Online learning | Communication | Communities | Curriculum Exchange

Develop your own online learning activities

Join the Teaching in Blackboard community and develop your own online learning materials.

This Blackboard community will give you access to:

Up to 20 Virtual Classrooms in Blackboard (more if requested)
Information to help you develop interactive online learning activities
Blackboard help for beginners and advanced
Tips for writing online
Scripts to create interactive exercises
Templates to help create your own courses
Respondus and StudyMate

The Learning Place has purchased statewide licences of Respondus and StudyMate for all our teachers. These programs help you to create quizzes, surveys and self-assessment, flash games and tools with ease. You can then export directly into your Blackboard courses, archive and share assessments with your peers. Work on existing quizzes and surveys offline, making editing and re-use even easier!

A community that will support your learning journey.

Your Virtual Classrooms

Your Virtual Classrooms are private, secure Blackboard spaces developed for your students or colleagues. Virtual Classrooms (or private courses) are not listed on the Learning Place. The only participants are your own students or the staff at your school or place of work.

Virtual Classrooms are not quality assured by the Learning Place. This means that the content and design is chosen at the local level. The copyright and IP should be checked at the local level to ensure all material is clear of infringement.

Your Virtual Classroom spaces might contain:

Group and individual learning activities
Research questions with relevant links
Quizzes and surveys
Homework and extension activities
Assessment documents
Full online courses with modules of work
Forums and synchronous chat sessions
WebQuests, Hotlists, Scavenger Hunts, etc.

Public course

You could develop a public course for a wider student or professional community. Public courses are listed on the Learning Place. Participants can register for the public course through the Course calendar.

Public courses are quality assured by the Learning Place. This means that the content and design are thoroughly checked. Public courses can be facilitated or be self paced courses. A participant’s fee can be charged to cover the costs of development and facilitation.

NOTE: If a fee is charged by the facilitator or course owner, then the Learning Place will invoice the participant. A percentage of the course fee will be retained by the Learning Place. Please contact the Learning Place if you intend facilitating a public course with a course fee.

Further support

The three development courses are still available for interested educators. You may like to participate in one of these courses to help you write and develop a quality assured public course or perhaps achieve University accreditation in a post graduate degree.

These documents open in a new window

These courses are facilitated by our Online Learning Coordinators and focus on planning the pedagogy, writing the activity and including interaction and collaboration.

Tips for developing online activities

Including interactive activities in your course are great ways to engage your students. However be aware when developing interactive activities that you are inclusive – consider students who have poor fine motor skills or are unable to use a mouse. They may have problems with mouse-controlled tasks.

When developing the activities consider alternatives to mouse controlled tasks, i.e. click here and drag and drop. Consider keyboard ways of doing tasks or provide alternatives so that you are being inclusive. For example instead of drag and drop you could have a list on one side with a drop down menu showing alternatives corresponding. Students then can use either a mouse or keyboard to select the correct answer.

It is best practice when developing interactions online that you test them in different browsers to ensure they work. Also validating your code will ensure that it works on future and past versions of the browser i.e. Netscape, Opera, and Internet Explorer.

To validate your code visit W3C MarkUp Validation Service.

Visit the Developer's guidelines Interactive exercises for suggestions.

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