On November 2, TLT completed the upgrade to lyndaCampus. This upgrade includes new features such as the ability to bookmark individual courses and movies, support for personal profiles, and certificates of completion. Additional details about these enhancements can be found on the lynda.com at Penn State site.
The October eEducation Council meeting has been scheduled for Wednesday, October 5 from 10:00 – 11:30 am in 118 Wagner. If you plan on attending by video-conferencing please provide me with the location no later than Tuesday, September 27th.
During the Spring 2011 semester, ITS piloted two clicker systems in order to find a new standardized student response system for Penn State. Over 4100 students in 22 classes both here at UP and at 4 Commonwealth Campuses tested the two systems. After surveying the faculty, students, and support staff, i>clicker emerged as the clear winner.
i>clicker is designed from the ground up to be as easy to use as possible. The clicker itself has only 6 buttons – Power and A-E. The i>clicker software operates as a toolbar that floats above any application on Mac or Windows, enabling the system to be used with any presentation software or any other application.
So far, the response to the new system has been great. For the current semester (Fall 2011), we have 59 instructors using i>clicker in 64 classes, representing a total student enrollment of over 13,000 undergrads. That’s significantly more classes and students than had used our previous clicker system, and we expect the adoption to continue to increase, as word spreads about this new, easier to use and more reliable system.
For more information visit http://clc.its.psu.edu/clickers/
lynda.com is an award winning provider of eLearning on hundreds of popular software applications such as Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Access, Excel, and PowerPoint. Since 2009 this service has been available for free to all active Penn State faculty, staff, and currently enrolled students.
TLT recently created a new website dedicated to just lynda.com which can be found at lynda.psu.edu. One of the goals of the site is to give the service more visibility and make it easier to access. Moving it from the ITS Training Services site to lynda.psu.edu is just one strategy for accomplishing this. Another goal includes helping faculty, staff, and students understand how it can benefit them personally. Currently, there are examples listed for each audience. A long-term goal is to create case studies highlighting best practices and success stories.
We are in the final stages of upgrading our existing contract to the lyndaCampus model. This will provide support for personal profiles, allow users to print certificates of completion, and bookmark individual courses and movies. More details will be posted at lynda.psu.edu as they are finalized.
TLT is exploring the affordances of the WordPress platform as they relate to teaching, learning, and research. This is just some early experimentation right now, but we are investigating the viability of running a true pilot of the system.
There is no production support for the system, but it is available for those in the PSU community willing to experiment. You can visit sites.psu.edu and log in to get started.
In addition to a full-featured blog content management system, WordPress has other tools that are built on top of it. Here are a few of the more interesting add-ons we are running right now:
1) BuddyPress – A social network which allows you to friend and follow other users, to see their recent activity across the system, to create groups, and much more. BuddyPress allows for the aggregation of all content across the system and is what is powering the content feed on the front page of http://sites.psu.edu.
2) Anthologize – Organize the content in a site into a hierarchical structure which can be exported as a book in a variety of formats.
3) Digress.it -Collaboratively annotate and critique texts.
4) P2 – Turn a WordPress blog into a microblogging site similar to twitter. (This is what is currently powering this eEducation Council Site.) While you get the ease of use of a site like twitter, you are not limited to a specific content length like you are on twitter.
There are at least 5 courses right now taking advantage of this WordPress environment.
The Penn State lecture capture initiative recently began the first semester of a year-long pilot to evaluate the efficacy of this technology for teaching and learning. The system we are currently piloting is Echo360, and it is now installed in 10 Sparks, 102 Forum, and Pond 123 and is primarily being used by large enrollment courses. Echo360 essentially automates the process of audio/video capture and publishing, making the recording of lectures or supplementary materials extremely easy. Courses that are being captured include ECON 102, BIOL 110, COMM100, ART H 111, and PSYCH 100. The faculty pilot participants are using lecture capture in a variety of ways with their students, such as a means of review for exams, to simplify the process of publishing supplementary content, to augment distance education courses, and even for faculty development.
We’re currently taking a triangulated approach to assessment with both faculty and students (similar to what was done for the LMS evaluation), and I will share what we learn this semester and in the Spring. I’d also like to share some of the captures (we have over 100 now) as soon as I secure permission from faculty. Some of what I’ve seen is quite good.
