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.

Bullet-proof Jigsaw Instruction Sheet

Have you ever tried to conduct a Jigsaw Activity with your learners? It can be a time-consuming and frustrating process, but one that is often worth the results if you muscle through :)

Here is my attempt to create a Bullet-proof Instruction Sheet™ for Jigsaw Activities:

PDF file: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/gjoeckel/bis/Jigsaw_Instructions.pdf

Please share suggestions for improvements!



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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 tool helps create effective Learning Outcomes

OER Salsa: an open source syllabus builder

Thanks to Geoff Cain for featuring Salsa on his blog Brainstorm in Progress!

opensource.com article on Salsa

Salsa: an open source syllabus creator for educators

Thanks to the folks at opensource.com for an awesome write-up!

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.

Audio Feedback in Online Courses

Providing verbal feedback to students is a great way to overcome the time/space gap inherent in online learning. Feedback that is frequent and personalized (to a degree tailored to the class size), has consistently proven to be an important component of many of the most successful online courses that I have reviewed.

Our institution uses the Canvas Learning Management System, and I encourage instructors to use the built-in audio recording tool for feedback. If your LMS does not have a built-in component, the open-source software program Audacity is very easy to use--and free :)

I think that hearing the instructor's voice creates an opportunity for a student to feel a deeper connection. It is also an efficient way to share feelings--curiosity, concern, empathy, etc.--that are difficult to represent in text. If you haven't used audio feedback in your online course designs, pilot it on a small scale, and see if you like the results.

PDF Syllabus Builder is Need-to-Know News

Thanks to Debbie Morrison at the online learning insights blog for featuring the PDF Syllabus Builder in today's post: Need-to-Know News: The Making of a MOOC, College Scorecard and Syllabus Builder Tool.

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?

Introduction to the PDF Syllabus Builder

Here is a 3-minute video introduction to the PDF Syllabus Builder.

You can now download version 1.0 of this open-source tool.