Work

We're now in the third week of the Fall 2013 Desire2Learn pilot, and I find myself using the Users > Statistics page to monitor the status of the environment. It's an extremely coarse way to see if people are having problems (if there's a problem, I'd assume the user count drops to near 0).

It's not exactly ideal, though. What I'd love is something closer to what WordPress gives for recent activity, but for active users in the environment. Something kind of like:

We're still looking for someone who will kick ass as the Director of Educational Development at the new Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning.

From the posting:

The University of Calgary invites applications for a full-time tenure track academic position at the Director rank, commencing October 1, 2013 (or as soon as possible). The successful candidate will be appointed Director of the Educational Development Unit (EDU) of the Institute for Teaching and Learning. This position presents an exciting opportunity to take a leadership role in shaping a core element in a uniquely integrated approach to building teaching and learning capacity in an innovative and forward looking institution.

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So, we're moving to Desire2Learn. Lots of things happening to get us there. Everything is being driven by a timeline leading to the decommissioning of our old LMS on May 31, 2014. Which means, when dealing with academic calendar years, and semester cycles, that we have 3 semesters to get from 0-100% adoption of D2L before we turn off the Blackboard servers.

I know. The timeline is kind of crazy. But, it's totally doable. We're going to have to be OK with noise and mess, and with not having all of the answers ahead of time. We're going to be needing a lot of support from Desire2Learn (thankfully, they're up to it), and from the UofC community as a whole.

The Teaching & Learning Centre at the University of Calgary is putting on a conference on May 15-16 2013, intended to bring together people who are interested in collaboration for learning (and teaching).

Dr. Gary Poole is the keynote speaker, and the call for proposals is out (closing March 1 2013). Hopefully, we'll see a good mix of folks from various fields. (yes, I mean you. vain.)

Brian Lamb wrote a fantastic post that linked to Martin Weller’s recent post that touches on enterprise-vs-twitter-scale-support.

My synopsis of the important issues:

1. People are different. They have different needs, different capabilities, different comfort levels, etc… etc…
2. Institutions are (relatively) good at offering Enterprise Solutions.
3. Enterprise Solutions kind of suck for individuals, and for small-scale innovation.

My take on this is that the institutions need to provide a “common ground” so all members of a community have access to core services and functionality. The LMS/VLE does that. Not always well, but the intent is to provide everyone with the ability to manage a course online. To do that at the scale of a modern university¹ means invoking Enterprise Software. So we get things like Peoplesoft as the Student Information System managing course enrolments and the like. And we get things like Blackboard providing the online course environment. Everyone gets to play. Maybe not in the exact way they’d like, but they’re in the game, and they get support to help them along. This is good.

So, this project has taken up the vast majority of my Day Job for the last year or so. We're finally approaching the point where a decision can be made on which LMS we'll be using.

I just published our working group's report on the project website, so we can share the current data with the university community. Long story short, it's a draw between Canvas and D2L, with further information needed before Those Who Are Higher Up Than I Am can make the decision. Good times.

The Provost announced today:

The University of Calgary has announced that they will not enter into an Access Copyright model licence but instead will manage copyright compliance and payments in-house.

The Copyright Office in Libraries and Cultural Resources has been expanded and new tracking software, Ares, has been purchased. Information Technologies is working closely with LCR to implement the software, integrate it with Blackboard and link it to other campus systems as required.. Library staff has begun working with the software which will later be rolled out to all members of the University community.

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The cumulative effect is clear: schools can rely more heavily on fair dealing for the copying that takes place on campus and in the classroom. This includes copies made by teachers for students for instructional purposes, copies that previously formed a core part of Access Copyright's claim of the necessity of a license. Indeed, it will be very difficult for educational institutions to justify the Access Copyright license in light of this decision.

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tl dr; run IE in 32-bit mode. Seriously. I know. That’s what I said, too.

I’ve been using Sharepoint 2007¹² with my group, to share information about groups and projects on campus. It’s been working, but we just started using the wiki tool³, and my inability to make the visual text editor turn on became really troublesome. I’d never been able to get the visual editor to show up. I looked in settings - the visual editor in Sharepoint 2007 is implemented as an ActiveX control⁴ so I made sure I was running Internet Explorer⁵ (IE9 on Win7). I made sure that I had ActiveX enabled, and that security settings would let it run. All set. Still, no visual editor. WTF?

What a consultant-ish title. Anyway. The working group I've been chairing since last summer (it even has its own tag here on my blog) has been doing a bunch of stuff (i.e., "engagements") to talk to people on campus (i.e., "stakeholders") to find out what they need from eLearning in general and in an LMS specifically (i.e., "high level needs documentation").

The first report, focusing on documenting the LMS engagement itself (surveys, focus groups, vendor demos, etc...) is now final, and has been published to the website. There will be 2 additional reports published before September - the first will update our documentation of stuff we do on campus to facilitate and support eLearning (i.e., "eLearning Inventory"), and the second will try to crunch through the data, mush it into the community's needs and hopefully make some sense out of it all (i.e., "eLearning technology analysis"). Another group, spun out of the General Faculties Council, will be working on an eLearning strategy for the University, and we'll be feeding our reports to them to help inform the process.

I bumped into a computer science prof who was lugging a cart to get coffee. On the cart was a big homebrew remote controlled car, with a Microsoft Kinnect sensor strapped to it. Turns out, they use it to capture the motions of athletes. They use the data both to analyse the motion later, and to provide immediate audio feedback to the athlete. They're working on a model that can follow speed skaters, at full speed, around the track. Awesome!

The latest iteration of the campus blogging platform, UCalgaryBlogs.ca, is 4 years old today. It had run previously as a Drupal community (started way back in 2005!), before migrating it to WordPress Multiuser, and now just plain old WordPress. For its first year, it basically sat idle. Then, starting in the fall semester of 2008, things kind of took off. Slowly, at first, and then in bursts at each new semester.