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Blackboard, Moodle, UNSW-TV and more

Posted by belindaallen on December 3rd, 2010 · Connections & collaboration, Learning & teaching, TELT news, UNFED

UNFED meeting notes – November 24 2010

cardboard box figure

My Figure by Noelas - Flickr CC image

The last meeting for 2010, and we had plenty of participants keen for news on the Blackboard upgrade and Moodle 2.0 pilot. The current status of UNSW-TV was also covered -  Niki’s notes on the discussion are below.

Only a little time was left for conference reports. Andrew Chambers told us about the IODL Conference on Open and Distance Learning that he attended, hosted at Anadolu university in Turkey, which has 1 million+ students. Most of the attending universities were ‘mega universities’, that is those with more than 100,000 enrolments, and some advanced distance learning models were presented. Distance education is relevant to several UNSW faculties, and discussion will be continued at our next meeting in February.

Also at the next meeting we will continue with conference news: Educause, Sydney Uni Learning Technology Research Fest 2010, ascilite 2010 and more – so please bring your reports of summer conferences.

Blackboard, Moodle and UNSWTV Updates

The group discussed the recent Blackboard upgrade and UNSWTV outages and asked questions about the issues affecting these services. Niki Fardouly, Robyn Jay and Tom Cavdarovski provided the following answers.

Date chosen for the upgrade

Currently there is no date available in the calendar that will guarantee that there is no impact on learning and teaching activity somewhere in the University. Unless the academic calendar is rearranged to accommodate essential maintenance work, learning and teaching activities will continue to be adversely impacted. The date was chosen so that it would not conflict with either exams or summer semester teaching, i.e. to minimise impact on students. We were also advised, wrongly as it turns out, that marking would have been completed by that date.

Timing of outages

To enable more frequent maintenance to be done to the TELT systems will require a regular time to be set aside for this work. This could be a short weekly outage window with a longer outage once a month. Discussion of the best times in the week to have this outage raised issues of impact on learning and teaching activities, if conducted during business hours, and impact on part-time students who can only study on weekends if conducted on Saturdays.

Reason for the long outage

IT have avoided applying system patches at regular intervals throughout the year in order to avoid outages that would impact on learning and teaching activities. All the patches were saved for this one upgrade. The 9.0 patches had to be applied before the 9.1 software upgrade could be installed. The patches ran into problems on our system that required troubleshooting by Blackboard Support. Apart from the errors, the patches also took a much longer time to install than had been anticipated.

IT are conducting a Post Incident Review to identify other contributing factors that can be managed differently in future, as well as talking to Blackboard about why the software updates ran into problems on our system.

Current problems affecting Bb 9.1.2

IT are investigating why the NSS data feed to Blackboard has broken and what can be done to fix it. In the meantime course creation, student enrolments, and staff role assignments are being done manually. The WSSO looping issue is also being investigated. For other issues see Blackboard 9.1.2 Known Issues List (Resolved and Unresolved).

Moodle project

Funding has been provided to expand the Moodle pilot in 2011, with the Faculty of Engineering moving to the externally hosted UNSW Moodle instance. Moodle interface themes and a set of pedagogically designed templates will be developed for deployment in second semester 2011. Technical training and support materials and pedagogically focused professional development resources and programs will also be developed for deployment in the second half of the year, in preparation for a wider expansion of Moodle use in 2012. Register your interest on the TELT website.

UNSW TV issues

The UNSW TV service has been suffering frequent outages and storage issues since it was moved from external servers to on campus servers. This has made the service too unreliable for critical learning and teaching activities at present. The problems should be alleviated by early 2011. If videos don’t need to be kept secure they can be uploaded to the UNSW YouTube channel.  Another option is to use the My Media service.

UPDATE Tom Cavdarovski advises that My Media is an option for staff only and those staff need to be able to make streaming files (contact Tom for advice). This system is not suitable for student uploads as it has no security system to protect the university from possible legal issues. Students do have the Youtube option – they can use/create their own Youtube account and can ‘relate’ their videos to other videos with the same name (ideally it would be a course code).

Next UNFED meeting will be February 2011, so best wishes to all for a happy and safe summer break. Don’t forget to let us know of any topics of interest, and to let your colleagues know about UNFED – contact Belinda for information.

EduFeedr: free and unfettered

Posted by robynjay on November 17th, 2010 · Issues, Learning & teaching, Networked learning, Tools & applications

One of the biggest challenges for academics seeking to engage students via open, independent, student-managed spaces particularly blogs, is how to aggregate and manage contributions for feedback and assessment purposes.

Mike Bogle and I have been following the progress of David Jones’ BIM ; an activity module for Moodle (v1.9 – BIM will be ported to Moodle 2.0 be early 2011 at the latest) that provides the functionality required to allow:

  • Students to register feeds.
    Be they RSS, ATOM etc and from whatever source – usually a public blog.
  • Students to use that feed to respond to questions set by teaching staff.
  • Teaching staff to track progress and, if so desired, mark and comment on student contributions.
  • Coordinating staff to track and moderate marking by other staff.
  • “Import” the marking into the Moodle gradebook.

