Resources for Flexible Teaching
These resources and guides should help you select and learn more about technologies and practices that can support flexible teaching and learning. Contact the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning if you would like assistance rethinking or modifying your course.
Featured Resources
- Communicating with Students in Times of Uncertainty NEW
- 8 Strategies to Prevent Teaching Burnout
- Recommendations to Increase Student Engagement in Online Courses
- Research-based Online Teaching Principles for Success
- 5 Tips for Moving from Remote Instruction to Quality Online Learning
- Building a HyFlex Course to Support Student Success (webinar recording)
- Designing Multimedia Presentations for Your Course
Technology tools and strategies can be employed for conducting assessments online.
- Options for Delivering Exams via Virtual Instruction
- Online Test Proctoring Tools at NIU
- Online Test Proctoring FAQ
- Proctoring a Live Online Exam Using Zoom
- Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty by James Lang
- 7 Ways to Assess Students Online and Minimize Cheating by Flower Darby
- The Science of Learning vs. Proctoring Software by Josh Eyler
- 5 Options for Flexible and Empathetic Summative Assessments
Blackboard provides a centralized tool for you to communicate with students, post and distribute learning materials, and collect and assess student work.
- Request your course in Blackboard - you must request your course each semester before you can use Blackboard
- Create and edit Assignments - collect student work electronically
- Grading Assignments in Blackboard - information on reviewing and grading student Assignment submissions and providing feedback
- Create Tests - deliver tests online with a wide variety of question types
- Teaching and Learning with Blackboard - extensive documentation and tutorials for using Blackboard for teaching and learning at NIU
- Self-paced online workshop on teaching with Blackboard - series of video tutorials to help you get started with building your Blackboard course
- Help for students using Blackboard - steps and tips for the most common features that students might use in Blackboard
- Blackboard Collaborate Participant Tour [PowerPoint] - sample slides that you can use to provide an overview for students on participating in a Blackboard Collaborate session
- Blackboard Collaborate Office Hours Slide [PowerPoint] - sample slide that you can use for holding office hours in Blackboard Collaborate, with instructions for students
Strategies and tools for supplementing or replacing in-person classroom lectures.
Beyond just creating your own content, look for existing content sources that can save you time. In addition to the resources below, check with your textbook publisher or professional association to see if they have anything available.
- Open Education Resources - OER are freely available or openly licensed learning objects such as media, textbooks, articles, and digital tools that can be used in your courses. The NIU University Libraries has created a helpful LibGuide with links to many OER repositories.
Interactivity and community are important to ensure that students still feel supported by you and connected to one another.
- Blackboard Discussion Board - Have students share thoughts and ideas about class materials asynchronously (not at the same time). You can create multiple discussion forums for students to discuss and respond to course content and activities, share resources, and collaborate around projects and assignments.
- FlipGrid - Instead of text-based discussions, foster interaction between you and your students by allowing students to record themselves in a video format. Students can then share the recording either with you alone or with the entire class. This tool can be a catalyst for multi-media dialogue in your online course.
- Office 365 - All students, faculty and staff have access to the latest versions of Microsoft Office tools available in a web browser and desktop application. Faculty and students can collaborate on documents and presentations, share content and provide feedback online.
- OneDrive - OneDrive gives you 1TB of individual storage space in a secure environment that is FERPA- and HIPAA-compliant. Faculty and students can share any file stored in OneDrive for easy collaboration.
- HyFlex Course Model
- Building a HyFlex Course to Support Student Success (webinar recording)
Academic Diversity, Equity and Inclusion has developed many resources for faculty, including an extensive faculty toolkit, with tips and strategies for culturally responsive teaching. Other helpful resources on inclusive teaching include:
Hold entire class sessions or office hours with web conferencing tools.
- Comparison of Virtual Meeting Tools - Blackboard Collaborate, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom are all available for NIU faculty to use. This comparison may help you decide which is right for you and your students
- Pros & Cons of Asking Students to Turn on their Cameras (PDF) - Teaching to a screen can be disorienting, and it is natural to want the sense of connection and feedback provided by seeing students' faces, but there are a number of considerations to weigh when encouraging or requiring students to turn on their cameras
- Blackboard Collaborate - Participants can share audio, video, and text chat; Presenters can share presentations, content on their computer screens
- Blackboard Collaborate Participant Tour [PowerPoint] - sample slides that you can use to provide an overview for students on participating in a Blackboard Collaborate session
- Blackboard Collaborate Office Hours Slide [PowerPoint] - sample slide that you can use for holding office hours in Blackboard Collaborate, with instructions for students
- Microsoft Teams - Microsoft Teams is a unified communications tool that allows for persistent 1:1 or group chat, video/audio calls and conferencing, and has integration with the full suite of O365 applications we’ve come to rely upon at NIU.
- Zoom - The university has purchased an educational site license of Zoom and all NIU faculty now have access to use Zoom for their teaching. To learn more about use of Zoom and to get started, please see the available resources and answers to frequently asked questions.
For more on tips on getting started teaching online, visit the NIU Online Teaching Quick Start. Also, see Recommendations to Increase Student Engagement in Online Courses for recommendations shared by NIU faculty and staff.
Additionally, the following resources and recommendations shared by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE) may be of particular interest and can be immediately put to use.
Supports materials, guides and resources for students learning online.
You can quickly create your own video content using the following tools:
- VoiceThread - VoiceThread is an online platform that allows you to put digital media such as images, videos, and documents at the center of an asynchronous conversation. VoiceThread allows people to contribute to discussions using a keyboard, microphone, web cam, telephone, or uploaded audio file. All NIU faculty and students have access to use VoiceThread.
- Screencasting - Record anything on your screen with audio and webcam video to create informative and engaging software or other screen-based demonstrations that are saved as a video file. Kaltura has screencasting capabilities within Kaltura Capture.
Both of the following tools also have free options. - Kaltura - Kaltura makes it easier to incorporate media like audio and video into Blackboard. You can record media directly using Kaltura Capture or upload your own video files. Kaltura encodes and converts media so that it is optimized for streaming and able to play on most devices.
Additional helpful resources on video creation:
This work was created by the NIU Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.