Author: Carolyn Speer

Wichita State has long been a partner with Panopto for academic video capture and hosting. This relationship will end on June 1, 2025, and Panopto will no longer be available to staff, faculty or students. If you have videos stored in Panopto, you can download them for future use. OIR has designed training to help you move from Panopto to Stream, the new video capture and hosting solution. The Academic Resources Conference (ARC) for January 2025 also has training available. Most of that training will take place Jan. 14, 2025 online via Teams, and recordings of those sessions will also be available. To make an ARC training plan, consult the session schedule.

At this time, Panopto videos are still safe in Panopto, and any videos you would like to remove from Panopto can be safely removed. This process must be completed no later than May 31, 2025, however. Reach out to the Office of Instructional Resources at OIR@wichita.edu for questions or help.

Do you need a moment of quiet in your day? That’s what Quiet Time, in-person and online meditations for staff and instructors, can offer.

Join every Tuesday online via Teams or in the faculty lounge in 204 Ablah Library. All staff and faculty are welcome. Meetings are from 2 to 2:30 p.m., and there will be have two meditations. One starts roughly 2:01 p.m. and the other starts roughly 2:16 p.m.

Come for both or stay for just one.

All new Wichita State courses are now in the Blackboard Ultra Course Format. All instructors need this vital information:

• Your old courses will still be in their original course format. Please do not convert Classic Blackboard courses directly to Ultra. Remember: copy, don’t convert.
• Your existing course material can be copied directly into an Ultra Course Format class. Please follow these directions to copy your existing course materials to your new Ultra course area.
• If you use Panopto, your videos will have to be relinked in your Ultra Course Format class.
• If you need help, instructors can email the Office of Instructional Resources at OIR@wichita.edu for help. OIR staff runs that email during the week and checks it on the weekends for emergency needs.
• All instructors of any rank and all WSU staff are invited to attend the free Academic Resources Conference (ARC) being held online Aug. 5-9. The ARC will provide technical training in Blackboard, and that’s not all. ARC will also have sessions on pedagogy, mindfulness and generative AI. It’s also a great time to meet your accessibility training requirement for AY 24-25. Most sessions are also recorded, so if you miss one, you can grab the link directly from the schedule page and watch later.

Next week, around April 15, summer classes will populate in Blackboard. The summer Blackboard course shells will all be in Ultra Course Format. Blackboard Classic Format will no longer be available at Wichita State as of the end of the spring 2024 term. If you are going to teach this summer, you can improve your Ultra Course Format experience by adapting your original courses in the following ways:

• Review your “tests” area and delete any old test banks that you don’t use.
• Check your “grade center” area and make sure you don’t have any hidden columns. If you do have hidden columns, unhide them.
• Do not “convert” your original course to an Ultra course. Instead, wait for the Ultra course shell, go to that shell area and copy your content from original into the Ultra course.

For other advice about how to prepare and then copy an original course to an Ultra course shell, check out the information in the “Ultra Training for Instructors” Blackboard course. If you don’t have access to that course, contact the Office of Instructional Resources at OIR@wichita.edu.

Quiet Time meets at 2 p.m. Tuesday, April 2 for two short meditations. The first meditation starts a little after 2 p.m., and the second starts around 2:15 p.m. Come for either or both.

These mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) meditations are offered by a certified workplace mindfulness facilitator from the Office of Instructional Resources (OIR) and are offered both via Teams and in-person in the Wichita State Connect building in the Technology Training room.

If you can’t make it in “real time,” you can participate in Quiet Time meditations from the podcast: Quiet Time at Wichita State, which you can subscribe to on Apple, Amazon or Spotify.

You can also add the Teams invitation link to your calendar.

Interested, worried or excited about AI’s impact on education? There’s an online class discussing just that.

CI 751GI: Disruption, Change, and AI in Education will be an online/asynchronous class offered in July. The course will cover generative AI’s impact on traditional educational practices and unpack what is known so far about generative AI with an eye toward understanding what might be on the horizon for educators.

The course is suitable for all staff and instructors.

Are you a staff member who teaches or an instructor who wants to learn more about instructional theory? Then learn more about CI 881, Instructional Theory (CRN 32382).

Students will have the opportunity to learn about practical instructional theory in a fully online course in the summer at WSU. Everything you learn is immediately applied as you design and build your own mini course in Blackboard Ultra. This is an opportunity for instructors who are worried about the transition to Ultra, because they will have practical instruction.

If you work with GTAs who would benefit from the course, you can help spread the word. The course will meet for eight weeks in the summer.

Send any questions to Carolyn Speer at carolyn.speer@wichita.edu. Summer tuition assistance is also due no later than April 15 for those who benefit.

The Office of Instructional Resources is proud to announce the launch of a new Blackboard-based training course for all instructors and any interested others. The course, “Ultra Training for Instructors,” is now available in Blackboard in the “Courses” area, and all 2023-24 academic year instructors have been enrolled.

In addition to the course, all enrollees have received a sandbox course shell called “Ultra Practice for Instructors,” which can be found in the Blackboard Courses area. The practice course will allow instructors to follow along with the training and practice Ultra skills.  If you are not enrolled in the course and would like to be (and staff and others we welcome too), send an email to OIR@wichita.edu with your Shocker ID number.

Wichita State is transitioning from Blackboard “Classic” course format to the “Ultra” course format as of summer, 2024, and the Office of Instructional Design urges all instructors who work in Blackboard to register for a free training seminar offered by Anthology.

The seminar is only an hour and will provide instructors with the information necessary to get started in Ultra Course Format. There are four seminar times coming up over the next four months: March 19, April 17, May 14 and June 12.

All instructors should try to attend the seminar if it’s possible, and making time to attend the seminar on more than one date could be beneficial.

The new Ultra Course View has tools that make it easy for students to find upcoming assignments. All assignments can be accessed through either the “Gradebook” link or the “Calendar” link in your Ultra class, and assignments in the “Gradebook” area can be sorted easily using the column headings.

Students can sort by due date, submission status and by grade. In the “Calendar” area, students can look at due dates by day or by month. Each assignment listed in the “Gradebook” and “Calendar” is also a “clickable link” that takes the students directly to the assignment so they can begin work.

Share this valuable information with your students, and when you set up future courses in Ultra, try out the “Student Preview” (upper right corner) tool to see for yourself how your students will be able to access assignments.