Unfortunately, the “availability” setting can be a bit hard to find in Moodle settings. To make this important setting easier to change and its current state more visible, you can now set its value from right in the Course Hub when creating or editing the Moodle Resource:

When you put files in the HANDOUTS/ or SHARE/ folders of your class folder, a “Middfiles Class Folder” resource will automatically be added to your Course Hub site. This resource provides a link that allows students to easily browse the files without having to mount a network drive. There is nothing extra you need to do. Read on for more details.

Middfiles is now securely accessible via the web

This summer LIS added WebDAV support to Middfiles, a new feature that allows any Middfiles file or folder to be shared securely via a web-addressable URL. What this means is that you can now put links to files and folders into email, blogs, and websites. When a user clicks on the link they will be prompted to log in before their browser downloads the file. To try it out, go to https://middfiles.middlebury.edu/ and copy-paste a link to a file.

The other benefit of this new feature is that Middfiles can now be easily used as file repository by classes primarily using a blog or Moodle site. If you have large files to share that are too big for the blog or Moodle, just put them in Middfiles and copy-paste the https://middfiles.middlebury.edu/Classes/Fall12/…/… link to the file into the blog or Moodle site.

Course Hub / Middfiles integration

As mentioned above, the Course Hub now automatically creates a “Middfiles Class Folder” resource when you put files in the HANDOUTS/ or SHARE/ sub-folders. This scan happens every few hours, so if you need the resource to appear more quickly, you can add it manually to the Course Hub.

In addition to providing the resource-link in the Course Hub sidebar, the Middfiles Resource provides a detail-view with the class-folder paths needed to map a drive to the class folder on either Windows or OS X. Class Folder PUBLIC_HTML/ sites

While LIS does not actively provide support for building static HTML websites, some instructors choose to build their own HTML websites and serve them out of the PUBLIC_HTML/ sub-folder of the class-folder on Middfiles. If any files are placed in the PUBLIC_HTML/ sub-folder a “Middfiles Public Website” resource will be automatically added to the Course Hub. If files are moved or removed from the PUBLIC_HTML/ sub-folder the resource will automatically be removed.

Lab/discussion Course Hub sites are not needed for the majority of courses as the lecture/seminar sites usually suffice. However, they may be useful in the following cases:

• The lab is taught by a separate instructor with its own resources and syllabus.
• You wish to create separate resources (e.g. Moodle sites) for each discussion section.

Below is a brief screen-cast describing how to create additional Course Hub sites.

Basic steps for adding an additional Course Hub Site:

1. Go to your Course Hub dashboard.
2. Click on the Manage Course Hub Sites link for a given term.
3. You will see a list of all sections you are teaching in that term.
   
4. Click the Add Course Hub Site link next to any section.

Our curricular web tools can be found via the Course Hub, a starting point for access to online resources. From the Course Hub instructors can create sites in Moodle and WordPress as well as make links to ERES and resources around the Internet.

Options for Migration and Archiving

Segue site owners are encouraged to migrate sites they wish to continue working with to Moodle, WordPress or ERES.  LIS has tools and workshops for assisting with migration, and can help you archive sites.

If you need help deciding platform best fits your pedagogical needs, please contact your liaison.

Segue Migration Workshops

The Curricular Technology team will provide a number of workshops and work sessions to help faculty migrate from Segue.

Segue Migration Sessions

These sessions will be focused on migrating Segue sites to other platforms.

• 1-2 pm, Tues, Jan 10th, Library 105  (sign up)
• 2-3 pm, Wed, Jan 11th, Library 105  (sign up)
• 1-2 pm, Wed, Jan 18th, Library 105  (sign up)

Curricular Technology Work Sessions

These sessions will be open work sessions where faculty can get support for any curricular use of technology including using Moodle and WordPress and also migrating Segue sites

• 2-3 pm, Jan 12th, Library 105 (sign up)
• 3-4 pm, Jan 19th, Library 105 (sign up)
• 11 am-12 pm, Jan 24th, Library 105 (sign up)
• 2-3 pm, Jan 26th, Library 105 (sign up)

