Susan Nugent

 Course is CIS-054, PowerPoint  I have taught it for about 8 years online  Generally a fairly easy course that students enjoy  Somewhat tricky to teach online  Student often don’t realize they must have the software installed on their computers

 For most students learning the software is easy  However, digital literacy is far more difficult to learn  Why is digital literacy important for a software class?  Students use images and other media for presentations  Many do not cite sources of any text and images they use  Added this requirement to the student assessment

 Find and Download Media Resources  Locate high quality images, text, and other graphics for presentations  Analyze media resources for license terms  Download and document media items sources  Understand copyright and Creative Commons licenses  Demonstrate knowledge of copyright law and fair use  Understand the differences in available Creative Commons licenses  Document all image and text sources  Create a bibliography in APA format in Word for all visuals, text, and graphics

I used four graded discussion topics to discuss some of the additional topics that the textbook does not cover. The copyright discussion was embedded in the visual design topic.

I only had one discussion question that covered the copyright discussion. It wasn’t enough and students don’t have a good grasp on why it is important to only use media with flexible copyright. Additionally, they do not have a good understanding of what makes an image high quality.

In the fall 2013 course I decided to improve the all of the discussions and provide an FAQ non-graded topic. The Media resources and copyright discussion is a new topic. The typography and visual discussions were combined.

I aligned the discussion questions more closely with the desired outcomes. Students should read the selected readings before adding their post. Students are assigned to answer certain questions assigned to them. Additionally, students are required to locate high quality media resources released under a Creative Commons license and post it on the wiki page.

The discussion rubric is based off the Carrie Saarinen’s 2012 InstructureCon presentation. I added the outcomes and students will be graded on the outcomes.

I tried to keep the readings fairly simple and straight to the point. I also gave them links to popular citing tools as well. In one outcome I do state that students should be familiar with using Word’s citation tool as well. I may add additional support material to help students use Word to create the bibliography.

Students should add at least one high quality media recourse. I gave them example of what I expect in the description of the media link.

 My course section did not meet the enrollment requirement for fall 2013 so hopefully I will be able to see the results in spring 2014  Any suggestions and feedback are welcome