Youngstown State Online

UPCOMING WEBINARS

Don’t Miss These Engaging Webinars

Intro to Padlet -- an Easy, Powerful Teaching Tool

📅 February 13, 2:00 PM | Register

In this session aimed at new users, you'll create an interactive multimedia Padlet and learn how to embed it in your Blackboard course. You'll learn how to add images, documents, video, and audio, and take a look at Padlet's new AI features. When we're done, you'll also have access to templates and use case ideas you can adapt to your specific instructional needs.

Utilize Blackboard's AI Design Assistant

📅 February 16, 2:00 PM | Register

Blackboard has partnered with Microsoft to become the first LMS to leverage generative AI. The AI Design Assistant helps you build your course and saves you time. You can use these features to help create learning modules, student interactions, assessments, and make rubrics. Come learn about these exciting features.

AI Productivity for Educators: What You Can Automate (and What You Shouldn’t)

📅 February 17, 1:00 PM | Register

Our online course partner, RisePoint, is offering this faculty development webinar. This session focuses on realistic, privacy-safe ways to use AI to streamline instructional tasks.

Making Accessibility Actionable: Using Ally in Blackboard

📅 February 27, 10:00 AM | Register

Discover how Ally for Blackboard can help you to work toward accessible and inclusive course content.

Apply for Blackboard’s Exemplary Course Award

The deadline for Blackboard’s Exemplary Course Award is coming up soon, on February 27th. This award is intended to identify and celebrate superior pedagogical design in online, hybrid, and blended courses. We encourage you to submit your courses!

Link to Exemplary Course Award Application (Feb. 27 deadline)

BLACKBOARD FEATURE FOCUS

Course Activity Report

Blackboard includes built-in course activity reports that enable you to see student participation details and trends. This makes it easy to identify students with low activity, so you can reach out early to offer support.

View the Course Activity Report resources

Heads we win, tails you lose: AI Detectors in Education

In this article from the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management’s January 2026 issue, the authors argue that generative AI detection tools are conceptually and methodologically unfit for educational use. A quote:

“Institutions must accept that AI detection is an unworkable solution to a problem that cannot be solved through surveillance and punishment. The focus must move from detection and enforcement to assessment design that recognises AI’s role in learning and the reality that unsupervised assessments cannot be secured. The continued use of AI detectors exposes students to procedural injustices and signals a fundamental misunderstanding of education’s purpose. AI detection does not safeguard academic integrity; it undermines it.” (Bassett et al., 2026, p. 13)

Read the full article

Try Podcasting: A Fresh Way to Assess Learning

Podcast-based assessment has been catching on at YSU. By shifting the medium of assessment from text to audio, instructors can challenge students to synthesize information in new ways while also streamlining their grading workflow.

Why Podcasts Work

Podcast creation requires students to shift from consumers of information to active knowledge constructors. Students must synthesize academic concepts and transform them into a conversational format -- a process that demands significant reflection and subject mastery. Plus, when students produce podcasts for an audience beyond the classroom, they often exhibit increased accountability (McTighe et al., 2020). This can lead to higher-quality submissions, potentially streamlining the feedback process.

Saving Faculty Time

One of the many reasons to consider podcasting is its potential to save faculty time. Audio-based assessment can be more manageable than traditional text-based grading in several ways:

Faster Feedback: Providing audio feedback in Blackboard is typically much faster than typing detailed comments.
Separating Skills: Podcasting allows faculty to assess learning and critical thinking independently of formal writing mechanics. There are no spelling errors to distract you!
Universal Design (UDL): Audio learning can meet a wide range of learning needs, including those of neurodivergent students. This offers an alternative to text-based assignments without adding a separate workload for the instructor.

Tips for Success

To keep the workload manageable:

Set Strict Time Limits: Limit episodes to 5–10 minutes. This forces students to be concise and keeps listening time equivalent to or less than reading time.
Use Accessible Tools: Recommend free, smartphone-compatible tools like Audacity or Spotify for Podcasters. These allow students to record and edit with minimal technical support needed from the instructor.
Flip the Assessment: You can use a podcast in place of a synchronous class presentation to share knowledge without consuming valuable "live" class time (Stanford IT, 2021).

Adding a podcast-based assessment is catching on at YSU. If you want to give it a try, this step-by-step library guide resource is a good place to start: Teaching with Podcasts: Why Podcasts?

References

Adams, K. et al. (2021). It’s Time for Academe to Take Podcasting Seriously. Inside Higher Ed.

Stanford IT Teaching Resources. (2021). How to leverage podcasts for learning. Stanford University.

McTighe, J., Doubet, K. J., & Carbaugh, E. M. (2020). Designing authentic performance Tasks and Projects: tools for meaningful learning and assessment.