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Instructor Toolkit

There are a number of digital teaching tools that could be used for instruction, but it is important to understand why there is a limited set of tools that can and should be used for instruction in Ohio State courses.

Before a new teaching tool is approved and added to the full university e-learning toolset or supplemented by the College of Arts and Sciences toolset, there are rigorous reviews completed to check that the tool meets OSU standards for data security, privacy, accessibility, and even the terms and conditions to which users are asked to agree before utilizing the tool. We also help look for the best tool on the market for your purposes and may be able to assist in establishing and maintaining a good relationship with the vendor to ensure ongoing usefulness and compliance with OSU standards. If you are using a learning tool that has not had these reviews, you may be out of compliance with OSU policy and/or state law, and may be unwittingly putting your students, yourself, or the university at risk.

The ASC Office of Distance Education is committed to supporting instructors in the College of Arts and Sciences in creating exceptional educational experiences for all students. In addition to supporting ASC instructors with the effective use of tools in the university e-learning toolset, we identify gaps in the university toolset that would facilitate the kind of learning experiences we hear instructors in our College would like to have available. For example, ASC pilots and adoptions of tools like ThingLink, Hypothesis, and H5P were initiated by our office as a response to a pattern of faculty need throughout the College. If you have identified a non-approved tool that you feel is well-suited for your needs, we are available to assist with evaluating the tool and its competitors, then initiating and shepherding the tool through the review process.

It is impossible for instructors to know about every available tool and the functionality of each tool. This webpage is intended to be a useful resource for instructors that are exploring digital tools to meet a specific teaching task or learning experience, in particular in Carmen and Scarlet spaces. If after reviewing this list, you would like to talk to an instructional designer about what tools are available to meet your specific goals, please request a consultation and we will assign an instructional designer to work with you to talk through solutions.

Overview

Most Suitable Supported Tools

Supported tools fall into four main groups. There are some additional exceptions, but over 90% of the supported tools are in one of these sets.

  • The OTDI Toolset: These are tools that OTDI has vetted, chosen, provides, and supports for everyone at the university. These include Carmen, CarmenZoom, and many others. These are all free for you to use, and support is provided in the form of articles, workshops, consultations, and on-demand help.
  • Arts and Sciences Toolset: These are tools that the College of Arts and Sciences has vetted, chosen, provides, and supports for instructors within the college. These include ThingLink, Hypothesis, and H5P. These are all free for you to use, and support is provided in the form of articles, consultations, and on-demand help.
  • Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365): These are tools that OTDI provides for everyone at the university. These include core office tools, including Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, as well as a few dozen additional tools with potential use for teaching and learning. Limited support is available in the form of articles, workshops, and consultations. Not all these tools have been thoroughly vetted for accessibility.
  • Adobe Creative Suite: These are tools that OTDI provides for everyone at the university. These include a wide range of multimedia creation and editing tools, including Photoshop, Acrobat, and Premiere, as well as a few dozen additional tools with potential use for teaching and learning. Limited support is available in the form of articles, workshops, and consultations. Not all these tools have been thoroughly vetted for accessibility.

Alternatives to Consider

  • Approved Publisher Tools: There are a number of publisher platforms (both etextbooks and homework systems) that have been vetted and approved for university use. These are mentioned in the following resource. When considering online textbooks and supporting tools, we strongly recommend meeting with our office early in the process.

Alternatives to Avoid

  • Any non-OSU-approved Alternative: Tools that have not been vetted for security, privacy, accessibility, and terms of use and for which students cannot receive help from university and college support teams should not be used at Ohio State.
  • Any non-OSU-approved learning management system (e.g., Moodle, Blackboard)
  • Any non-OSU-approved document platforms (e.g., Google Documents, Evernote)
  • Any non-OSU-approved web file storage platforms (e.g., Box, Dropbox)
  • Any publisher platforms or tools you do not know are approved
  • Personal websites, webservers, webhosting, or web tools not provided by OSU
  • Any of the 10,000 alternative tools whose representatives may approach you with offers but which Ohio State has not approved for use

Presenting Materials to Students

A core ability of online learning is the ability to communicate with your students wherever they are through video, either in real-time (synchronous) or in recordings (asynchronous). Given the traditional centrality of this activity in college teaching, the toolset features a range of options to enable you to do this with your students.

