Q&A Week 4: Questions Answered – Learning Collaborative

ReFocus Online Q&A Week 4 - Round 1 (7-8-20)

Below are the synthesized questions and answers from the ReFocus Online Q&A that happened July 8th, 2020.

Synchronous Classes

Is it better to save synchronous meetings strictly for those days when asynchronous won't do the trick, or is there some value in tucking in a few not-strictly-necessary synchronous classes to build community and create variety?

Yes and yes! Synchronous sessions are best utilized to personalize learning and promote interactions between students and with you. You can also use synchronous sessions for ‘check ins’ and as a bit of a buffer throughout the semester. Some faculty plan on having synchronous sessions for review activities or ‘tell me more’ presentations where students may need more support or more time to work with new concepts.

If my course includes infrequent but necessary synchronous days, is it best to have a regular schedule--for instance putting all synchronous sessions on Fridays--or is it fine to schedule synchronous sessions whenever they're needed, just announcing them before the course starts and providing frequent reminders?

If you maintained your day and time band when moving to an online course, synchronous sessions should be scheduled only during the time your class would have originally met in person. If your day and time band was not maintained when moving to an online course, synchronous sessions may be difficult to schedule due to conflicts with other courses or time commitments. In this case, we would not recommend scheduling synchronous sessions unless you can ensure that ALL students are available. Even then, this may be placing a barrier on students who anticipated no synchronous sessions based on the listing in the course schedule.

Video

What is best practice between flipping between different views in Screencast-O-Matic? And how does one do this?

When recording in Screencast-O-Matic you can flip views while recording or you can pause the recording and change the view. It is all a matter of what you are comfortable with. In order to set this up when you record you’ll want to select “Both” in your recording settings:

screenshot of screencast-o-matic recorder

This will allow you to switch between the different views (Screen, Webcam, Both) while recording:

screenshot of screencast-o-matic recorder

In Zoom, is the Raise Hand function on automatically or do we need to turn it on somewhere?

The ‘Raise Hand’ function is automatically available to all meeting participants via the Participants window. However, the meeting host cannot see this function or use it themselves; it is assumed that as meeting host you have control of the meeting floor, as well.

Canvas

Canvas Commons is a digital library full of educational that allows Canvas users to share learning resources with other users as well as import learning resources into a Canvas course. If you are interested in exploring what is available you can follow this guide on how you can find Canvas Common resources.

Jabber

What are the pros and cons of Cisco Jabber?

Cisco Jabber allows you to access your UMW phone through your computer. You can accept calls, review messages, and contact others without using a personal phone. Installation to your UMW computer is handled by the IT Help Desk. Cisco Jabber does require access to the VPN.

Based on our units’ use of Jabber, the sound quality is clear and it is easy to use. However, you do have to remember to be on the VPN and have Jabber open in order to use the platform in ‘real time’.