The first is from Wired: Beyond the Buzz, Where Are MOOCs Really Going? by Michael Horn and Clayton Christensen.  “We believe they are likely to evolve into a scale business, one that relies on the technology and data backbone of the medium to optimize and individualize learning opportunities for millions of students. This is very different than simply putting a video of a professor lecturing online.”

The second is The Trouble With Online College from the New York Times and takes perhaps a less optimistic view. “Courses delivered solely online may be fine for highly skilled, highly motivated people, but they are inappropriate for struggling students who make up a significant portion of college enrollment and who need close contact with instructors to succeed.”

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.

I attended the 2012 New Media Consortium’s summer conference located in Boston at the MIT campus for the first time, accompanied by Joe Antonioli. It was an invigorating several days of talks around new technology and education. I want to introduce you to some of the great speakers and ideas that I encountered. The embedded videos are short but get to the core of many of these ideas. Please take at least a few minutes to scan them and watch further if you find them interesting.

I began the conference with an entire morning session with Dr. Jeff Borden of Pearson called “Personalization : How Far Can (Should) We Go?” He advocates encouraging creativity, giving students safe places to fail but holding them to mastery. He cautions that too much personalization can be a bad thing, when “filter bubbles” over-personalize our experience, but data can provide invaluable feedback to both educators and students. He covers a lot of the same material in the following short video from a different conference. It’s worth watching.

This video, clips of which were shown during Kaltura’s presentation “Enhance Your Online Learning Environment with Video”, highlights the profoundly transformative effect that technologies as simple as YouTube can have. Just the first 7.5 minutes of this video will get this point across:

Several of the talks I attended were about game based learning and gamification as powerful tools for engagement and active learning.

In “Just Press Play: A Unified Game Layer for Education” Andrew Phelps (Rochester Institute of Technology) introduces “Just Press Play” an achievement/badge based system which provides a scale of accomplishment for students to engage in a range of activities and track what they have experienced.

Brett Bixler’s 20+ ways to Add Game-like Elements to Your Learning Designs

During “Which? The Academic Technology Card Game” David Thomas put forth the simple idea “Time is valuable. Entertainment values your time.” We played a card game that “inadvertently” got us talking about academic technology. It sparked inquisition and discussion and it really was fun. The following video is his short TEDx talk “What Makes a Place Fun?”

Helen Keegan urges us to take risks to get people curious. She used a “pedagogy of deception” when creating a fictional person whom the class followed via social networks.

My takeaway was that there really are opportunities to do things in new ways now, genuinely new ways that don’t simply transplant old practices into new technology, that are worth exploring. The message seems to be, take risks, encourage creativity, and get students engaged in learning by leveraging the new social, mobile, visual, storytelling, and gaming technologies.

More to engage with:

New Media Consortium Summer Conference presentations playlist Includes Joichi Ito’s opening keynote.

Tweets (Some top tweets from our own Joe Antonioli!) (click the all link for the full list)

iTunesU contains many of the talks

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.

• 2-3 pm, Thurs, Dec 8th, Library 105, Introduction to Moodle (sign up)
• 3-4 pm, Thurs, Dec 8th, Library 105, Introduction to WordPress (sign up)
• 3-4 pm, Tues, Dec 13th, Library 105, Curricular Technologies Work Session (sign up)
• 2-3 pm, Wed, Dec 14th, Library 105, Curricular Technologies Work Session (sign up)

For more information on these, see: Workshops

For information about all workshops offered by LIS in December see: On-campus Workshops > Schedule