Most Suitable Tools

Alternatives to Consider

  • Microsoft Teams: Less easy to use in some ways, Teams provides similar meeting and recording functions as CarmenZoom
  • Microsoft Powerpoint (for recording): Any presentation can be exported as a video by inserting recorded audio into each slide

Alternatives to Avoid

  • Commercial video hosting platforms (e.g., YouTube, Vimeo)
  • Non-video platforms (e.g., OneDrive, Carmen Files): Sharing video over the internet requires specialized software, and most file storage options are not equipped to do it well. Carmen also allows very limited storage space, so should not be used as a primary lecture or video solution.
  • Any non-OSU-approved Alternative: Tools that have not been vetted for security, privacy, accessibility, and terms of use and for which students cannot receive help from university and college support teams should not be used at Ohio State.

The internet is made of words, so it would seem that creating and sharing reading materials would be the simplest teaching task to accomplish online. There are nevertheless some nuances worth considering, because some methods of sharing text can result in inaccessible materials and/or compromise student security or privacy.

Most Suitable Tools

  • Carmen (Pages, Books): For creating readings for students, compiling links to multiple reading materials, and purchasing textbooks
  • Microsoft Files (Word, PowerPoint, etc.): To create complicated materials and to make it easier for students to download materials to use outside Carmen
  • Library resources: The University Library provides deep collections of digital materials suitable for teaching, all of which has been vetted for standards similar to those used for online tools and licensed so that use is free for students
  • Approved eTextbook Providers: A number of publisher platforms (both etextbooks and homework systems) have been vetted and approved for university use. When considering online textbooks and supporting tools, we strongly recommend meeting with our office early in the process.

Alternatives to Consider

  • Acrobat PDFs: when you only have access to a text in physical form, it can make sense to scan it to a PDF and then share it with students. It is crucial for accessibility to run OCR (optical character recognition) on the resulting file. You should only save other documents (Word files, etc.) to PDF when it is essential that they appear a certain way, because it can be challenging to ensure accessibility.

Alternatives to Avoid

  • The Open Internet: Files you find on the internet may not be accessible and in some cases may present security and privacy concerns.
  • Image Tools (e.g., Photoshop): Text presented in the form of an image can only be used by sighted students and should be avoided for readings.
  • Any non-OSU-approved Publisher Tools: including Amazon Kindle, Overdrive, and other platforms.
  • Any non-OSU-approved Alternative: Tools that have not been vetted for security, privacy, accessibility, and terms of use and for which students cannot receive help from university and college support teams should not be used at Ohio State.

There are multiple ways to add explanatory text and other enhancements to videos you create or find elsewhere, which can be a powerful way to deepen students' understanding and increase the efficiency of the time they spend watching materials. ThingLink is most effective for adding constructed annotations, while CarmenZoom is the simplest way to record mark-up and annotations created in the moment. NOTE: there are nuances and challenges involved in generating annotated multimedia, and it can be especially helpful to meet with an instructional designer for input and support.

Most Suitable Tools

  • ThingLink: provides an intuitive interface and basic set of options for inserting text and multimedia annotations at specific points in uploaded video files, including 360 video. Note: students have access to ThingLink to generate their own annotations.
  • CarmenZoom and Microsoft Teams Meetings: provide tools to add text and commentary to any material currently being screen-shared and to record the results. For most effective annotation, it is advisable to use a touch-screen, a specialized input device, or other tools.

Alternatives to Consider

  • Microsoft Flip: Enables addition of limited annotations and text to videos within a threaded discussion format. Most appropriate when students need to add their own commentary.
  • Adobe Premiere Rush: a relatively simple video editing tool, Rush enables adding text, images, audio, and other media into a video file.
  • H5P: provides extensive video annotation features, including the ability to include quiz questions (which will result in grades reported back to the Carmen Gradebook). Note: Due to license issues, material must be created and edited by an ASC ODE Instructional Designer.

