Many faculty and staff have attended our workshops on the Course Hub, Moodle and WordPress. To help people get started on their sites, we have scheduled a number of work sessions:
The Curricular Technology team has organized training sessions on the Course Hub and WordPress, a popular platform that has been in use at Middlebury for a number of years now. Below is more information on these sessions:
These sessions have been scheduled before or after similar sessions on Moodle, Middlebury’s new learning management system (LMS). Both of these platforms can be used for course sites. To learn more about how they differ, see: Curricular Technologies Platform Overview
To attend one of these sessions, please fill out our sign up form, see:
WordPress / Course Hub Workshop Sign Up
Dear Language Schools Faculty,
As you know, the current summer is the final semester in which you will be able to add new content to Segue. (After the end of this summer, Segue will become “Read-only”.) Middlebury is in the process of transitioning away from Segue to other courseware. In preparation for this, LIS is offering a series of training workshops for Language School faculty. Moodle and WordPress will be covered in the sessions. We will discuss background and theory (when to use what, how to transfer content, etc.), as well as offer hands-on training.
Several workshops will be offered in the Davis Family Library 105.
Week of July 4
Week of July 11
Week of July 25
Please use the signup sheet linked below. Exact times are listed on the signup sheet. There are 19 computers in the lab.
Beginning next fall with the 2011-12 academic year, Segue will be replaced by a collection of platforms connected by the Course Hub. The Course Hub will become the definitive starting point for all online course resources and will provide links to other platforms including WordPress, ERES and soon Moodle, our new learning management system (LMS).
To help with the transition of sites from Segue to one of these new platforms, Curricular Technology (CT) team will be organizing workshops throughout the summer for faculty and staff. The first series of workshops will begin next week:
1:00 – 2:00 pm, Tues, June 21, Library 105
2-3:30 pm, Weds, June 22, Library 105
1-2:30 pm, Fri, June 24, Library 105
Moodle has been selected as the primary learning management system (LMS) for Middlebury College. Other LMS platforms considered were Sakai and Blackboard. The Curricular Technology (CT) team researched these three LMS platforms extensively and organized a pilot program that involved over 20 faculty and more than 300 students.
Surveys of pilot participants indicated that more faculty and students who completed the survey considered Moodle the most useful and easy to use of the LMS platforms piloted. The CT team used an template developed by the Longsight Group (see: Longsight > LMS Selection Criteria) to do its own evaluation and came to similar conclusions.
Moodle has been in use at Middlebury since 2007, primarily for online assessment. Beginning in the Fall of 2011, Moodle will be fully integrated into the new Course Hub platform which will become the definitive starting point for all new online course resources.
From the above research, the team has found 3 LMS that are viable candidates for use at Middlebury and would now like to make these available to faculty to pilot over the winter and spring semesters. The LMS platforms being considered are:
LMS platforms are designed to help use the web for both teaching and learning, with tools for grading, assignments, online discussion and so on. Below are descriptions of some of these tools.
Our focus groups and surveys revealed issues with many of the tools and techniques currently used for collecting and grading assignments. Most LMS platforms have “modules” for assignment submission that greatly simplify this process, allowing faculty to create assignments with due dates that students can easily access and upload completed assignments to. These modules are configured to allow students to see that their assignment has been successfully submitted and to allow faculty to see all submitted assignments and be able to grade and give feedback on these from within the LMS itself.
LMS platforms allow faculty to “grade” many of the activities students do within the LMS including assignments and discussion posts. Typically this grading functionality can be applied to specific assignments, discussion topics and quizzes and the LMS provides tools for aggregating all graded items into a single view that can be used as the basis for evaluating student performance. Most LMS can be configured to show students only their own grades (and not those of their peers) to help them keep track of how well they are doing in a given course.
Middlebury has long provided various tools for online discussion including Segue, WordPress and MediaWiki. LMS platforms also have tools for online discussion with options to grading individual discussion posts by students. While this sort of functionality is not something that our surveys and focus groups indicated a strong need for, having it available to use may result in new teaching practices.
Most LMS include calendars that can be used for scheduling class events, assignments and exams.
LMS platforms also include popular tools such as those for blogging, wikis and podcasts, similar to what has been available via Segue, WordPress and MediaWiki.
The Curricular Technology Team has proposed an alternative to Segue that has been approved for development. Based on our analysis of existing course and curricular resources as well as findings from focus groups and surveys, we recognized that no single platform would meet the teaching, learning and research needs of all of the College and its affiliates. Thus we recommended the development of a “course hub” architecture that would enable faculty to create collections of resources for a given course in a single location referred to as a “hub.”
We recommended course hub sites be automatically created for all courses with basic course information such as the course title, description, instructor profile, schedule and location. These sites would include basic functionality for adding additional content such as a syllabus and links with an emphasis on ease of use and simplicity.
These sites would also include links to “connected” platforms allowing users to create additional resources using popular tools such as WordPress and MediaWiki that would be automatically linked back to the hub site.
The Curricular Technology team is now working on evaluating other platforms to connect to the course hub, focusing on learning management systems (LMS) and better tools for online discussion, collaboration, assignment submission and grading.
Many faculty have started to use WordPress for course sites. WordPress is a good choice if you just want to:
Access to WordPress sites can be limited to students in a class (or any other Active Directory group of users). For more information on how to use WordPress for course sites, see:
Some of the ways in which the Language Schools have used Segue are documented in our usage analysis (see: Language Learning Resources and Audio Capture). Language Schools have also made extensive use of Measure, our instance of Moodle, for placement, entrance and exit exams (see: Student Assessment). As we research alternatives to Segue we will be certain to recommend tools to support these types of usage.
Many Language School faculty have filled out our technology needs survey which has also helped us understand how Language Schools use technology. In the next couple of weeks the Curricular Technology team will be holding a number of open sessions for any faculty to stop by and describe their particular technology needs and tools that they have used and think would be useful for Middlebury to invest in.
We encourage anybody in the Middlebury community to tell us what they need in the following ways:
The Curricular Technology team organized a number of sessions with faculty innovators to find how they were using technology (see: Presentations by Faculty Innovators). More recently, the team invited James Morrison, Assistant Professor of Political Science, to do a presentation on how he creates podcasts of his lectures.
Prof. Morrison uses a USB-powered label mic that he plugs into his laptop. He is currently using GarageBand to record audio. Typically, he’ll make a copy of a previous lecture podcast to preserve the metadata and intro and outro audio. When he’s done recording a class lecture, he can then simply update the title, date and description and adjust the positioning of outro audio. The audio file can then be exported and uploaded to his course site.
Here are links to some of his podcasts:
International Political Economy (Fall 09)
International Politics (Spring 2010)