We know this is a busy time of year for our Faculty, and even more so this year as we work on MTECH’s accreditation. You have all been hard at work encouraging your students and helping them prepare not only for employment but many this year have also participated in special events like HOSA and Skills USA. It is amazing to see your student’s accomplishments and we all look forward to the upcoming graduations.
The Office of Teaching and Learning team is excited to continue working with you to support you in your own development and the constant improvement of your courses and programs. Here are a couple updates.
More Help
First, some good news. While we did unfortunately recently lose one of our instructional designers as Camellia Hill has moved on to pursue bigger and better things. We are excited to announce that we have filled that vacancy. Nichole Richards recently joined our team after working with our Trades schools on a contract basis, Nichole has accepted a full-time position. She has an impressive resume and has already been a great help here at MTECH.
Additionally, we have also added a Part-Time Instructional Designer. Sonya Sutherland was initially hired to work on a large revision of the Auto and Diesel programs. After successfully completing that project and providing additional help to the Trades programs, her position was added to the Office of Teaching and Learning. We are excited to welcome her as well!
OTL Procedures
As we continue to grow at OTL and as a school, it is becoming more necessary that we define processes and procedures in order to reduce some of our work load. As such, OTL is looking into ways to simplify course creation as well as begin archiving old courses and syllabi. As we work on defining these processes we will be limiting major changes to syllabi and official course requests to Directors and AVPs.
As with all new processes, we will have to work out some of the details. We plan on working closely with Directors to make sure all course requests and Syllabi are ready and available and that any issues that may come up are properly addressed.
Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions. We want to help in any way we can.
Upcoming Dates
Here are the next OTL webinars as well as some other important dates.
- April 25 @ 3:30 – Deeper Dive in Gaming Apps and sites – Webinar
- May 14 – Commencement
- May 26 – COE Narratives Due
- May 30 @ 3:30 – Pacing and Transitions – Webinar
Tech Tip
Have you ever copied something you needed to save, only to accidentally copy some other text? As many of you work with syllabi, assignment instructions, emails, and more tabs than you can count, it can be easy to lose track of important information.
Did you know that you can enable a Window’s Clipboard history that will keep track of multiple things that you have copied and pasted?
You may have to go into your Window’s settings to enable this feature, but once it’s turned on, you can simply hit Windows Logo Key+V, and it will open a history of things you’ve copied. Then, make sure you are in the spot you want it, and click on the item in the list to paste it in place.
Canvas has announced a Discussion Redesign that will be implemented on July 20, 2024. The new update will include the following changes:
- Anonymous Discussions
- @ Mentions
- Flexible Layout
- Checkpoints for Multiple Due Dates
- Quote Replies
- Post Version History
In order to better understand how this will impact any discussions in your courses, they have also prepared several resources. Please review this PDF as well as the video below to learn more about the Canvas Discussion Redesign.