Alternatives to Avoid

  • Any non-OSU-approved Alternative: Tools that have not been vetted for security, privacy, accessibility, and terms of use and for which students cannot receive help from university and college support teams should not be used at Ohio State.
  • NOTE: there are nuances and challenges involved in generating annotated multimedia, and it can be especially helpful to meet with an instructional designer for input and support.

Rather than presenting information in a single, linear stream, it can be valuable for students to make decisions while they are processing new information. Also called "choose-your-own-adventure" pedagogy, branching activities present students with decision-points and provide different new materials based on their choices. Ultimately, any tool that enables hyperlinking can host a branching scenario; some tools are easier and some enable more options.

Most Suitable Tools

  • ThingLink: ThingLink provides a dedicated "Scenarios" object type that provides specialized guidance and support for linking scenes into branching activities.
  • H5P: H5P includes a specific tool for creating branching scenarios. Unfortunately, instructors cannot currently create H5P materials independently, but our office will be happy to meet with you to discuss creating items for you at your direction.
  • Carmen Pages: To build a branching activity in Carmen Pages, describe the scenario and decision-point, then create hyperlinks for each possible decision, leading to a different Carmen page. Pages is simple to get started but can become difficult to manage for larger sets of scenarios.

Alternatives to Consider

  • u.osu.edu: Since a u.osu.edu site fundamentally consists of pages and posts that include multimedia and hyperlinks, it is simple to develop branching scenarios.

Alternatives to Avoid

  • Any non-OSU-approved specialized tools (e.g., Twine, Articulate): Due to the navigational complexity, the need for high accessibility standards is especially crucial for branching activities.
  • Any non-OSU-approved Alternative: Tools that have not been vetted for security, privacy, accessibility, and terms of use and for which students cannot receive help from university and college support teams should not be used at Ohio State.

Beyond sharing materials with students, it is important to present those materials in a clearly organized, easily navigable form.

Most Suitable Tools

  • Carmen (Modules, Pages, Files): For creating modules, pages, and a virtual space to store course materials
  • OneDrive: While it should not be used as the primary way that students are asked to navigate materials, OneDrive is useful as a place to store and share files. It is especially important to use for large files or sets of files, which may exceed Carmen's storage quotas

Alternatives to Consider

  • Microsoft Teams: For each team, topic, and channel, Teams creates a file storage area, which can be used as a tool for sharing materials with students. Given that students are very familiar with Carmen and not very familiar with Teams, you should only consider using Teams if there is a compelling reason.

Alternatives to Avoid

  • Personal websites: Even if you are an expert web developer, using non-OSU-provided servers and options may create problems for students
  • Any non-OSU-approved Alternative: Tools that have not been vetted for security, privacy, accessibility, and terms of use and for which students cannot receive help from university and college support teams should not be used at Ohio State.

Most online tools present material in linear form: vertical text in Word, for example, or horizontally scrolling slides in PowerPoint. It can be valuable to present material in more flexible forms or to interact with materials while presenting to move things around or to add additional notes. In some courses, it is important to demonstrate solving problems by writing out solutions while explaining the process to students. These advanced kinds of presentation are especially challenging to provide accessibly and many vendors that do so are especially likely to violate student privacy.

Most Suitable Tools

  • Microsoft Whiteboard: Provides core drawing features that can be easily shared with students and recorded using screenshare and Zoom
  • Microsoft Planner: Not strictly a mindmapping tool, using the Kanban view in Planner does make it possible to categorize items and quickly move them around for sorting

Alternatives to Avoid

  • Any non-OSU-approved commercial and open alternatives (e.g., Padlet)
  • Any non-OSU-approved Alternative: Tools that have not been vetted for security, privacy, accessibility, and terms of use and for which students cannot receive help from university and college support teams should not be used at Ohio State.

