Moodle Transition to  v3.0 – Message for Faculty

In June of 2016, ITS will be upgrading Moodle to version 3.0. This upgrade will provide improved functionality, as well as an enhanced look and feel of the Moodle environment. The decision to upgrade Moodle was based, in large part, on feedback and recommendations that emerged from the Faculty Moodle Satisfaction Survey conducted by the Committee on Information Technology(CIT) in 2015. Faculty satisfaction with Moodle was, for the most part positive, and the upgrade will address several of the issues identified in the survey report. Colgate will be partnering with eThink to facilitate and support this upgrade (fully managed hosting, upgrade, data migration, and testing). Additional information about the upgrade is briefly outlined below.

Timeline

Key milestones for the upgrade include the following:

• April & May 2016 – ITS planning and technical preparation.
• June 2016 – Finalize a configuration of a test instance of Moodle v3.0
• End June 2016 – “Go live” with upgraded site.
• July / August 2016 – User education (faculty workshops / support resources)

What will this mean for you?

While the look and feel of Moodle 3.0 will be slightly different, the overall functionality will remain the same.  We have been working to identify and summarize those changes which we think are most relevant for Colgate faculty members. The linked document below, “Transition to Moodle 3.0” presents our analysis to date. In essence, we believe there are many positive changes yet few that change your environment negatively or dramatically.

Transition to Moodle 3.0 (Google Doc) 

Education & Support for Faculty

Faculty can anticipate a range of support opportunities prior to the start of the Fall 2016 term. Specific scheduling details about these opportunities will be made available in follow-up communications.

• Hands-on workshops
• 1:1 consultations
• Self-paced tutorials
• Documentation
• Exploring test site

Contact

Please direct any questions or requests for additional information to our project lead for the transition to Moodle 3.0, Dan Wheeler, in Academic Technologies — via email (dwheeler@colgate.edu) or phone extension 7742.

Ongoing updates and information will be made available on the following web page:

colgate.edu/moodle

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The annual EDUCAUSE conference is where innovative higher education CIOs go to learn about new industry trends and compare notes on the latest breakthroughs. This year was no exception as 7,300 IT leaders from more than 50 countries gathered in Orlando along with 260 educational technology exhibitors. Discussions took place in session rooms, on the exhibition floor, after the keynotes, and throughout the hallways. These are the common threads that permeated those discussions; the ten hottest topics for CIOs in higher education.

See #6 for special mention.  Colgate’s CIO Kevin Lynch and Instructional Technologist Ahmad Khazaee presented on “Just Don’t Call It a Drone” @ Educause this past year.

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These are just some of the curricular uses of technology that Colgate Faculty have used this semester. Library and ITS provide support on these, and many other, types of projects.

If you are interested in incorporating technology into your curriculum and want more information please contact the faculty member mentioned, or email CEL@colgate.edu to reach a librarian or technologist for assistance.

Video Narratives

Students use video to enhance a story, report their research, describe a concept, or generate a call to action. Video Narratives incorporate photos, video, maps, charts, music, and voiceover.

• Susan Woolley EDUC101A

• Barbara Regenspan EDUC309A

• Sheila Clonan EDUC307/507A

• Shaohua Guo CHIN222

• Craig Hamilton WRIT103

• Jacob Mundy CORE185A

• Mark Stern CORE153C

CEL PROJECTS

• Jessica Graybill GEOG/REST308

• Mark Stern EDUC101B

• April Baptiste ENST321

• April Baptiste ENST390

• Catherine Herne CORE104SA

Wikis/Blogs

Online classroom workspace where faculty and students can communicate and work on writing projects alone or in teams.

• April Sweeney ENGL357

• Matthew Miller Freiburg Study Group

Wikipedia Editing

Students used what they learned from course readings, class discussions and research to contribute to and improve Wikipedia content related to the course subject matter.

CEL PROJECTS

• Aisha Musa CORE151

• Aisha Musa RELG234

iClickers

iClickers are hand-held devices that allow faculty and students to dynamically interact in real-time in the classroom.

