GAiN Conference Presentation 2014: Wonderful Wikis: Supporting Learning and Collaboration
Wiki, wiki, quick, quick! Set up a website for learning or collaboration or both! See examples of wikis used to promote critical thinking, support collaborative work, manage committee work, and even for peer editing! We will examine different types of collaboration and the advantages and disadvantages of different wiki tools for different purposes. We will showcase a variety of wikis possibilities and discuss various wiki options such as the wiki within Moodle, wikispaces, pbworks, and others.
USDLA 2013 Session: Higher Ed Wikis: Collaboration, Critical Thinking, Committees, and Peer Editing
How can wikis be used in higher education? For collaboration, promoting critical thinking, managing committee work, and even peer editing! In this session, we will showcase a variety of wikis used at Andrews University, and share additional ideas for using wikis in face-to-face and distance classes.
This morning I’m presenting for the Southern Union’s academy principals. The presentation is titled Technology-Enabled Cheating: Responses and Considerations. This blog post is a companion page with linked resources and references.
Today I am guest presenting in a Seminary course on Teaching Religion in College to a group of PhD and ThD students. My contribution will be an overview of some educational technology tools. Here are the resources we will explore:
Consider the tools we have reviewed during this session. Pick one of them, and comment below. What intrigues you with the possibilities? What concerns you? What ideas do you have for your own teaching?
Today the School of Distance Education hosted the very first Lunch and Learn open to the rest of Andrews University. We had been offering them all the past year for internal learning; but we decided it was time to start sharing with the campus!
Today’s topic: iOS mobile devices: iPads, iPods, and iPhone.
This post contains the apps and resources shared by facilitators Janine and Marsha and the participants. In addition, I have added a few other references related to what was discussed and shared.
Communication
FaceTime – Apple’s video conferencing app – connect between iPhones, iPads, iPods, and Mac computers.
This post contains resources and links for my Andrews UniversityFaculty Institute session titled Using a Wiki to Promote Collaboration and Critical Thinking.
This post contains the links and resources referenced in the 2012 NAD Teachers’ Convention (North American Division of Seventh-day Adventists) session titled Wikis for Collaboration.
Leap of Faith: Trials and Tribulations after Converting to Moodle
Presenters: Charlene Stubblefield, Stephanie Holmes, Major Stewart, and John Williams from Prairie View A&M University
This is a follow up session to a session they did last year on their implementation process.
They are on Moodle 1.9. Someone in the audience highly recommended upgrading to 2.x.
Leap 1: Deciding on Moodle as the LMS
Leap 2-4: Uploading the student information from Banner into Moodle; Setting up LDAP for single sign-on; They update twice a day at 11 am and 11 pm. They ran into issues as they merged the student accounts for single sign on.
Leap 5-20: Training, Training, Training
Training for the office of distance learning staff
Training for students – students didn’t show up to the trainings; they had better attendance if the training was embedded into the actual course time (had to deal with students asking for the ODL staff to train the instructor to use it certain ways)
Web based documentation online for students and faculty – text with screenshots and Flash video
Faculty training: they do certification for teachers to be able to teach online; phone and email support is provided on a regular basis; the provost supports the online certification process for when the faculty are resistant to it; at the beginning of each session they have a 5-10 minute gripe session to let them “get it out” – and then they go on with training; they see the key as building a relationship with faculty of support and technical expertise
The web based certification is 10 weeks with 3 modules, but some finish it in a few days; the face to face is the same training, but is in three two-hour sessions
They’ve had this certification in place for 10 years; and at the very beginning there was an incentive ($1500); but now the online course is considered part of the regular teaching load and the online certification is considered normal practice
There is also a test at the end of the certification that the faculty have to take
They do a face to face meeting to see how the faculty use the computer – and then from that they do an assessment to see if the faculty member should go to the online training or the face to face training.