A powerful way to improve student learning is to enhance materials by adding elements beyond text, images, audio, and video. For example, you might want to add your custom annotations to a reading or video, providing just-in-time guidance for students through a challenging text. Or you may want to mark up an image or diagram, adding clickable markers that students can use to trigger more detailed explanations. Or you may want to incorporate interactive elements, which ask students to answer a question or engage in a task in the midst of a reading or video.

Most Suitable Tools

  • Hypothesis (annotation): Makes it easy to add annotations to any PDF document, JSTOR item, or open website
  • ThingLink (interactive markup): Makes it easy to mark up any image (or set of images) to add interactive hot-spots students can use to trigger for more information

Alternatives to Consider

  • H5P (interactivity): H5P includes a set of tools that can be used to incorporate a wide range of interactive elements within Carmen Pages and elsewhere. Unfortunately, instructors cannot currently create H5P materials independently, but our office will be happy to meet with you to discuss creating items for you at your direction.
  • Carmen Quizzes: While not the most elegant solution, it is possible to incorporate any kind of media in the form of text items, interspersed with any kind of quiz question, creating an interactive experience for students
  • Notability: If you have an iPad, you can use Notability as part of the Microsoft platform

Alternatives to Avoid

  • Any non-OSU-approved Alternative: Tools that have not been vetted for security, privacy, accessibility, and terms of use and for which students cannot receive help from university and college support teams should not be used at Ohio State.

Activities and Assessments

Enabling students to learn with and from each other by talking or exchanging text directly is an extremely powerful tool for learning. Fortunately, there are many tools available to enable these kinds of interactions.

Most Suitable Tools

  • Carmen (Zoom, Discussions, Student Groups): To meet with students, and enabling students to meet with each other, for threaded multi-media posts that you can asses using Speedgrader and rubrics, and for assigning students to groups.
  • Hypothesis: This tool enables students (and you) to add annotations to PDFs, open web resources, and JSTOR articles and then reply to each others' annotations.
  • Microsoft Teams: This tool enables complex interactions, featuring teams, channels, and chats, as well as built-in synchronous video meetings. The set up can be substantial, and grading does not automatically transfer to the gradebook.

Alternatives to Consider

  • Microsoft Flip: This tool, part of the Microsoft 365 platform, enables students to exchange and respond to recorded video comments easily.

Alternatives to Avoid

  • Any non-OSU-approved tools (e.g., PackBack, Discord, Slack)
  • Social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, TikTok): In addition to data/privacy, accessibility, and other concerns, students generally prefer to maintain separation from their personal and educational online lives.
  • Any non-OSU-approved Alternative: Tools that have not been vetted for security, privacy, accessibility, and terms of use and for which students cannot receive help from university and college support teams should not be used at Ohio State.

The value of online quizzing is sometimes underestimated, but it is possible to design learning activities that go well beyond simple objective memory testing.

Most Suitable Tools

  • Carmen Quizzes: This tool enables instructors to build quizzes featuring about a dozen kinds of questions, question banks (which enable randomization), instant feedback, and other powerful features.
  • TopHat: This polling tool enables instructors to incorporate multiple types of questions into presentations, then rapidly share summaries of student responses. Recently added features enable the creation of asynchronous presentations and polling/quizzing activities.
  • H5P: This tool makes it easy to create a wide range of interactive widgets, ranging from individual quiz questions through matching activities and beyond, which can then be embedded within other learning materials such as Carmen Pages. NOTE: Due to licensing restrictions, it is not possible for instructors to create H5P content directly, but the ASC ODE office will be happy to create materials on your behalf.

Alternatives to Consider

  • Microsoft Forms: For informal, ungraded questions, creating a simple form or survey can be a useful way to gather information.
  • Microsoft Qualtrics: For informal, ungraded questions, creating a simple form or survey can be a useful way to gather information.
  • Approved Publisher Tools: There are a number of publisher platforms (both etextbooks and homework systems) that have been vetted and approved for university use. These are mentioned in the following resource. When considering online textbooks and supporting tools, we strongly recommend meeting with our office early in the process.

