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.”

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.

WordPress Introductory Workshop

This workshop is open to anyone who is interested in learning more about WordPress.

• 1:00 – 2:00 pm, Fri, Oct. 14 Library 105

If you are interested in attending this workshop, see:
WordPress Workshop Sign Up

WordPress Work Sessions

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:

• 4:00 – 5:00 pm, Tues October 18, Library 105
• 4:15 – 5:15 pm, Thurs October 20, Library 105
• 4:00 – 5:00 pm, Weds October 26, Library 105
• 2:00 – 3:00 pm, Thurs October 27, Library 105

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

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.

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.

When you are logged in and viewing a private blog, the RSS feed links will now contain a special key unique to you and the blog that gives your reader access to the feed. There is nothing special you need to do, just subscribe as usual and feeds from private blogs will now work without redirecting your reader to the login page.

Oops, I emailed my private feed link to everyone!

If you accidentally share your personal feed link with others, you can go to your profile page and revoke your key for the blog in question.

Note that you will need to resubscribe to the feeds yourself if you revoke a key.

FAQs

• If someone finds out my key, can they use it to access my other sites?
  No, keys are per-user and per-site.
• I removed a user from my private site, will they still see updates?
  No, the feed keys just authenticate the user, they still are checked against the subscriber list before showing them content.
• Will my feed key let me edit without logging in?
  No, the key only grants access to feeds, nothing more.