They have significant buy in from the provost and the deans for certification for teaching online
They have a self-study document for the faculty member to review the course before it is taught online (it’s a 10 page document that includes what should be in the course and what types of learning experiences)
Faculty sign a release form that their course materials are owned by the university
After this, they did a pilot with Moodle…
They piloted with one course – with a high level instructor – and there were no issues. The problem though was they needed to hear from less savvy faculty members to get better feedback on the issues.
Leap 21: Based on the pilot, they pushed the implementation from the fall to the spring.
Leap 22: Significant work to convert course materials, quizzes, etc. from Blackboard CE6 to Moodle.
Side conversation on why they moved: the major reason was the cost; they also liked the open source model; concerns about the monopoly; interesting conversation through the room on hosting etc.
Walled Garden Mail (faculty really want to keep course email separate from regular email)
She mentioned a Moodle XML builder as a tool helping with the conversion process.
The benefits of Moodle plug-ins and extras is that faculty can beg for a feature, and then you can find a plug-in or module, install it, and two weeks later you’ve given the teachers what they need. Instead of the vendor saying – well that will be in the next version next year.
They have four instances of Moodle: For courses/production, for development, for outcomes, and for the school of education for NCATE. Very interesting way of using Moodle for multiple uses on campus.
Their hosting company is Remote Learner. They are really flexible; they will offer service whatever you need – training for your IT people; you can create your own contract, etc. (That was feedback from the presenters. Good to know – sounds like a great option.)
They like hosting because the hosting company is very quick to implement what is needed.
Reflection:
It’s so wonderful to hear the trials and tribulations from another institution and their experiences of
One of the online collaborative tools I’ve been learning lately is project management software. We are playing with Zoho Project Management (selected due to it’s integration with GoogleDocs). I’d heard of project management software before but didn’t really have a need for it.
Course Production
Photo by striatic
We (Andrews University) inherited 120 courses through the merger with Griggs University. These courses are in need of upgrading. After spending several months getting a handle on the state of the courses, how they were used, and stats about them, I knew that we needed some method to manage the work of the upgrades. In addition, we have several staff working on the project. I wanted a way that everyone involved could see the work to be done and could even pick next projects on their own. Self management is possible if everyone is trained and can see the pile of work!
We have several different categories of people working on the courses:
Student workers
Staff
Instructional designers
Course authors (subject matter specialist)
Two of us are supervising the student workers
All of these people have logins to the Zoho site except for the course authors. But we did make a dummy account called “AUTHOR” so we could mark and track various tasks that the course author is doing.
Zoho Projects Features
We are using only a few of the features of the site:
Tasks. We have a Task List for each course. We may assign work to the students, or they can also assign themselves to a job. They know to pick a job that they are trained on. Within Tasks, each job has a completion graph. Everyone is putting the percent finished at the end of each day so we can monitor progress and who will need another job soon.
Milestones. At the moment we have four milestones. We are using them as big categories for the sets of courses we are working on. We have a deadline for each milestone.
Wiki. We have a couple pages with instructions, and have collected a few supporting links.
Documents. We haven’t put up too many documents – a few syllabi in progress. Most of our documents are on our shared drive for courses instead.
Dashboard. The dashboard is fun to see our progress.
Other Uses
Now that we have a system going with Zoho Projects for our course development, I’m starting to think about other ways we could use this.
Online Course Approvals. We have an Online Course Approval process that is required by our accrediting agency (NCA HLC). We have built a process that divides the work among the committee members. I’m thinking that Zoho Projects might be helpful for tracking the work.
Dissertations. One of my assignments is to figure out a way to track dissertation progress and provide online tools that support it. We have a few doctoral level degrees in the School of Education that are online – and an online tool to support the dissertation/thesis process could be very helpful. I haven’t seen anything online designed specifically for this, so it seems maybe project management software would help. We could have document versions, task and calendar tracking, as well as discussion areas. I have questions around this still, but am thinking about it.
We currently have one Zoho Projects site, which is free. If we expand, we’ll probably look into getting into some type of campus wide plan. But so far we’re not ready to think about that!
What about you? Do you have any large scale projects that need managing? How do you track them? What tips do you have?