Alternatives to Avoid

  • Proprietary Quizzing Tools (e.g., Quizlet, Articulate, Mentimeter)
  • Any non-OSU-approved Alternative: Tools that have not been vetted for security, privacy, accessibility, and terms of use and for which students cannot receive help from university and college support teams should not be used at Ohio State.

Technically, quizzes and tests are the same thing online, regardless of the point values or percent of the final grade involved; thus, all the tools above can be used for high-stakes tests as well as low-stakes quizzes. What we are describing here are tools that can be used for especially important assessments when it is most important to reinforce academic integrity even at the cost of additional effort and the risk of worsening student anxiety.

Most Suitable Tools

  • Proctorio: This browswer plug-in enables instructors to gather a range of data about students' behavior and device configurations while they are completing a Carmen Quiz, up to and including video. That data can then be used to form judgments about academic integrity. NOTE: This tool must be used carefully and with great caution, because there are strict limits to its ability to gather unbiased information, and the use of that data requires thoughtful interpretation.

Alternatives to Consider

  • Carmen Zoom: This tool will enable you to observe students while they complete assessments.
  • In-Person Proctoring Options: Given the many challenges for managing and/or monitoring the behavior of anyone online, it may be worth conducting high-stakes and otherwise very important assessments in-person. There are a number of resources, such as on-campus testing centers, that can be used to provide space.

Alternatives to Avoid

  • ExamSoft: The College of Arts and Sciences has elected not to continue use of ExamSoft due to cost. Reach out to the Office of Distance Education (ascode@osu.edu) to examine alternatives or consider electing to opt back in to paying for this tool based on proposed use.
  • Schedule a Consult: Given that high-stakes assessments are inherently very impactful on students' careers, we strongly recommend meeting with a member of our staff to discuss your needs and ways to address them.
  • Any non-OSU-approved Alternative: Tools that have not been vetted for security, privacy, accessibility, and terms of use and for which students cannot receive help from university and college support teams should not be used at Ohio State.

There are multiple tools designed to provide guidance for students while they complete a complex set or sequence of steps.

Most Suitable Tools

  • (social annotation) Hypothesis: This tool enables students (and you) to add annotations to PDFs, open web resources, and JSTOR articles and then reply to each others' annotations. You could pre-seed a document with specific questions for students to consider or answer. Or you could ask students to annotate their journey through the logic of a complex argument.
  • (data) LabArchives: This tool is designed specifically to enable any researcher (novice to professional) to gather and manage data in a secure, reliable, time-dated platform.
  • Carmen Quizzes: If time-limits are removed from a quiz, it can be used to guide complex activities by alternating the use of explanatory text items and various kinds of questions, including file-upload questions, if students need to take notes beyond typing into Carmen.

Alternatives to Consider

  • Virtual Desktop: This tool makes it possible to provide students with a remote, online operating system that can be pre-loaded with files and/or software -- and which simulates a more powerful computer than many students have access to -- making it possible to provide rare or expensive tools for students to complete complex activities.
  • Ohio Supercomputer Center: The OSC provides online tools and educational materials to support data-intensive learning activities, including such things as statistical analysis and data visualization using the R suite.

Alternatives to Avoid

  • Any non-OSU-approved Alternative: Tools that have not been vetted for security, privacy, accessibility, and terms of use and for which students cannot receive help from university and college support teams should not be used at Ohio State.

The word "papers" is in quotation marks here both because there is no paper on the internet and because, as a result, the number of kinds of thing a student might submit to demonstrate their learning is a very large number.

