UAS Online Features and Supported Applications
Announcements
There are two types of Announcements: Static and Dated. Static Announcements stay on site until you either change the announcement or delete the content. Dated announcements are created with a subject line and a date/time in a weblog format. You can choose how many dated announcements you want displayed at one time and have older ones archived. Students can access the archived announcements.
UAS Online Forums
The Forums provide an online discussion tool for UAS courses and portfolios. The forum is a multi-threaded discussion tool providing editing capabilities, uploading of multiple attachments, bookmarking posts and a subscription feature to help students and faculty stay current with postings. A Forum can be added to any Portfolio page for students, staff or faculty.
Course Forums provide the faculty with extra features such as:
- Grade a student response in the Forum that is linked to the Gradebook
- Rename, delete or move threads
- Control Topics by freezing, ordering or placing in Dormancy
Discussion Board
A threaded discussion tool provided by Blackboard has less formatting and attachment capabilities then the Forums, but provides a reliable interface for discussions with only text and limited use of images.
UAS Wiki
MediaWiki software has been incorporated into UASOnline to provide a space for student's collaborative work. All work in the main Wiki can be viewed by any UAS account. Access permissions can be edited for courses and Portfolios.
Web Meetings
Provided by Elluminate for synchronous sharing of voice and screen video. Instructors can enable it for a class or students can utilize it with their portfolios for group work.
Bulk E-mail
Faculty can send email to all the students in the class for select specific students for the message.
Quiz Tool
Quizzes can provide multiple choice, matching, T/F or short answer questions. Students receive immediate feedback on quiz responses except for short answers. Quiz results can automatically be entered into the students Gradebook.
Essay Tool
Short essays created for students can be graded and annotated online with the grade automatically placed in the students gradebook. A special form of the called the recitation model provides the student with the instructions response after they submit their essay. The instructor can use this capability for two different purposes:
- Challenging the students without punishing them for their efforts.
- By creating a challenging essay that makes them think about the material in a different way you force them to use their knowledge in a different application.
After they submit their answer they can see the instructors response with prompts to provide them with clues on how to integrate their knowledge into this particular situation. They will then have the opportunity to respond again. The instant feedback along with the challenge of using their knowledge in new ways provides a great learning experience. Providing multiple short essay questions to a large group of students without having to annotate every response.
If you have 20 students in a class and offer 10 short essays every week you will save enormous time by having student read the feedback to understand what they left out. You can then just give them the appropriate score that can be linked directly to the gradebook.
Task Tool
The Task Tool provides a place for students to upload attachments for a particular assignment. Multiple attachments can be uploaded in most any file type.
Survey Tool
Surveys can be created with four question types: text, nominal, ordinal and interval. The results are summarized for the Instructor.
Gradebook
The Gradebook can be created as point based or descriptive. Point based Gradebooks can be configured with weighted categories and have Essays, Tasks or Quizzes linked directly to it.
UAS Portfolio System
The UAS ePortfolio is an online, web-based portfolio system. Students can post course related content and share their work with anyone who has internet access. To access your student's protfolios follow the links on the class list.
UAS Home
The UASHome system is a personal filespace that each student, staff and faculty receive with their computer accounts. By default, the space has 50mb, but this can be increased for reasonable academic needs.
SoftChalk
SoftChalk Lesson Builder is an easy to use tool that helps instructors build sophisticated, interactive online lessons that require no knowledge of HTML or other programming. If you can use a Word Processor you can use SoftChalk. More Information
Adobe Presenter 7
Designed as a plug-in for Microsoft Powerpoint, this program allows you to add audio to an existing PowerPoint presentation and publish it as a video.You can upload the movie to an eportfolio or request publish rights on the Adobe Connect server. Publish requests go through the Helpdesk. The links to the presentations can be placed anywhere for your students to access.
Streaming Video
Video files in the FLV (flash video) and WMV (windows media) formats, if uploaded to UAS Online, will be automatically embedded in a player and streamed from our server.
Audio Conferencing
Audio conferencing is frequently used for university meetings and distance classes. If you want to set up a conference account or for more information, please visit the UA OIT Helpdesk Audio Conferencing Site.
Campus Specific Technology
Sitka
Webster Smartboard and Mimeo Interactive Whiteboard
Capture or
broadcast presentations on a whiteboard.
Elmo projector
Capture or broadcast video as you handle or
rotate three dimensional materials.
Scanners
Digitize documents, pictures, slides, etc.
Ketchikan
Juneau
Video Conferencing is available in Egan 113, 115 and 116. Contact the Helpdesk on how to schedule video conferencing meetings.
Promethean Whiteboards are available in Egan 223 and 225. The pen driven technology of these boards is useful for Elluminate classes with heavy whiteboard use classes where you would like to save the board content for student review. Contact the Helpdesk for support.
Media Services has a broadcast classroom configured to send the video signal around the state. Broadcast classes are also streamed live and archived. Live broadcasts can be viewed at http://uatv.alaska.edu