There is a video of a presentation that gives an overview of BIM, including showing how it works for staff and students.

In a blog post today David points to a similar service that can operate independently from Moodle.

EduFeedr is ‘a feed reader for online courses where each participant is using his/her personal blog to publish thoughts on course readings, answers to assignments and other course related posts.’ Although still in beta it looks like it will have potential for those seeking to operate free of an LMS.

A good overview with links and slides is available on Hans Poljoda’s blog.

CC FlickR image by Aranda\Lasch

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Gartner’s top 10

Posted by robynjay on November 16th, 2010 · Tools & applications, Trends

Following on from the previous post, Gartner’s top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for organizations in 2011 may also be of interest.
‘Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.
A strategic technology may be an existing technology that has matured and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses. It may also be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for strategic business advantage for early adopters or with potential for significant market disruption in the next five years.   As such, these technologies impact the organization’s long-term plans, programs and initiatives.’
The top 10 strategic technologies for 2011 include:

  • Cloud Computing
  • Mobile Applications and Media Tablets
  • Social Communications and Collaboration
  • Video
  • Next Generation Analytics
  • Social Analytics
  • Context-Aware Computing
  • Storage Class Memory
  • Ubiquitous Computing
  • Fabric-Based Infrastructure and Computers
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2010 ANZ Horizon Report

Posted by robynjay on November 16th, 2010 · Tools & applications, Trends

The Horizon Report: 2010 Australia-New Zealand Edition is now available online.

The New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project is an ongoing research project that aims to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative inquiry within higher education around the globe over a five-year time period.  The Horizon Report: 2010 Australia-New Zealand Edition, is the third in the ANZ series, and focuses on emerging technologies as they appear in and affect higher education in Australia and New Zealand particularly.

The report follows a specific format to describe six areas of emerging technology that will impact higher education in Australia and New Zealand within three adoption horizons over the next five years. Each topic opens with an overview describing the technology at hand, followed by a discussion of its relevance to teaching, learning, or creative inquiry. Examples of how the technology is currently employed, or how it could be applied to education, illustrate its potential. Finally, an annotated list of materials for further reading is provided for those who wish to explore a topic in greater depth.

Focusing on six topics, the project draws on conversation among leaders in the fields of business, industry, and education informed by a review of published resources, by current research and practice, and by the expertise of educational technology communities in Australia, New Zealand, and around the world. The report is guided by the Horizon Project’s Australia-New Zealand Advisory Board which engages in a discussion framed by a set of research questions that are intended to uncover significant trends and challenges and to identify a broad field of potential technologies for the report.

The process by which the Advisory Board arrives at consensus about the final six topics presented in the Horizon Report is detailed in the methodology section of the project wiki.

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Blackboard 9.1 Upgrade Plan

Posted by Niki Fardouly on November 4th, 2010 · Announcements, Bb staff announcements, bbstaff, staffannouncements, TELT news

The UNSW Blackboard Learn server will be upgraded to Release 9.1, Service Pack 2 on Thursday 18th November 2010. To find out how it will affect you please read the attached documents.

Upgrade plan for Blackboard 9.1

Whats New in Bb 9.1

Bb 9.1 Course Roll-Over

Using mobile learning devices for class polling and live marking

Posted by belindaallen on November 1st, 2010 · Connections & collaboration, Events, Learning & teaching, UNFED

UNFED notes 27.10.10

John Paul Posada from Engineering showed some of the things they’ve been doing with iPod touch in classrooms:

Live polling using Polleverywhere – this app runs from the web, so no software needs to be installed. It is free to use for small classes, and costs $700/year for large classes. Responders can use any internet or SMS enabled device. By asking users to input an identifier (eg student id) the responses can be tracked, and a widget is available for feeding the data to Powerpoint so poll results can be included in class presentations.

Issues of equity re use of mobile devices came up – Engineering has purchased 100 iPods, but have sometimes asked students to use their own devices. The cost of these is coming down, and there is very wide student ownership.

An alternative to Polleverywhere is Polldaddy – unfortunately this app does not yet allow input from multiple concurrent devices.

Engineering is also developing an iPod Touch Marking app (iUNSW Rubric?). This has been used to replace paper-based review processes in competitive marking scenarios in Mech Eng for Thesis Presenters, and for HDR Poster presentations faculty wide. The results feed directly to a server and can be extracted as a text file. In future it is hoped that results could be published from the server to the internet. Contact John Paul if you’d like more information.

The news on the upcoming Blackboard upgrade was mixed – the upgrade will be happening, probably the week beginning November 15, depending on results from user-testing that has identified some server configuration issues. The upgrade has some welcome improvement in functionality – including a more useful Learning module format, and much better Content collection integration, however some issues that have been identified by UNSW users as problematic have not yet been addressed – eg timed quiz and group management issues. Niki will be informing users via Faculty contacts of any final decision on the timing of the upgrade.

