Happy New Year! It’s been a while since I’ve posted an update here. Time to get cracking on those work projects for the new year, both ongoing and new ones. Here’s a brief outline of what I’ve got going on:

Quickbase

The improvements we saw in staff efficiencies over the past year have been tremendous, including:

• the ability to better track IT requests
• automated much of the course creation process that had been previously handled manually
• automated much of the quality assurance process
• better tracking and automation of permissions, IP agreements, and copyright sources

Over the next few months, plans will be in the works to also integrate budget information, time tracking, and tasks. It’s a lot of work but always rewarding when you get good feedback and see real results in the form of improved use of people’s time. No more redundancies and bloated amounts of time spent on “administrivia”!

Evolution usability testing

This one’s coming soon, and it’s something I’m pretty excited about. I’m going to be working with Mike Brooks on devising a plan for testing our new and improved Evolution student and faculty interfaces. It’s something we’re definitely rolling out in most World Campus courses over the next year,  and we have a good opportunity now to do some usability testing with our students and faculty, and develop a longer term feedback plan for when the new interface rolls out. We’ll be trying out a newish usability testing application, Silverback: http://silverbackapp.com/

Blogs

I don’t really have a specific plan or application in mind here yet, but I’d love to see Blogs@PSU have more of a role in World Campus courses and programs. I’m tinkering with the creation of a “geoblog” similar to the application created by Chris Stubbs over at ETS (and I’ve consulted with him about this), the Geoblog for students studying abroad:
http://geoblog.psu.edu/
I think something like this would be a great way for World Campus students to connect and share. The visual of the map adds a sense of place and connection that might be lost by students just saying text-wise where they live or work. Stay tuned.

Mobile announcements

Over the summer I took a workshop on the creation of Web mobile and native iPhone apps. The workshop only lasted one day so it really only allowed the participants to dabble in this stuff, but I was able to put together a very crude prototype of a mobile announcement app that we could use in our World Campus courses. I hope to refine this prototype a little further and share it with my colleagues.