• Doug Johnson PSYC309

• Todd Springer PHYS112

• Ken Belanger, Barbara Hoopes, Geoff Holm BIOL212

• Catherine Cardelus, Tim Mckay, Eddie Watkins, Damhnait McHugh BIOL211

• Daisaku Yamamoto CORE 167CA GEOG315A

• Steven Ludeke PSYC261A

• Catherine Herne PHYS336

• Jasmine Bailey CORE164CA

iPad Class Sets

The iPad Pilot projects are intended to encourage faculty to explore whether mobile tablet technology enhances or enables our ability to:

• Promote student engagement in the classroom, the lab, or in the field
• Assist small group collaboration in idea creation and sharing or information search, analysis, and visual representation
• Provide access to and manipulation of digital content

• April Sweeney ENGL357

• Jessica Graybill GEOG/REST308

Mellon Digital Humanities Projects

Pilot projects designed to explore the strategic use of technology in the teaching of the humanities and humanistic social sciences. The goal is to enable faculty to develop genuinely creative projects, increase the information available to faculty as they reflect on the best ways to use technology in teaching, and enable the lessons learned by individual faculty to be more easily shared.

• Carolyn Guile, Wenhua Shi, Adam Burnett – Art and GIS

  • ArcGIS

  • Google Earth

  • Camtasia Lecture Capture & Ensemble to Moodle GIS tutorials

• Sasha Nakhimovsky, Alice Nakhimovsky, & Robert Garland – Social Network Analysis

  • NodeXL

• Christopher Henke (SOCI453) & Elana Shever – Qualitative Data Analysis with MAXQDA software

  • Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) implementation

  • Archiving of student research data with Dataverse

• Janel Benson, Mary Simonson, Alicia Simmons, Meg Worley – Quantitative Literacy

  • PowerPoint & Easel.ly

• John Crespi, Jessica Graybill, & Ian Helfant – Across the Global Curriculum: Integrating Foreign Languages,Core Components, and Area Studies through Digital Technologies

  • JCrespi – VoiceThread

  • IHelfant – Transparent Language

  • JGraybill – Video Narrative

VisLab Classes

Using the real-time imagery of the Digistar system, students can experience detailed fly-bys of geographic regions around the globe and in the solar system. Student-created animations and models add a valuable perspective across the curriculum.

• Catherine Herne CORE104S

• Damhnait McHugh, Tim McCay BIOL211

• Connie Soja GEOL215

• Mike Loranty GEOG131

• Marcus Edino GEOG329

• William Stull LATN121

• Neil Albert PSYC375

• Jeff Bary ASTR102

TimelineJS

• Karen Harpp CORE138

• Karen Harpp GEOG220

Data Visualization

• Janel Benson SOAN250

ePortfolios

The Education department continues its use of Google Sites to create portfolios for each graduate student.

• Barbara Regenspan MAT candidates

Online Class / Learning

• Karen Harpp CORE138

Lecture Capture

A tool that allows for the recording of a class or student presentations that can get uploaded to Moodle or another platform. Video, audio-only, and powerpoint presentations can all be integrated into the recording.

• Beth Parks PHYS432

Prezi

A cloud-based presentation software and storytelling tool for presenting ideas on a virtual canvas, which allows users to zoom in and out of their presentation media.

• Monica Facchini – ITAL201A

Website Creation

Students creating websites to communicate with public audiences

CEL Project

• Nick Rutter – HIST200

NodeXL

• Susan Cerassano ENGL321B

MaxQDA

Qualitative Data Analysis

• Emilio Spadola ANTH211A

Video Conferencing

Connecting with people off campus and around the world

• Karen Harpp CORE138 – BlueJean conferencing

• PCON Faculty Conflict Lab

Digital Mapping

Using ArcGIS or online tools such as Google Earth, EJView, and other online mapping and geospatial data sites