You can find out more at the pilot site at: http://capture.psu.edu.
I have also organized a cross-university working group which has conducted a systematic review of relevant literature, a process that has informed much of the resources we’re working on as well as the design support we provide. We’ll be publishing a meta-analysis at some point as well. So if you’re interested in any of the theoretical underpinnings of any of this, I can provide that.
Chris, this is really great stuff! I think we are working to install another Echo360 appliance in 118 Wagner so we can use it for future eEducation Council meetings. I’ve actually watched a couple of lectures from PSU faculty on my iPhone while walking across campus and the quality and features are excellent. Looking forward to seeing more!
VoiceThread is a completely web-based collaborative multimedia application that allows creators to upload various media (images, videos, PowerPoint slides, etc.) into a slide show and then invite others to access it and interact with the slideshow by leaving comments anywhere within in it in one of five ways: microphone, webcam, phone call, text or audio file.
Penn State entered a licensing agreement with this vendor in a software-for-service model, with the resulting service called “VoiceThread at Penn State”. This implementation now provides all faculty, students and staff at Penn State with with a free VoiceThread account accessed via web access credentials. The service has been in production since December 2010. The support site and log-in point is for VoiceThread at Penn State is located at http://voicethread.psu.edu/.
I’m not sure if I’m ready to say this but it’s gotten some serious leverage this summer as a “poor man’s” lecture capture. Here’s a post on Dana Mitra’s use this summer in that way: http://voicethread.psu.edu/2011/09/voicethread-at-psu-use-case-education-and-public-policy.html
Also, Denise Woodward in College of Science created over 100 “mini-lectures” for this summer’s Bio110 course. This being said, I hesitate to lay that out here with all the other lecture-capture talk. The bigger context is perhaps ways to flip the classroom.
And in our case, meetings. Thanks for the pointer to Dana’s course.
Matt – I like the idea of a poor man’s lecture capture. This can (and should be) accomplished with a continuum of technologies, depending on the specific needs. I think we can probably do a better job of articulating not just what each solution does, but also the relative benefits of each, to support faculty decisions about adoption. As we talk more about “flipping the classroom” I definitely see VoiceThread and Echo360 as great tools to bring more active learning into our classrooms.
This is really a great service … what I’d like some help thinking about is how we could potentially leverage voice thread for conversations around eEd topics. Any ideas?
Hi Everyone,
As you are aware from previous updates, the eLearning Strategic Committee has been exploring several learning management system (LMS) options since being charged with this task by the Provost of Information Technology in August 2009. The committee explored several candidates through discussions with vendors, product testing, and visits to other universities. Ultimately, the Committee decided to pilot three LMS platforms during the 2010-11 academic year: Blackboard, Desire2Learn, and Moodlerooms. Data was collected over the course of the pilot through a series of surveys, focus groups, and direct observations. Data was collected from everyone involved in the pilot including students, faculty, instructional designers, and support personnel.
An analysis of the data indicated no preference when it came to the core functionality of each product, therefore the eLearning Strategic Committee requested each vendor to submit a request for purchase (RFP) agreement over the summer. This approach afforded us the opportunity to further evaluate each product as far as its future direction, infrastructure, hosting, and cost of ownership as well as our potential business relationship with each company.
The eLerning strategic committee is currently reviewing the RFP agreements and intends to make a recommendation to the Provost by 11/1/2011. If the recommendation is accepted we will begin contract negotiations with the vendor. After that preparations for migrating courses will begin. Please note this is a labor intensive process involving a lot of functional areas and therefore no one will see an immediate change regarding the use of ANGEL, our current LMS. Faculty, students, and staff can continue using ANGEL with full confidence that it will be available and supported. In fact, our current plans include supporting ANGEL through the completion of the migration process by 12/31/2014.
Progress of our LMS search can be followed by going to the LMS pilot site (http://blogs.tlt.psu.edu/projects/lms-pilot/). Please let me know if you have any questions. I’d be happy to discuss them with you.
Regards,
Jeff
cxm470, 
Cole Camplese 5:15 pm on September 7, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Just to let everyone know that this site is running on the WP at TLT Labs using the P2 theme. Took me about 10 minutes to set it up.