Most Suitable Tools

Tools for Students to Submit Work (and for You to Grade It)

Tools Students Might Use to Create Work that They Will Then Submit

  • Microsoft Office [Word, Powerpoint, etc.] (traditional text): Office tools have been and remain the standard default for student work. One recent development is that students can now share links to the file, rather than uploading a copy of the file.
  • u.osu.edu (blogging, websites): Based on WordPress, u.osu.edu enables students to create an entire website, including multimedia pages and posts, and to manage the sharing of that site, whether with you, other students, and/or anyone on the internet.
  • LabArchives (data/research): This tool is designed specifically to enable any researcher (novice to professional) to gather and manage data in a secure, reliable, time-dated platform.
  • Adobe Express (infographics, webpages): This tool enables students to develop multimedia, ranging from simple images through complex web pages, without needing to know any special skills of editing or coding.
  • ThingLink (interactive images, diagrams, infographics, etc.): This tool enables students to annotate images by adding interactive "hot spots" that can display explanatory material ranging from plain text through video and multimedia.

Alternatives to Consider

  • Almost Anything in the Toolset: With a few exceptions, students have the same access to approved tools as staff and instructors, so anything that can be used to generate stable material (a file or a stable hyperlink) can be used by students to create "papers."
  • Universal Design for Learning: When feasible, avoid specifying a specific tool or format for an assignment beyond what is necessary for student learning. For example, rather than a Microsoft Word document, request a discursive response; instead of an image, request an artifact. More open assignments benefit students with disabilities by preemptively enabling them to choose the medium that is most effective for them.

Alternatives to Avoid

  • Any non-OSU-approved software suites (e.g., Google Documents)
  • System-specific tools (e.g., Pages or Notepad): Since students use a variety of devices, it is important to avoid requesting that assignments be completed in tools that are only available in one system, such as Microsoft Access or the Apple Office Suite.
  • Any non-OSU-approved Alternative: Tools that have not been vetted for security, privacy, accessibility, and terms of use and for which students cannot receive help from university and college support teams should not be used at Ohio State.

Public speaking and other demonstrative and performative skills play an important role in learning and can provide very valuable information about the status of students' learning. Online contexts provide a wider range of possibilities than the relatively straightforward situation of in-class presentations, so it is especially helpful to distinguish between a) the tools used to create the presentation media and b) the channel(s) whereby students share their presentation with you and their classmates.

Most Suitable Tools for Presentation Materials

  • Microsoft Powerpoint: Microsoft PowerPoint remains the primary and most widely known tool for organizing text and multimedia to accompany spoken presentations.
  • ThingLink (interactive images, diagrams, infographics, etc.): This tool enables students to annotate images by adding interactive "hot spots" that can display explanatory material ranging from plain text through video and multimedia, which can be a very effective format for asynchronous presentations.
  • Adobe Express: This tool enables students to develop multimedia, ranging from simple images through complex web pages, without needing to know any special skills of editing or coding.

Alternatives to Consider for Presentation Materials

  • u.osu.edu (blogging, websites): Based on WordPress, u.osu.edu enables students to create an entire website, including multimedia pages and posts, and to manage the sharing of that site, whether with you, other students, and/or anyone on the internet.

Most Suitable Tools for Presentation Channels

Alternatives to Consider for Presentation Channels

  • Flip: This tool, part of the Microsoft 365 platform, enables students to exchange and respond to recorded video comments easily. It is designed primarily for informal and brief videos (it is possible set time-limits), rather than longer, formal presentations.

Alternatives to Avoid

  • Dynamic presentation tools (e.g., Prezi): Tools that add motion, multiple layers, multiple levels of perspective, and other innovations are especially challenging to make usable by people with disabilities. In addition, vendors often violate privacy and/or ignore security or charge for use.
  • Any non-OSU-approved video hosting platforms (e.g., YouTube, Vimeo)
  • Non-video platforms (e.g., OneDrive, Carmen Files): Sharing video over the internet requires specialized software, and most file storage options are not equipped to do it well. Carmen also allows very limited storage space, so should not be used as a primary lecture or video solution.
  • Any non-OSU-approved Alternative: Tools that have not been vetted for security, privacy, accessibility, and terms of use and for which students cannot receive help from university and college support teams should not be used at Ohio State.

