DigEco 2018

Boise State recently welcomed Pressbooks into our portfolio of supported learning technologies. A Wordpress-based publishing platform, Pressbooks opens up powerful opportunities for reclaiming course content and sharing it openly in a variety of digital formats. This lightning talk offers an overview of the platform and introduces our strategies for letting learning experiences shape the tool's use (not the other way around). 

Idaho STEM Action Center was created three years ago to support Idaho educators. This is an chance to learn more about our opportunities and determine if you are eligible to receive funding and professional development support.


Attendees will learn how to access $4M in funding which is appropriated to the Idaho STEM Action Center.

Virtual Office Hours (VOH) are an alternative to traditional office hours. The virtual environment can provide students and instructors with more flexibility in meeting times and locations, content delivery, and types of interaction. A VOH can also provide a low-stakes platform for discussions, allowing students to better articulate their thought processes. Successful virtual sessions are dependent on thoughtful design. Questions which encourage deeper thinking, problem-solving, and critical analysis are essential student engagement and to the success of a virtual session.  VOH can make it easier for some students to get the help they need. Here are some of the known benefits of offering virtual sessions: •    Students can participate from any location •    Flexibility to target high demand hours–evening “homework” hours •    Opens a new or additional channel for communication •    May remove invisible barriers (shyness, intimidation) •    Multiple students can attend simultaneously •    Session can be recorded and archived for the benefit of other students •    Classmates can compare questions and help instruct each other •    Reduces time spent responding to individual questions via email •    Provides opportunities to implement active learning strategies •    Session can be adapted to student needs (muddiest point) •    Can be used for co-teaching, including TA’s or run by TA’s •    Review sessions before exams 

This free repository will soon host over 450 free classroom-ready activities for language instructors across Idaho to use in their classrooms. Learn more about Boise State World Languages' exciting new project for open educational resources (OER) and find out how you can get involved! 

The Pathways Language Teaching Repository (LTR) is an open (i.e., freely accessible) site, where language instructors can access: 1) classroom-ready teaching materials aligned to Idaho State Standards and ACTFL performance measures (i.e., four skills, three modes); and 2) Digitally-tagged classroom observations of Master K-16 teachers who implement classroom-ready teaching materials successfully. This LTR offers a transferable model for rural states struggling to provide a unified community of practice and standards-based curriculum for language teachers. 

In this interactive presentation, I'll share how and why my teaching strategy has changed over time to incorporate interactive videos in online courses. We'll discuss ideas for increasing interaction regardless of your platform, although I'll also share the suite of tools I use to develop and manage content.


I'll provide a link to a couple of videos that include embedded quiz questions for take-away examples, and share some free and paid resources that will enable student interaction with videos.