Introduction to Moodle Workshops – Prepare your courses for the Spring Semester

These workshops will give an overview of Moodle for faculty interested in migrating their Segue sites to Moodle

• 3-4pm, Jan 11th, Library 105 (sign up)
• 2-3pm, Jan 18th, Library 105 (sign up)

Introduction to WordPress Workshops – Prepare your courses for the Spring Semester

These workshops will give an overview of WordPress for faculty interested in migrating their Segue sites to WordPress

• 4-5pm, Jan 11th, Library 105 (sign up)
• 4-5pm, Jan 18th, Library 105 (sign up)

If these dates/times are not convenient for you, please contact your liaison, who may be able to provide you with enough information to get you started via a phone call or a house call to your office.

As with the old version, the photo roster is only accessible to the instructor[s] of a course. We hope that by moving the photo roster into the Course Hub it will be easier to use and more readily accessible. While we don’t have a shutdown date yet, the old version of the photo roster will likely disappear when the online directory is next rebuilt (not until sometime after the current semester).

Faculty, please give this new feature a try (look for the Roster links in the Course Hub) and give us any feedback you may have.

We have also just scheduled a number of work sessions next week, specifically for faculty and staff who have already started to create sites in these new platforms and have specific questions or just want to collaborate with colleagues and LIS staff.   Here’s the schedule of these new work sessions:

• 10:00-11:00 am Weds, Sept 7th, Library 105
• 2:00-4:00 pm Weds, Sept 8th, Library 105
• 10:00-12:00 pm Weds, Sept 9th, Library 105

For the full schedule of workshops, see:
Segue from Segue > Workshops

WordPress and Moodle are the primary alternatives to Segue for course sites at Middlebury.  A number of workshops have been scheduled on how to use WordPress for course sites and how it is integrated with the Course Hub.

• 11:00 am -12:00 pm, Wednesday, August 31, Library 105
• 11:00 am -12:00 pm, Thursday, Sept 1, Library 105
• 4:00-5:00 pm, Tuesday, Sept 6, Library 105
• 3:00-4:00 pm, Wednesday, Sept 7, Library 105

Recently, several people have had issues uploading files to Drupal using Firefox. What happens is that, when you use Firefox to download a file, like a PDF, the server you download it from tells Firefox what type of file you’re downloading. Firefox then associates that file type with the file extension. A server might tell you that a PDF is the file type “application/x-download” instead of “application/pdf” and from then on Firefox will think that all PDFs are “application/x-download”s. This causes problems when you then try to upload a PDF to our site and your browser tells our server than you’re sending us a “application/x-download”, which we don’t want you to upload.

To resolve this, you need to delete a file called “mimeTypes.rdf” from your Firefox profile folder. See this guide to locating your profile folder. You only need to do this if you start experiencing this issue.

Drupal

• There are now named anchors above every node on the site. If you have a page with a bunch of nodes, you can link to a specific one by adding #node-XXXXXX to the URL where XXXXXX is the node ID, usually a six-digit number that is in the URL when you’re editing the node.
• The Google Calendar content type now supports multiple calendars and will let you select from a drop down list to choose which calendar you want to view. Items in the month display now line wrap to show you the full title. These changes were done to help support adding Library hours to our website.
• A meta description is now automatically created for every news article on the site so that when you link to a news article on Facebook the description of the link will be taken from the beginning text of the article.
• We’ve replaced the ShareThis link at the bottom of our news articles with large buttons that look nicer. This also corrects an issue where people visiting our site using Firefox 3.5 were not able to load news articles. We encourage people to upgrade to the latest version of their browsers for best support.

Course Hub

• If a course site is empty, the description from Banner is now displayed on the front page. (suggested by Shel)
• The list of updates is now styled to be more constrained table-layout — along the lines of a Twitter feed or a Facebook wall. The most common feedback we received from faculty about the Course Hub was that the update list was “messy looking”. This styling change is a big improvement on that front.

GO

• A fix so it’s now not possible to make a code with the same name as an existing alias.