Asking students to produce compilations of work completed at multiple different times, either as an ongoing and unfolding project or as a retrospective way to re-examine and re-use earlier work, is a very powerful learning opportunity, and the durability of files created and submitted via online tools makes this kind of work easier than in traditional settings.

Most Suitable Tools

  • PebblePad: This tool is purpose-built to enable students to compile multiple assignments completed in other systems (especially in Carmen) and to organize and analyze that work in novel ways.
  • u.osu.edu: Based on WordPress, u.osu.edu enables students to create an entire website, including multimedia pages and posts, and to manage the sharing of that site, whether with you, other students, and/or anyone on the internet. Those pages and posts can easily be composed of or contain work submitted elsewhere.

Alternatives to Consider

  • Adobe Express: This tool enables students to develop multimedia, ranging from simple images through complex web pages, without needing to know any special skills of editing or coding. While very elaborate portfolios might become confusing, Express would be ideal for 1-2 courses' worth of assignments.
  • OneDrive: For portfolios with very complex content and/or where the viewing and navigational interface is less important, OneDrive can provide a useful alternative.

Alternatives to Avoid

  • Any non-OSU-approved Alternative: Tools that have not been vetted for security, privacy, accessibility, and terms of use and for which students cannot receive help from university and college support teams should not be used at Ohio State. (e.g., Google Documents, LinkedIn, public blogging software, badging tools)

Other

Especially in online courses, maintaining open lines of communication with students between sessions is crucial, including ensuring that they have information available to know how they are doing in the course, so that they can pose questions about the material or what they should be doing in the course, and so that you can provide them with new or emerging information.

Most Suitable Tools

Alternatives to Consider

  • Microsoft Outlook: For generating more complex messages to students and/or to personalize messages through using features like mail merge, Outlook remains a good option, since e-mails remain within OSU systems.

Alternatives to Avoid

  • Any non-OSU-approved communication tool (e.g., GMail)
  • Other data storage systems (e.g., Microsoft Excel): While it can be helpful to supplement the information included in the Carmen Gradebook with more granular information elsewhere, students should always be able to monitor their progress in the Carmen Gradebook.
  • Any non-OSU-approved Alternative: Tools that have not been vetted for security, privacy, accessibility, and terms of use and for which students cannot receive help from university and college support teams should not be used at Ohio State.

In addition to regularly scheduled class times, it can be powerful to meet with students individually or in smaller groups to focus on specific projects, provide more extensive insights about particular concepts or skills, and otherwise provide more tailored teaching.

Most Suitable Tools

  • Carmen Calendar + Appointment Groups: Carmen incorporates scheduling tools that enable scheduing specific meetings and also make it possible to provide students with a limited range of options to choose from.

Alternatives to Consider

  • Microsoft Bookings: The Microsoft 365 platform provides this more elaborate alternative tool, which is also integrated more closely with the Microsoft Outlook Calendar.
  • Microsoft Scheduling Poll: This tool enables you to identify multiple possible times for meeting, to which students (or colleagues or TAs) can reply to indicate their availability.

Alternatives to Avoid

  • Any non-OSU-approved scheduling poll alternatives (e.g., Doodle Polls)
  • Any non-OSU-approved time management systems (e.g., Google Calendar)
  • Any non-OSU-approved Alternative: Tools that have not been vetted for security, privacy, accessibility, and terms of use and for which students cannot receive help from university and college support teams should not be used at Ohio State.

Recent technical and commercial developments have made a range of artificial intelligence (AI) tools available for public use. Potential student uses have included assisting composition, tutoring, and facilitating research. There is also concern that these tools will be used for inappropriate purposes, such as plagiarism. At present, there is no AI tool provided or approved for use at Ohio State.

Most Suitable Tools

Alternatives to Consider

  • None: No AI tool is currently provided or approved for use at Ohio State. The above TLRC resource provides a range of suggestions for addressing AI in your courses.

Alternatives to Avoid

  • Any AI Tools: As stated in the OTDI resource linked above, "University faculty, staff, students, and affiliates should not enter institutional data into any generative AI tools, including ChatGPT."