WCU's Commons for Teaching and Learning Excellence

Season's Greetings,

At the beginning of our previous newsletter, we spoke of the changing seasons, their beauty, and the challenges that they bring. At that time, we could not have predicted that we were heralding a season of change at WCU also. With the entire campus community, we were heartbroken to hear the news about Chancellor Belcher.

And as seems fitting to changes at the end of a season of Thanksgiving, we are thankful for leaders like Drs. Alison Morrison-Shetlar and Carol Burton who have agreed to step forward and take on new challenges and responsibilities to guide and support WCU as it moves into another season of change.

Change need not fill us with complete dismay, however. Following on the season of thankfulness is a season of hope. To mark hope in the darker days of winter, we may hang lights or light candles. In the darkness, these lights remind us that spring will come. Whether you celebrate this season with Christmas lights, Hanukah candles, a Kinara, or not at all, let’s step forward into the changes that have come our way, encouraging each other to look for the markers of hope.

Happy Holidays from all of us at the CFC.

Martha Diede, PhD
Director, Coulter Faculty Commons

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the Coulter Faculty Commons at 828-227-2930 or email us at LMSsupport@wcu.edu.

The "New CFC" in Hunter Library 172 - Come and See Us

Thinking About Research

Need Help With Your Research Process?

Follow this Research Roadmap to help you through the stages.

Faculty Writing Groups - A Productive Team

The faculty in this semester’s writing groups made tremendous progress on their personal academic projects, with projects ranging from a paper on a symphony score to articles on sports medicine. One faculty member has even finished a book proposal and will be attending workshops to further her work in the spring.

Kong (CK) Chen, CFC Faculty Research Associate, advised faculty with questions about graphing and using the R statistical package, and Kelsey Woodburn, our graduate assistant, facilitated the meetings. Meetings were held in multiple locations including the Camp building, HHS, and Biltmore Park.

CFC-hosted writing groups are offered each term for faculty—simply contact Kelsey Woodburn at klwoodburn@email.wcu.edu to express your interest to join. Faculty bring laptops and manuscripts and spend up to 2 hours working independently each week or with a reading of their peers’ work.

In the spring, we will host writing groups here in the new CFC Consultation Room, in addition to meeting at HHS and Biltmore Park. Our room has good natural lighting and seating.

Information about dates for spring writing groups will be published in our January newsletter.

For more information, contact Kelsey Woodburn at klwoodburn@email.wcu.edu .

Blackboard Updates

Blackboard Outage and Upgrade

Event Date/Time: Tuesday, December 19, 2017 5:00 PM - Wednesday, December 20, 2017 5:00 PM

Event Details: The Blackboard system will be upgraded to apply patches and fixes to our environment. We will also be updating the Crocodoc assignment grading tool to a new version called New Box View. New Box View is the same tool as Crocodoc but will accept more file types including but not limited to Excel, PowerPoint, PDFs, and Word documents. The Blackboard environment will be unavailable during this upgrade. The LMS Team will work to get our system back up and running as quickly as possible.

Users Impacted: Faculty, Staff, Students

Contact Information: Please contact the IT Help Desk if you have any questions or concerns.

Course Frameworks

Our new faculty who have been introduced to our new framework for courses have been pleased with a design that allows them autonomy and an easy way to develop course by adding their content in the areas provided. The Framework is based off the Quality Matters Rubric and meets the best practices of course design. This, in turn, reduces the administrative overhead of developing a course and provides the greatest opportunity for student success.  

If instructors have a course that they would like to copy forward, this can still be accomplished by using the Course Copy request form (https://wcu.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8IVpBSbhRfvOoEl).

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask.

Online Blackboard Help

Creating a manual for Blackboard at WCU has been a challenge for the LMS Team. The regular updates have made it nearly impossible to keep training materials current. Fortunately, Blackboard does have a well-developed support site that you can search on topics of interest. Below are the URLs for the Instructor site and the Student site. Of course, for faculty, the LMS Team is only a phone call or email away.

Instructor Blackboard Site: https://help.blackboard.com/Learn/Instructor

Student Blackboard Site: https://help.blackboard.com/Learn/Student

Blackboard Collaborate Help Site

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out.

Course Merge Requests
Course Copy Requests

As we are heading downhill toward the end of the fall semester, please take a moment to submit your Blackboard Course Merge requests and your Course Copy requests for the Spring 2018 term as early as possible. This will help you to be ready in January for the new term and remove a few things from your list of items to accomplish. Below are the URLs to the two request forms.

Course Merge Requests: https://wcu.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_1yHNiwgjPCF5BvT

Course Copy Requests: https://wcu.az1.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_8IVpBSbhRfvOoEl

If you have any questions, please let us know how we can assist you.

For help with research planning and development contact Terry Pollard (twpollard@email.wcu.edu  828-227-7196).

For help with data analysis contact our faculty research support specialist CK (kchen@wcu.edu  828-227-3456).

We can also help with the final write up stage of drafts and revision. If you are looking for more help or even peer review ask us about our faculty writing groups that will start back up in the Spring!

Getting the Information You Want and Need

The CFC is in a constant process of improvement as we try to meet your needs.  In our beginning of Spring issue, we plan to give you a full map of our "new" ways for you to access our materials, but for the remainder of this year, continue to watch your mailbox, check cfc.wcu.edu, and if you'd like to see what we're reading in the broader world having to do with Higher Education and Innovation, feel free to subscribe to our optional weekly curated content newsletter, The Black Swan Forecast.

Partner Resources

Have A Great Student Who Should be in the Honors College?

Students who aspire to join The Honors College upon completion of the Fall 2017 term and will have earned a cumulative GPA of 3.5 or higher on at least 15 WCU credit hours are welcome to apply NOW rather than waiting until the end of the term. The application is online at Honors College Application.  We will hold the applications until final grades roll, but students are welcome to apply now.

More Resources:

CFC Automated Appointments
Quality customer service is our goal at the Coulter Faculty Commons (CFC).  So, in order to serve our faculty better, we have created a new form to request an appointment with any member of our team.  Please click here to request an appointment.

Course Syllabus Template
Trying to write your syllabus? The CFC has the tools and templates for you to help make the process much easier.  The template provides you with all of the required elements along with an outline into which you can fill in all of your course information. To view the syllabus template, along with some other documents you might find useful as you build your course, please click here.

Blackboard Online Help
As the Learning Management System used at WCU, Blackboard enhances the quality of online and face-to-face instruction and is used to monitor, document, and manage online and classroom events and assignments.  The LMS Team at the CFC has put together a handy list of resources for Blackboard, tailored to meet the needs of the WCU Community.

Highlighted Learning Videos on WCU's Panopto Features Page
We've customized the first entry landing page on the Panopto home page.  We'll be putting up-to-date focused videos in this space and changing them monthly, so make sure to take a look and to suggest more content.  To view the videos, please click the link above and log into Panopto.

Provost's List of Faculty Resources
The Office of the Provost provides a considerable amount of helpful information on this web page. Information concerning faculty awards and recognition, support and development, to forums, gender equity, and policy and procedures is available on this site.

CFC Resources Online
The CFC works to keep our main web page updated.  We'd love to have you click in for a visit.  We also have a Faculty Resources Blog where we post additional resources and announcements as we get them.

IT Training Opportunities
The Division of  IT continues to provide training opportunities on Microsoft products for faculty and staff.

CFC Feedback
We would greatly appreciate any feedback you could give us about how we can improve or add to our services.  We regularly monitor all inputs and try to respond to suggestions as quickly as possible. We thank you for taking the time to provide us with your constructive and formative feedback!