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Author: Amanda Tross

Hardy presentation to be videotaped, put online

Darcy Walsh Hardy’s presentation this Thursday will be videotaped and available online at axioconference.org for viewing by the first week of October. A nationally known online education expert, Hardy will present “Sometimes Good is Good Enough – Sometimes It’s Not” at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, Sept. 18, in the Flint Hills Room of the K-State Student Union. This event is free and open to the public. During this interactive session, she will discuss the need for:

  • Applying nationally recognized instructional design standards to fully online and hybrid courses
  • Accountability in the online classroom
  • Training and support to develop the highest quality online courses possible

Registration is not required to attend this presentation (which is part of the third annual Axio Learning Community Meeting and Conference). Questions about the event should be sent to Amanda Tross,  atross@k-state.edu, 785-532-4370.

Hardy’s awards and achievements (see more in last week’s article)

  • She serves as Chair Emerita with the United States Distance Learning Association (USDLA), where she has been a member of the Board of Directors since 1999, is a past president, and is responsible for founding the USDLA International Forum for Women in E-Learning (IFWE).
  • She received the WCET Richard Jonsen award (2005) for “long-standing willingness to nurture and assist others in the distance learning community, significant contribution to the field, and innovative service to distance learning students.”
  • Her most recent publication, Dancing on the Glass Ceiling: Women, Leadership and Technology, which she co-edited with Don Olcott, received the 2005 Charles Wedemeyer Publication Award from UCEA.
  • In 2003, she received the Gayle B. Childs Award from UCEA for “exemplary long-term leadership, scholarship, and applied contributions to the field of continuing and distance learning.”

Reuse your course for fall semester

When you teach the same class each semester, you don’t have to create a new course. Instead, you can “version” your course and assignments for the new semester. When you do this, you will want to clean up or update areas of your K-State Online course. The Announcements, Calendar, Assignments, and Files you’ve put online are not automatically updated with each new version of your course. You will have to go into each of these tools and decide what you want to update, what you want to delete, and what you want to archive.

For reference, use the Reusing Your Course checklist (PDF) created by the iTAC trainers. You can also review the online help — after signing in to K-State Online, click the Help link in the upper-right corner and search for the Reuse Your Course topics.

by Amanda Tross, Office of Mediated Education

Where is my K-State Online File Dropbox?

With the release of the K-State Online upgrade last weekend, the File Dropbox is no longer a component and will not appear in the homepage menu for students. (Components are features that are turned on or off per course.) Instead, you can now create multiple File Dropboxes without naming restrictions, and can organize them with Manage Files to best fit your course.

Your course File Dropbox that you used prior to last weekend has not been deleted. It has been renamed “CourseFileDropbox” (no spaces in the dropbox name) and has been moved under Content in Manage Files. It is currently unpublished. If you wish to continue using this dropbox, you’ll need to publish it so it is accessible to students.

* To publish, click the red X next to the File Dropbox. It will change to a green plus (+) sign indicating the File Dropbox is now published and students can again submit files.
* You can change the “CourseFileDropbox” name by clicking the black arrow next to the dropbox, and typing a new name in the “File Name” box.
* To create new dropboxes, from Manage Files, click the “New Item” button on the toolbar and select “File Dropbox”.

For assistance, contact the IT Help Desk, helpdesk@k-state.edu, 785-532-7722.

by Amanda Tross, Office of Mediated Education