• April Baptiste ENST 232

• Danny Barreto SPAN 353

• Marcus Edino GEOG/SOAN 314

• Jacob Mundy CORE 185

• Jun Yoshino PSYCH 109

Academic Posters

• Catherine Herne PHYS3356

CEL Project

• Anna Rios-Rojas EDUC303

• Susan Woolley EDUC241

• Marcus Edino GEOG329

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From The Chronicle of Higher Education > The Digital Campus 2014

There are at least three reasons your next syllabus should include some multimedia-production assignment in addition to the standard term paper and final exam. Read more

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From the Chronicle of Higher Education, “What You Need to Know About MOOCs”, includes an interactive timeline that will be updated regularly.

http://chronicle.com/article/What-You-Need-to-Know-About/133475/

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In part 2 of this post found on the Los Angeles Book Review blog, the four academics who posted position essays on MOOCs respond to each other’s essays.

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/moocs-and-the-future-of-the-humanities-a-roundtable-part-2

A few highlights of the responses…

Read more

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In part 1 of this post found on the Los Angeles Review of Books blog, four academics provide initial position papers on MOOCs.

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/moocs-and-the-future-of-the-humanities-a-roundtable-part-1

Al Filreis ’78  (professor at University of Pennsylvania) talks about his modern and contemporary American poetry (English 88) class that he has taught for 30 years.  “The interactive, collaboration-based mode of the course has emerged from the material — “naturally,”  as it were — and about 20 years ago I stopped lecturing entirely.”  Filreis has been teaching this course online for about 20 years and has recently offered a MOOC.

Cathy N. Davidson (Duke University) discusses the educational access angle to MOOCs. “I don’t want a society that massively excludes so many students, nor one where you have to be better than perfect to gain admission to your state university.”

Ray Schroeder (University of Illinois Springfield) discusses his roots in a small liberal arts institution and his teaching online for the past decade. “The social constructivist principles of what scholars of education call the “community of inquiry” thrive online through teaching presence, social presence, and cognitive presence. Those are the very same principles that led to success the liberal arts college experience decades ago.”

Ian Bogost (Georgia Institute of Technology) talks about the different non-educational motivations for offering MOOCs (maybe good, maybe not so good). “Even if MOOCs do sometimes function as courses (or as textbooks), a minority of their effects arises from their status as educational experiences. Other, less obvious aspects of MOOCs exert far more influence on contemporary life.”

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Project Gutenberg offers over 42,000 free ebooks in ePub and kindle format that may be downloaded or read online. The works are proofread with the help of thousands of volunteers. No fee or registration is required.

Visit at: http://www.gutenberg.org/

Here is a list of notable classic works available:

Agamemnon (Aeschylus)
Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle)
Hippolytus/The Bacchae (Euripides)
Iliad (Homer)
Odyssey (Homer)
The Aeneid (Virgil)
Summa Theologica (Thomas Aquinas)
The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians (Budge)
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci – Complete (Da Vinci)
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Sir Isaac Newton)

Top 20 titles by viewership:

1. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (1547)
2. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1301)
3. First on the Moon by Jeff Sutton (834)
4. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (791)
5. Grimms’ Fairy Tales by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm (752)
6. Alchemy: Ancient and Modern by H. Stanley Redgrove (663)
7. The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (625)
8. The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana by Vatsyayana (623)
9. The Divine Comedy by Dante, Illustrated by Dante Alighieri (606)
10. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (552)
11. Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (543)
12. Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (540)
13. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (530)
14. Space Viking by H. Beam Piper (518)
15. How to Analyze People on Sight by Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict (512)
16. The Art of War by Sunzi (487)
17. Ulysses by James Joyce (441)
18. The Spirit Land by Samuel B. Emmons (436)
19. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (435)
20. Moby Dick; Or, The Whale by Herman Melville (434)

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Steven Schwartz explains why more universities should start publishing ebooks and how they benefit students, claiming “Ebooks, I believe, are the format of the academic future.”

Read more at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2012/mar/15/ebooks-academic-future-universities-steven-schwartz

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