Extending the Virtual Classroom

The LMS of today is too confining a virtual learning environment. Such closed systems lock out all but those officially enrolled in the course. The emerging LMS needs to accommodate others in addition to students and faculty, allowing learners to benefit from interaction with a broader network and community of practice. Last semester, as part [...]

Academic Technology

We just finished a two-year project migrating from WebCT Campus Edition 4.1 to Vista 4x (now 8x) at our university. We enjoyed a fair amount of success. In addition to migrating from one deployment to another which was significantly more complex, we also integrated our CMS with our Luminis portal and Banner student information system. [...]

More stuff on Selecting and Evaluating Technologies

I found the following list doing a Google search for “selecting and evaluating instructional technology”. The presentation was entitled: A Case Study for Evaluating a New Technology: Selecting a Synchronous Collaboration Tool at the University of Tennessee – http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/SER06075.pdf Important Considerations when conducting final evaluation Features (incl. faculty feedback!) Blackboard integration Training and support Cost [...]

Creating Users and Courses in Moodle

I downloaded a manual from the Moodle site. Its 284 pages and is actually for the next version – Version 2.0 (The version I installed was the latest stable version 1.9.4+). So far the manual has been helpful for this installation – I’m not sure what I am missing yet. Today I created a course [...]

Trying out Moodle

Over the past couple of years I have attended various instructional technology / e-learning conferences, at which there was a lot of talk about Open Source learning management systems (LMS). Two solutions in particular, Sakai and Moodle, came up time and again. Last fall a grad student in our MISM program agreed to provide a [...]