL, therefore, that will
work from on or off campus, you must locate the
persistent URL to the article to which you want to
link, and then prefix it with this proxy prefix.
Examples will help here. Four of our most
heavily used databases support persistent URLs:
Ebscohost, JSTOR, Gale Reference Library, and the
Proquest newspaper database. Here is how to
constuct a persistent URL in each one.
Ebsco Academic Search Premier Database
- First perform your search and find the full
text article to which you want to link.
- Click the "Citation" link at the top of the
article:
.
- Locate the field in the citation record
titled "Persistent link to this record."
- Copy the URL given after this label.
- Prefix this URL with the Palomar proxy
prefix, and then use this full URL to create a
link on a web page or within Blackboard.
A typical link from an Ebsco database will look
like this:
http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=9938557&site=ehost-live
The entire Persistent URL will look like this:
http://prozy.palomar.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=9938557&site=ehost-live
(Even though this link looks like it wraps around
and occupies two lines on your screen (if in fact it
does) that is only apparent, a result of the
formatting of the web page on which you are viewing
it. The URL must contain no line breaks,
carriage returns or any other special characters.
It must be a continuous string of pure text
characters.
A link to this particular article, then, would
look like this:
Cosmology's Big Three
JSTOR Databases
Search results in JSTOR display what is called a
"Stable URL" for each article. This is the
same thing as a "persistent link" in Ebsco
terminology. Use it to construct your
persistent URL.
A JSTOR Stable URL looks like this:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0036-8423%2819770219%29111%3A8%3C121%3AAHITMO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-K
A persistent URL to this article accessed using
Palomar's proxy server looks like this:
http://prozy.palomar.edu/login?url=http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0036-8423%2819770219%29111%3A8%3C121%3AAHITMO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-K
Or, when converted to a normal web page link,
like this:
A Hole in the Middle of the Galaxy
(Once again, this is a continuous string of
characters and must not contain line breaks.)
Gale Virtual Reference Library
In search results in this database you will find
a "Bookmark" field. Click the "Bookmark this
Document" link after the Bookmark label.
On the resulting screen you will find a Bookmark
URL. Copy this URL. It will look
something like this:
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE|CX2831600063&v=2.1&u=cclc_palomar&it=r&p=GVRL&sw=w
(without the
line break, of course). Add the proxy prefix
to create the Persistent URL to this article:
http://prozy.palomar.edu/login?url=http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE|CX2831600063&v=2.1&u=cclc_palomar&it=r&p=GVRL&sw=w
Proquest
Newspapers Database
After finding
the article to which you wish to link, click the
"Full Text" link.
Then click "Copy
link.":
at the top of the full text article. In the
resulting popup window you will find what is called
the "durable link" to this document. That is
the link you need to use to build your persistent
URL. Copy it, prefix the proxy prefix, and you
have created your link. This will work for
HTML and PDF versions of the articles, which is also
true of the Ebsco articles.
Building the
Link in Blackboard
Now that you
know how to create persistent URLs to journal
database articles that will work from on or off
campus, how do you create the link in Blackboard?
Simple.
- Go to the
content area within your Blackboard course where
you wish to place the link.
- Click "Edit
View" in the upper left corner of the page:
- Click
"External Link" on the Add Content toolbar:
- Give the
link a name (you can copy and paste in the
article name from your search results) and paste
your persistnet URL into the URL box.
- Click
Submit and you are done.
Your link will
look like this in Blackboard:
You can, of course, write any sort of
instructions, comments or bibliographic information
you wish to go along with the link.
I have created a screen video (flash required)
which will walk you through each step of creating
these links in Blackboard for each of the four
databases mentioned above.
Click here for the screen video.
Podcast
for February 22, 2008 - Episode 84
"Liberty
without learning is always in peril; learning without
liberty is always in vain."
~John F. Kennedy
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