Stephen F. Austin State University

OIT News and Announcements

Blackboard Will Be Erased - Act Now

Grades will not pass from Blackboard to Banner at the end of Spring 2012.

No live courses will be in Blackboard beginning Summer 2012.

Blackboard is available until August 15th ONLY for Incompletes and for faculty to retrieve materials. Blackboard at SFA will be turned off permanently August 15, 2012. No one will be able to log in to Blackboard after that. Faculty should take steps now to download (to your own computer) copies of files, content, gradebooks, etc., currently on Blackboard that need to be preserved. Those items will serve as your only copy of your course materials. OIT will not be able to retrieve any items from Blackboard after August 15th.

Faculty who have ANY completely developed courses in Blackboard that have not yet been migrated into D2L should contact OIT immediately by sending email to d2l@sfasu.edu. No courses, present or future, will be able to be migrated from Blackboard into D2L after August 15. Please don't wait. Contact d2l@sfasu.edu immediately. Special arrangements will need to be made by faculty for those students who took Incompletes in the Spring and cannot finish their course by August 1.

Need a Peer-Reviewed Publication?

The Northeast Texas Consortium of Colleges and Universities (NETnet) has released a Call for Papers open to faculty, administrators, and degree candidates at Consortium universities and related institutions. The papers will be considered for presentation and review during the 2012 Summer Distance Learning Conference to be held July 11-13 at Kilgore College in Kilgore Texas. Submitted papers will be reviewed by a panel of referees from the five Consortium universities. See the PDF below for complete information.

Call for Papers - NETnet conference 2012

Outstanding Excellence in Online Education

Three SFA faculty were presented with OIT's Award for Outstanding Excellence in Online Education in a May 10th ceremony. The 2012 recipients are:

The recipients presented selected aspects of their online courses at the annual graduation ceremony for graduates of OIT's Certified Online Instructor training program. Please helps us congratulate these outstanding online faculty.

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Deadlines for Approval of New Online Courses

Certified Online Instructors who are planning to develop a course that will be offered in a fully-developed online format for the first time in Spring 2013 and have not yet had a Design Plan Meeting for that course, should contact the OIT Instructional Designer to make arrangements to have a Design Plan Meeting by September 1. Final Reviews must be held by October 1.

Faculty planning to bring new fully-developed online courses forward for Final Review before the March 1 deadline must complete a Design Plan Meeting before February 1 in which they present at least two completed instructional modules.

So that we may focus on helping faculty meet the annual March 1 and October 1 deadlines for Final Review, the Office of Instructional Technology does not conduct Design Plan Meetings during the months of February or September. Lani Draper, the OIT Instructional Designer, may be reached by email at coursedesign@sfasu.edu and by phone at ext. 1735 to help you schedule and prepare for the meetings.