Faculty First Grant 2016 Call for Proposals

APPLICATION DEADLINE: December 14, 2015

OIT Instructional Support invites faculty to apply for the 2016 Faculty First Grant, an instructional development program that runs from February to December 2016.

Grant recipients form a long-term partnership with OIT staff to develop instructional material or redesign a course. OIT staff will provide assistance in instructional development and technology integration. OIT assistance may include instructional design, web and multimedia development, video production, and technical assistance.

Learn more about the program and access the Call for Proposals at the OIT Faculty First website.

Using Color Contrast for Emphasis Is Not Recommended

Readers who have color blindness, limited vision, or total vision loss will miss information when it is presented with only color to give instructions or as emphasis.

Color must not be relied upon as the only means of conveying information, such as highlighting in red to draw attention to instructions or as an indicator of error. If you’re writing instructions on an assignment, use a Heading or italics to indicate the emphasis on that piece of information.

When using color, always pair it with another indicator such as underlining, asterisks, or explanatory text. For example, a color blind viewer may not be able to easily distinguish between a plain red button to mean “Cancel” and a plain green button to mean “Submit.” You can still color code the buttons, but be sure to add the words “Submit” and “Cancel.”

Learn more about how to make your classes accessible by going to accessibility.utk.edu or checking out one of our workshops!      

Want to Know How to Create a Rubric for Your Class in Blackboard Learn?

Rubrics are helpful to both instructors and students because they set up clear expectations on assignments. In the Online@UT 09 (Assessment Rubrics in Blackboard Learn) workshop, instructors will learn how to create and manage rubrics and how to apply them in the Grade Center on Blackboard Learn.

This is a quick, one-hour workshop. Join us in person on Friday, January 15, from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. or online via Zoom on Tuesday, April 12, from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. 

IT Community of Practice

Want to Know What’s Trending in IT?

Attend the IT Community of Practice (ITCoP), a monthly demo and discussion Brown Bag lunch meeting where trends and issues impacting teaching and learning are addressed. Beginning January 2016, we will feature Broader Perspectives: Exploring Cross-Discipline Data Gathering, a series of topics related to various data-gathering techniques and technologies. You’re sure to glean a tip or two to enhance your teaching, learning, and research! Check out our monthly topics in the upcoming January 2016 OIT News, or visit the ITCoP website where you can also view the 2015 recordings. 

Fall 2015 GTA@OIT Grant Recipients Announced

Each fall and spring semester, OIT selects GTAs with sole responsibility for teaching a course to expand their teaching practice by redesigning a course or course component for web-based delivery in Online@UT (Blackboard Learn), our current Learning Management System. Our fall GTA@OIT recipients and their proposal topics are listed below. For more information, visit the GTA@OIT site.
 
Rachel Floyd, MFLL
Fostering Early Language Learning Through Mobile Gaming
 


Janine Al-Aseer, Educational Psychology & Counseling
Integrating Online Praxis, Collaborative Dialogue and Blackboard Technology into a Cultural Studies in Education Course  

Instructional Technology Research Grants Awarded

Project RITE (Research of Instructional Technology in Education) is a grant opportunity for faculty at UT Knoxville and UT Martin to study the impact of using technology-mediated instructional strategies on student learning outcomes. The 2015-2016 recipients are listed below. Visit the Project RITE website for more information.
 
UT Knoxville
Dr. Karee Dunn, Educational Psychology & Counseling
Let’s Talk: Increasing Discussion in a Synchronous Online Research Course
 
UT Martin
Dr. Trisha Capansky, English and Modern Foreign Languages
Envisioning History: A Digital Humanities Hybrid Course
 
Drs. Kimberly G. Williams and Karen S. DiBella, Educational Studies
Literacy and Numeracy: Enhancing Higher Level Thinking Through Technology Integration
 
Dr. Harriette Spiegel, IT Center, and Tara Tansil-Gentry, Health and Human Performance
Disseminating Instructional Technology Expertise: Creating Accessible Course Materials at UTM - Workshop for Faculty Representatives 

Featured Software:
SAS 9.4 TS1M3 Is Available

SAS licenses are for all University of Tennessee campuses and can be installed on personally-owned and UT-owned computers. A single-user license for academic use is available for no additional charge to students, faculty, and staff. The program can be downloaded from the OIT software distribution page. A SAS license for campus administrative use costs extra and can be ordered through the OIT business office via e-mail to pbrought@utk.edu.   

SAS is a popular software package for data management, statistical analysis, and data visualization. The new release of SAS 9.4 fully uses multicore technologies to deliver increased processing capabilities through high-performance, in-database, and in-memory analytics resulting in greater insights from big data. The latest maintenance release, SAS 9.4 TS1M3 (9.4M3), delivers the 14.1 releases of the SAS analytical products, including rich new features and enhancements. SAS/STAT 14.1 includes two new procedures: the high-performance GAMPL procedure that fits generalized additive models and the SURVEYIMPUTE procedure that imputes missing values of an item in a sample survey. The high-performance procedures that are available in SAS High-Performance Statistics software for distributed computing are also available in SAS/STAT software for use in single-machine mode. SAS 9.4M3 also includes several enhancements to deployment including faster install times and less manual configuration. For more information about the features of SAS 9.4, read What's New in SAS 9.4.   

Featured Software: ChemBioDraw 15.0

PerkinElmer’s ChemBioDraw is the complete drawing tool of choice for chemists and biologists to create publication-ready, scientifically intelligent drawings for use in ELNs, databases, publications, and for querying chemical databases. The latest ChemBioDraw Ultra Version 15.0 provides customizable drawing tools for common pathway diagrams, biological objects, and chemical structure essentials. The new version 15.0 is a simpler set of desktop products but does lose some features from the previous versions such as Chem 3D. To access those lost features in version 15, users are encouraged to co-install ChemBiodraw 14 along with version 15 to have both the new tools and the useful 3D features.

ChemBioDraw is available to faculty, staff, and students at the University of Tennessee Knoxville campus with no additional charge.  Instructions for obtaining, installing, and activating ChemBioDraw can be downloaded from the OIT software page.