Saturday, March 26, 2011

Week 2 of 8...

...in an "accelerated" all online section.

--Two drops. But does either Blackboard OR our registrar provide any "push" notification of this to the instructor? Nah. First evidence was when they went missing in the Blackboard grade book, which clued me to the info from our admin site. Good thing I noticed: it would have made the two-person collaborative Dogwalking exercise I had them assigned to this week rather awkward.

-One deer through a husband's car window. Pictures weren't offered...I was tempted to ask. Hubbie is fine. The car and the deer, not so much.

-One 5-day inpatient hospitalization. Documentation was offered in the plea for extensions. With the offer of proof alone, my soft heard melted and I said that was good enough.

That's some high level action at the front end of the session. I feel sorry for some grandparents come the first week of May. At least they are mostly seniors; don't think they'll want to jeopardize their big day.

And, they seem like nice, optimistic people. Or maybe that's just their online persona.

3 comments:

  1. An alert when someone drops (or adds late), from either Bb or the registrar, would be a wonderful addition to our tech tools. I'd like to be able to turn the feature on and off, preferably at the individual-class level, since I don't want to be bombarded by such messages in the first few days of a semester, especially for face to face classes where I can get a sense of what's going on just by calling roll. But for the later part of the add/drop period, and for online classes, it would be tremendously helpful. It should, of course, also tell me *who* dropped or added, so I don't have to play the compare-the-rolls game.

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  2. You mean your administration people remove students from Blackboard? I'm not sure if I'm envious or not. I, too, would appreciate notification of dropping students.

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  3. Now that we are on our way to the paperless society, we get no notification that students have dropped. I check my rosters daily online. In accelerated formats, I don't want to see any late registrants. We simply don't have time to deal with them in the online format since they have to not only get their books and be ready to use them the first week (which is apparently akin to torture these days) but also get them through the college's orientation process, ensure their computer works with the LMS properly, and walk them through all the potential bugs the LMS might harbor that would keep them from doing something wrong. It's hard enough to do all that with people who start on the first day or two of class. It's pretty much a lost cause after that.

    We can get students removed from Blackboard, but it's an onerous process involving a special program that goes to the techies who have to do it for us, and we're not allowed to it until the "date of attendance recording" for state funding purposes. I have dozens of ghost students floating around in my shells until then. Those who do any work cannot be removed and have to be blocked manually and then removed from view in the grade book through yet another manual process.

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