I’m just back from the 4th Minnesota Instructional Technologists (MinIT) symposium this time hosted by Carleton College at the Weitz Center for Creativity. My excellent colleague Barron Koralesky from Macalester College and myself started this group in 2009 (though we had been talking about the idea for two years before that). It is a gathering of instructional technology professionals from regional Colleges and Universities. We’ve done various formats over the years and keep on trying new formats — we’re an experimental group!
This year Carleton organized a large group discussion that was centered around topics submitted by the attendees during registration. The majority of the schools are on moodle so we had much talk about transition to version 2.x. Hopefully the few that weren’t on moodle yet will join the fun soon – <wink>. Most of us are opening up our beta sites to faculty before fall so they can get used to the changes. Early feedback from faculty generally has been good. Even though moodle 2 has “moved the cheese” faculty are adapting and liking the new features and new user interface standards.
Here are some links to PDFs of my Educause presentation materials. Right now the handouts are 11×17 duplexed. I’ll see about changing them to 8.5×11 form after the conference.
online course evaluations powerpoint
online course evaluations handout
The summer and start of fall term have been nonstop this year. I’m currently preparing for Educause 2006. I’m presenting a session on online course evaluations called “From Pencils to Pixels: Course Evaluations Go from Online Pilot to Production.” I’m also doing a poster session on moodle called “Moodle for the Masses: Deploying an Enterprise-Wide, Open-Source CMS.” I’m looking forward to connecting with others in Educause interested in these topics.
To Dallas!
With the end of term approaching, our faculty needed a way to read all of the posts in a forum without having to click into each discussion. They got used to this feature in Blackboard so I wrote a new view of a forum that accomplishes this. I made it part of our Augsburg moodle library. After you add a button to the standard forum view anyone can collect the posts — it also respects groups (at least in my testing of it).
I whipped together a block for the new RPI interface to CourseEval3 (what we use for our course evaluations). You can find it on my moodle mods page. The RPI provides a data stream for the current user (in this case a javascript table) to external portals. I look forward to seeing if it improves our response rate in the winter trimester and spring semester. Our students are constantly going to moodle so it’s a logical place to put it.