The Salsa project completes Phase 1

Having successfully provided web-accessible online syllabi to more than 5,000 students during the Fall 2014 pilot program, the Salsa project completed Phase 1 on January 31, 2015.

Phase 1 was made possible through funding provided by the Utah Science and Technology Research (USTAR) initiative, and a partnership between Commercial Enterprises and the Center for Innovative Design & Instruction (CIDI).

Salsa is an open-source, web-based application for creating accessible higher-education syllabi. The full application is available for download at GitHub.

Incorporating Bloom's Revised Taxonomy into a Syllabus

Many higher education institutions recommend that instructors use Bloom's Revised Taxonomy when creating a syllabus. Here are a few examples: Chicago State University, Duquense University, University of Illinois - Champaign-Urbana, University of Minnesota, University of North Carolina - Greensboro and University of West Florida.

Incorporating Bloom's Revised into a syllabus is very easy with the open source syllabus authoring tool Salsa. Action verbs grouped by Bloom's Revised are built into the product:

Instructors can select a level of Bloom's:

And when they click on the verb, it is added to the text editor:

What are your thoughts on Bloom's Revised in the syllabus?

Salsa is up and running!

We'll be launching version 1.0 of Salsa shortly, but in the meantime, the open-source application is up and running.

Follow Salsa on Twitter: Follow @Salsa4HE

What are SALSAs?

SALSAs are styled & accessible learning service agreements for contemporary higher-education students, particularly those participating in some form of asynchronous learning delivered online.

SALSAs are:

• accessible to all students regardless of physical or sensory impairment
• styled to provide clarity and consistency
• organized into six parts: information, outcomes, resources, activities, policies and grades

The Center for Innovative Design & Instruction at Utah State University is developing an open-source, web application named Salsa. Building on the design of the PDF Syllabus Builder, this authoring tool generates online documents in PDF and HTML format.

Tools and Resources for the Flipped Classroom

Julie Schell at the Turn to Your Neighbor (TTYN) blog has shared a great Annotated List of Flipped Class Tools and Resources featuring rising stars like Educreations, NB, PeerWise and the PDF Syllabus Builder :) Thanks Julie!

PDF Assignment Builder videos surpass 15,000 views

Both the original PDF Assignment Builder and the newer PDF Assignment Builder 3.0 continue to add new views. In the year that it has been posted, the PDF AB3 has averaged 670 views per month!

The PDF Assignment Builder allows users to cut and paste information from any word processor into Adobe Reader. The field into which the information is pasted is dynamic--it will grow in size to accommodate 100 lines, or 100 pages. Users will be able to save the PDF form and send it to another user. The form will remain writable, editable, printable and savable.

The PDF Assignment Builder 3.0 allows instructors to create question and answer fields, as well as editable Title and Instruction fields. The question fields are numbered automatically, and specific instructions can be entered into the answer fields, and then typed over by students. Before the form is sent to students, the Title, Instruction and Answer fields are "locked" by changing their type to "read only".

Might be time for a new version. Anyone interested in collaborating?

100+ Video Sites Every Educator Should Bookmark

Thanks to Emma Taylor for sending me the link to this great list on accreditedonlinecolleges.com.

One of the gems that stuck out to me right off the bat was YouTube EDU. I will definitely be finding some time to spend there :)