New Platforms for Teaching, Learning and Research

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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:

Curricular Technology Platforms Overview

1:00 – 2:00 pm, Tues, June 21,  Library 105

Moodle workshop

2-3:30 pm, Weds, June 22, Library 105

WordPress workshop

1-2:30 pm, Fri, June 24, Library 105

Moodle @ Middlebury

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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.

LMS Pilot Training Sessions

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The CT team has organized a number of LMS training sessions for pilot participants, as well as any faculty or staff interested in learning more about the learning management systems (LMS) we are currently evaluating.  Here are details:

Moodle Workshops

2 – 3:30 pm, Thursday, January 13, Library 105 – Alex Chapin
2 – 3:30 pm, Friday, January 14, Library 105 – Alex Chapin

Sakai Workshops

10 – 11:30 am, Tuesday, Jan 18th, Library 105 – Shel Sax
2 – 3:30 pm, Thursday, Jan 20th, Library 105 – Shel Sax

WordPress Workshops

WordPress is another viable platform for course sites that will be included in the Course Hub.

2 – 3:30 pm, Monday, January 17, Library 105 – Alex Chapin
1 – 2:30 pm, Weds, January 19, Library 105 – Alex Chapin

Learning Management Systems Evaluation

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The Curricular Technology team has been researching learning management systems (LMS) for use at Middlebury, using findings from its focus group sessions, surveys and technology usage analysis collected over the last year to determine what features would be most useful in an LMS.  The team also researched which LMS platforms other institutions were using, focusing on those institutions most similar to Middlebury.

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:

For more information about these pilots and how to participate, come to an LMS Pilot Information Session, here are dates/times:
  • 3 – 4 pm, Monday, Dec 6th, Library 105
  • 3 – 4 pm, Tuesday, Dec 7th, Library 105

LMS Overview

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.

Assignment Submission Module

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.

Online Grading

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.

Online Discussion

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.

Calendars

Most LMS include calendars that can be used for scheduling class events, assignments and exams.

Blog, Wikis and more

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.

Course Hub

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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.

Next Steps

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.

WordPress and Course Sites

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Many faculty have started to use WordPress for course sites.  WordPress is a good choice if you just want to:

  • Share course information with your students
  • Post course announcements
  • Create hierarchically arranged pages
  • Upload files (on larger than 10 MB)
  • Start online discussion
  • Have students upload papers for peer review
  • Blog

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:

WordPress @ Middlebury > Using WordPress for Course Sites

Segue from Segue: Open Sessions

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The Curricular Technology team has scheduled a number of open sessions on the Segue from Segue project in Library 145.  Here are the dates and times:

  • 10:00 – 10:30, Monday August 2nd
  • 1:00 – 1:30, Tuesday, August 3th
  • 4:00 – 4:30, Wednesday, August 4th
  • 3:00 – 3:30, Thursday, August 5th

These sessions are an opportunity for you to tell us about the kinds of technologies for teaching, learning and research you think Middlebury should invest in.  We particularly encourage Language School faculty to stop by and give us feedback about your use of technology for teaching languages.

We will also discuss some of the ideas we have for alternatives to Segue including Moodle, Drupal, WordPress, Google Sites and MediaWiki.

Segue and Language Schools

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The Language Schools have long been innovative users of technology.  Indeed Segue was initially developed to support the creation of web sites in other languages, particularly less commonly taught languages that use non-Latin characters such as Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Russian.  We also designed Segue to support a wide range of language learning resources including images, audio and video and provide a simply way to download these media files to mobile devices such as iPods and iPhones using really simple syndication (RSS).  Finally, we did our best to make it easy to copy sites created in previous semesters for use in the current semester and to assign others, both individuals and groups, roles on any site.

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:

  • Email us at LISCurricularTechnologyTeam@middlebury.edu
  • Vote on existing technology ideas/suggestions or add your own
  • Complete any of our ancillary surveys
  • Comment on any post on this blog

James Morrison on Lecture Capture

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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)

CTLR Pedagogy Series: Course Management

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Shel Sax, the Director of Educational Technology, Mike Roy, the Dean of Library and Information Services (LIS) and myself in my role as the Leader of the Curricular Technology Team, did a presentation on the Segue from Segue project at a Center for Teaching, Learning and Research (CTLR) Pedagogy Series workshop on “Course Management: Where We Are and Where We’re Going.”

Segue from Segue

Shel gave an overview of why LIS decided to discontinue development of Segue, explaining that Middlebury no longer

had the resources to continue its development and that there are now many platforms on the market that provide similar features and functionality.

I discussed how we planned to phase out Segue, and our plans to develop migration tools that would allow people to easily migrate their sites to other platforms.  I also discussed how we planned to determine what technologies the Middlebury community needed for teaching, learning and research, describing our usage analysis, focus groups and surveys.

Mike gave an overview of strategies for deciding what kinds of platforms to consider, focusing on “all-in-one” vs “best-of-breed” platforms.

All of us then presented various platforms that are being considered as alternatives to Segue including:

Course Hub

I wrapped up the workshop with a description of the Curricular Technology team’s current proposal, that of a “course hub.”  Essentially, the course hub as we envision it, would be a course site that is automatically created for all courses with basic course information such as course title, description, instructor, schedule and location.

This basic course hub site would also include a very simple user interface (UI) for adding a syllabus and/or additional pages.  We would then add to this hub a simple UI for creating additional resources in other platforms such as WordPress, Moodle, MediaWiki or Google Sites.  This UI would initiate a web service that would create the resource in the “connected” platform and create a link to that resource, as well as a feed of its recent activity.

The reaction of faculty participating in this workshop was quite positive.  Many felt the course hub idea providing a simple way for any faculty to ensure a web presence for their course while also allowing them a number of options for adding additional resources.