The Course Hub is being actively used by a variety of courses this fall. To give a sense of the different ways faculty are using this new platform, we’ve made a short screencast that shows a number of courses and some the resources they have linked to their course hub sites.
The Curricular Technology team has scheduled workshops and work sessions for faculty on various platforms that are available for teaching and learning. Workshops typically provide overviews of a given platform. Work sessions are designed to provide hands on support and consultation.
For more information on these, see: Workshops
For information about all workshops offered by LIS in December see: On-campus Workshops > Schedule
WordPress is a platform for creating a wide range of web sites, including this one. A number of workshops on WordPress have been scheduled in October.
This workshop is open to anyone who is interested in learning more about WordPress.
If you are interested in attending this workshop, see:
WordPress Workshop Sign Up
We have also scheduled a number of work sessions on WordPress, as well as Moodle. These work sessions are designed to provide hands on assistance to anyone who is working on a site or has specific questions. Here are dates/times:
If you are interested in attending one or more of these sessions, see:
WordPress/Moodle Work Session Sign Up
For more information about WordPress, see:
http://mediawiki.middlebury.edu/wiki/LIS/WordPress
http://sites.middlebury.edu/wordpress
For a full list of workshops offered by LIS as well as links to other resources for learning about technology, see:
Help & Support » How to Learn More » On-campus Workshops
Last week I attended a Nercomp event on WordPress in the Liberal Arts in Norwood, MA and participated in a panel on WordPress themes and plugins with colleagues from the College of Wooster and Abilene Christian University. About 45 people attended, most from institutions that were already using WordPress. Many of these same institutions were also using Moodle and Drupal.
WordPress is used by many for course sites. Abilene Christian University has integrated it with Banner making it easy for their faculty to create class blogs that automatically include students. The College of Wooster has an instance of WordPress referred to as Voices, that includes BuddyPress and bbPress, popular WordPress plugins and associated platforms that add functionality for creating groups and forums and aggregating activity streams across various sites. Mark Frydenberg from Bentley University teaches his students how to maintain a WordPress site, requiring each student to take on the role of site administrator and tasking them with changing the site theme, adding plugins and managing roles.
Some institutions are using WordPress for e-portfolios. Macaulay Honors College has over 1,500 sites in EPorfolios@Macaulay, which also makes use of BuddyPress to create various groups that they plan to include in their upcoming WordPress student portal, My.Macaulay. Some institutions even use WordPress for the college website including Bates, Lafayette and Wheaton.
For more than a decade the Web Applications group and its predecessors have provided a popular “class photo roster” through the online directory to help instructors match names to faces. We are pleased to announce that as of today, the class photo roster is now a feature of the Course Hub.
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.
The Curricular Technology team has organized a number of workshops on the Course Hub, Moodle and WordPress which have been very well attended and have provided us with great feedback.
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:
For the full schedule of workshops, see:
Segue from Segue > Workshops
The Curricular Technology (CT) team will be organizing workshops this summer on new technologies for teaching, learning and research including the new Course Hub and the Moodle learning management system (LMS). The first series of these workshops will be offered next week. Here are details:
1:00 – 2:00 pm, Tues, June 21, Library 105
This workshop will give an overview of the platforms that will be available in the next academic year for creating course websites including the Course Hub, Moodle and WordPress. For more information on the Course Hub, which will become the definitive starting point for all online course resources, see:
The Course Hub > About
2-3:30 pm, Weds, June 22, Library 105
This workshop will introduce Moodle, one of the platforms that will replace Segue for creating course sites. For more information on Moodle, see:
Moodle @ Middlebury
1-2:30 pm, Fri, June 24, Library 105
This workshop will introduce WordPress, another platform that can be used as a replacement for Segue for creating course sites. For more information on WordPress, see:
WordPress @ Middlebury
On Tuesday May 31st we’re going to change the categories on this blog, so if by any chance you’re using a feed of a specific category, that’s going to break. We suggest subscribing to the whole blog for maximum enjoyment! If you’re not a LIS staff member & would like to filter out the more staff related posts, you can subscribe to the new “Middlebury Community Interest” category after May 31st. The other categories will be “LIS Staff Interest”, and “Post for MiddPoints” which will cause the post to be added to the MiddPoints blog too. All the old categories except “The Essentials” will be converted to tags for easy searching.
The LIS Web team developed this new scheme, following recommendations that came out of the open meeting about the future of the LIS Blog (including a call for simplified categories). The AD Team reviewed and approved these changes. We welcome your comments.
Segue from Segue Teaching with Technology LIS Staff Middlebury Community MiddPoints