Time for only a brief chat about current reading. Belinda recommended The Art of Changing the Brain by James Zull, who uses ideas from Biochemistry and Neuroscience to explain why experiential learning is intrinsic to how our brain functions, and how learning happens neurologically. Related readings mentioned are Nicholas Carr (The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains), Norman Doidge (The Brain that Changes Itself) and Janet Zadina, who speaks on Brain Research and Instruction and has published a workbook called “Six Weeks to a Brain-Compatible Classroom”.

Last meeting for 2010 will be Wednesday November 24. Don’t forget to add your ideas to the UNFED wiki, and please let your interested colleagues know about UNFED – contact Belinda for information.

Using clickers in the classroom

Posted by belindaallen on November 1st, 2010 · Connections & collaboration, Events, Learning & teaching, UNFED

UNFED notes 29th September 2010

Sorry this is late being posted as I was away – thanks to Xinni for hosting the meeting and compiling the notes ;) Belinda

Many regular participants were on leave. But, we still managed to attract more than a dozen people with ASB’s presentation on clickers and Niki’s readers’ digest on assessing online learning.

Peter McGuinn, Education Technologist from ASB, gave us an overview on the Students Response System trial in the Faculty. The purpose of the trial is to look for technologies that can engage students in large classes in face-to-face teaching environment. The faculty made the decision on trialing TurningPoint clickers, a student response system.  So far, 1000 clicker pads have been purchased.  The equivalent software has been installed on computers in all Centrally Allocated Teaching Space (CATS) rooms and teaching spaces. Robyn pointed out that if the software has been installed in SOE, it could be made available to any SOE computers on campus. Peter noted that professional development workshop went well and embedding clickers into classroom teaching has been well accepted by staff and students. However, the problems they have encountered so far are mainly logistical and maintenance issues – distributing and collecting clicker pads are time-consuming and labour-intensive, as well as future clicker battery check-up and replacement.  At current stage, clickers are used in classroom for checking students’ understandings on contents and class progress.

Erin and Xinni briefed the group about the planned Assessment resources toolkit. The development of a suite of resources (referred to for convenience as ‘the toolkit’) on assessment is one of the strategies supporting the University Assessment Project.  Building on resources developed at Macquarie University, the toolkit will reflect the local UNSW context of policies and procedures, and draw from the experience and expertise of L&T@UNSW staff and UNSW faculties. The format of the resources will initially be static web pages and pdfs and it will be developed into a media-rich, searchable database later via Learning & Teaching Gateway.

The group had a good discussion on assessment in online learning, which was facilitated by Niki. The discussion was based on Chapter 14. Teaching in an Online Learning Context from The Theory and Practice of Online Learning, edited by Terry Anderson (http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120146). Niki summed up the article in the format of readers’ digest (Teaching in Online Learning Context_summary).

Next meeting will be Wednesday October 27. Don’t forget to add your ideas to the UNFED wiki, and please let your interested colleagues know about UNFED – contact Belinda for information.

ECAR study of undergrad. students & IT

Posted by robynjay on October 27th, 2010 · Research, Trends

The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2010 is now available online. Since 2004, the annual study has asked undergraduate students ‘about the technology they own and how they use it in and out of their academic world’.

Excerpt from the Key Findings conclusion:

‘Our study suggests that mobile computing is on the rise, and cloud-based applications and resources are catching on among undergraduates. But it also reveals that many student technology adoption patterns are surprisingly stable, even as the technologies themselves change dramatically; and students continue to express a desire for a moderate level of technology in their courses, even if we can’t be sure exactly what moderate or extensive technology means to them. Perhaps the most important take-away from our study, this year and every year, is that there is no stereotypical student when it comes to technology.’ (Educause, 2010, p.12)

Source:
Shannon D. Smith and Judith Borreson Caruso, with an introduction by Joshua Kim. The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2010 (Research Study, Vol. 6). Boulder, CO: EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research, 2010, available from http://www.educause.edu/ecar

Post-school changes

Posted by robynjay on October 26th, 2010 · Events, Policy

Thank you to AUSTAFE, speakers and Sydney Institute of TAFE for making available recordings from the recent national AUSTAFE conference.

Of particular interest to us in Higher Education were the keynotes by Kaye Schofield – Regulation, risk and quality in the VET sector, and Leesa Wheelahan – Will Higher Education in TAFE Lead to Sectoral War?  TAFE’s Role in the Emerging Tertiary Education System.

Kaye was appointed as Interim Chair of the National Vocational VET Regulator in July 2010 to lead its establishment.  In her keynote she speaks about the issues faced in the establishment of the Commonwealth Statutory Authority and it’s parallel to the new national regulatory and quality agency for higher education, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA).

Leesa is Associate Professor at the L.H. Martin Institute for Higher Education Leadership and Management at the University of Melbourne with an interest in tertiary policy, relations between VET and higher education and student equity.


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Changing education paradigms

Posted by robynjay on October 20th, 2010 · Issues, Learning & teaching, Opinion

This animate from the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) was adapted from a talk given at the RSA by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA’s Benjamin Franklin award.

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