Faculty Teaching Toolbox: Course Management Tools

At ACC, the Distance Education team coordinates and supports the delivery of online and hybrid courses. Faculty are encouraged to use our course management system, Blackboard, to deliver their content to students, whether for a face-to-face, hybrid, or fully-online course, as the system offers many features to support management of your classroom, and makes resources easily discoverable by your students.

Visit the ACC Distance Education website to learn more about SACS prerequisites for teaching a fully-online course and about tools available to all of our faculty to support delivery of content to their students to improve learning.

ACC provides many tools and resources to aid in delivering your instructional content to students. These tools include:

• Blackboard and its many features
• Instructional Designers

There are many more tools and resources available to you. To learn more or to ask a question about a specific type of support for which you are looking, contact your campus Instructional Designer.

The tools found in Blackboard, are powerful success tools for students whether you are teaching online or face-to-face. While it will take an investment from you to leverage these tools by setting them up in advance, the payoff for properly implemented tools can be immense. Some popular tools that you can consider using in online and face-to-face settings include:

• Load your detailed syllabus in your Blackboard course shell
• Set up assessments in Blackboard to be automatically graded and entered into the Blackboard grade center
• Link to resources that support student success, including online tutorials, streaming video, and more
• Use the Blackboard discussion board and/or blogging feature to engage students and encourage peer-to-peer communication
• Use adaptive release to offer remediation content to students who fail to meet a benchmark score on critical learning outcomes
• Use SafeAssign for all written assignments to help you catch any intentional or unintentional plagiarism

Have questions on how to use Blackboard? Visit ACC's Blackboard Faculty Resources pages or contact an Instructional Designer on your campus.

If students contact you to ask whether an online course might be right for them, you can refer them to these handy resources that allow them to self-identify if they might be successful in an online course:

• Learning Style Survey
• Technical Skills Checklist

You may consider directing your students to the following links in your syllabus for more information on Hybrid & Distance Education courses and content in your course.