Annotating Texts to Deepen Meaning

CV Starr Professor of Russian & East European Studies Tom Beyer is no stranger to utilizing technology in the classroom. During the summer of 2013 Tom approached the digital media tutor program to see if we could assist with transitioning content from an existing Wetpaint site to another platform.

See the video below to learn more about the project and process involved.

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Course Hub Review

The Course Hub is a meta-platform for aggregating resources for a given course across a variety of platforms including WordPress and Moodle.  Below is a screencast showing how the Course Hub has been used in courses this fall.

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Integrating Moodle and WordPress

Louisa Stein is an assistant professor of Film and Media Culture who used both Moodle and WordPress in the spring of 2011 for a course on the “Aesthetics of the Moving Image.”  Prof. Stein used WordPress for the public face of this course and Moodle for the weekly outline of readings, online discussion and assignment submissions.  Watch the screencast below for more details. Continue reading “Integrating Moodle and WordPress”

Online Placement Exam – Prof Nancy O’Connor

All the Language departments and Language Schools at Middlebury require students to take a placement exam before enrolling in language courses or programs in order to ensure students take courses at a level appropriate to their knowledge of the language they want to study.  Amongst language departments, the Spanish department was the first to create an online version of their placement exam in a web application referred to as Measure.  Prof. Nancy O’Connor used the Spanish department exam as a guide for developing an exam for students of French.

The exam contains about 90 questions, most of which are either multiple-choice or cloze type questions, and progresses from easier points of grammar — verb conjugation in the present, possessive and demonstrative adjectives — to more difficult ones — choice between past tenses, use of the conditional and the subjunctive.  There is a section to test reading comprehension, consisting of questions concerning a short text. The exam is configured to allow students to access the questions only once and has a time limit of 1 hour 15 minutes.  Student answers are saved to a database and scores can be exported into a spreadsheet.  Results from this exam determine what level courses students are allowed to take at Middlebury.”