Author: eschudel

eLearning Development and Support Services Fall 2015 workshops

Don’t forget to register now for eLearning Fall 2015 Workshops. 

The eLearning Development and Support Services workshops are designed to assist faculty (beginner to advanced) incorporating educational technologies (including Desire2Learn (D2L) and multimedia) into their teaching.  Please register for the workshop session(s) you would like to attend.  Registration is important as it allows us to notify you if there is a room change or cancellation.

Note:  Our workshop schedule is subject to change.  Please check back to confirm dates, times and locations for the workshops.  Don’t see what you’re looking for?  Contact eLearning Support (desupport@camosun.ca) to book a consult with an Instructional Designer.

Go to eLearning Development and Support Services Workshop Series – Fall 2015 for more information, and to register.

Friday, June 12: Friday Fun Fact – Where is Camosun College, and how old is it anyway?

So, this has nothing directly to do with educational technologies or online learning, but Camosun College is the reason Distributed Education (and I, your intrepid blogger) is here, so I thought I would look into a bit of its history for this holiday Friday’s post.  And yes, it may seem a funny thing to post on a blog belonging to a unit at Camosun College, but I think most of the audience following this blog, mostly through Twitter, does NOT work here, so I think it’s fair.

Camosun College first opened in 1971, so it’s a fairly young institution.  To quote the camosun.ca website, “Located in picturesque Victoria, British Columbia, Camosun is situated on the traditional territories of the Lkwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples. The college adopted the name “Camosun,” a Lkwungen word meaning “where different waters meet and are transformed
” (http://camosun.ca/about)

We have two campuses – one close to the University of Victoria in an area of the city called Oak Bay, the Lansdowne campus, and the second up in Saanich called Interurban – and close to 20,000 students studying in over 160 programs.

We do a lot of cool things at Camosun College (in addition to online and blended learning).  I don’t pretend to know what they all are, so I won’t start listing them here at the risk of missing something. The one plug I will make, which I think is particularly cool, involves our Centre for Indigenous Education & Community Connections, Eyēʔ Sqȃ’lewen which you can read more about at the IECC website (http://camosun.ca/learn/school/indigenous-education-community-connections/index.html).  One of the initiatives driven by the College and the IECC is the indigenization of Camosun College curriculum (http://web.camosun.ca/cetl/curriculum-design/learning-about-indigenization).  There is even a free course offered to all staff and faculty at the college, TELTIN TTE WILNEW (Understanding Indigenous People), which does bring me back to Distributed Education, because this is a blended course which we support through our online learning management system, as well as instructional design guidance and recommendations.

So, that’s my short post for this holiday Friday, and now you (perhaps) know a bit more about Camosun College from which all these blog posts originate!

Find out more at:

DE Workshops start TODAY!!

The anticipation is over!!

We still have some room, so don’t miss out.  Our Workshop Series is designed to assist faculty (beginner to advanced) with incorporating various educational technologies (including Desire2Learn (D2L) and Camtasia) into their teaching.  Make sure to register for the session(s) you would like to attend (click on the links below to view the sessions, and then on the Register Here button at the bottom of the page) so that we can notify you if there is a room change or cancellation.

Note:  This schedule is subject to change.  Please check back to confirm dates, times and locations for the workshops.  Don’t see what you’re looking for?  Contact DE Support (desupport@camosun.ca) to book a consult with an Instructional Designer.

Go to DE Workshop Series – Spring 2015 for more information, and to register.

DE Workshops start Next Week!!

Don’t forget to register now for our Distributed Education Spring 2015 Workshop Series.  Only one week before the excitement begins!!

The Distributed Education (DE) Workshop Series is designed to assist faculty (beginner to advanced) with incorporating various educational technologies (including Desire2Learn (D2L) and Camtasia) into their teaching.  Make sure to register for the session(s) you would like to attend (click on the links below to view the sessions, and then on the Register Here button at the bottom of the page) so that we can notify you if there is a room change or cancellation.

Note:  This schedule is subject to change.  Please check back to confirm dates, times and locations for the workshops.  Don’t see what you’re looking for?  Contact DE Support (desupport@camosun.ca) to book a consult with an Instructional Designer.

Go to DE Workshop Series – Spring 2015 for more information, and to register.

D2L Tool Tip of the week: Setting up Quizzes with Special Access (for example, for students requiring accommodation, time extensions, etc.)

This tutorial will walk you through setting up Special Access options in a quiz for a student requiring accommodation (for example, more time to write exams).  It will also note some considerations to keep in mind when setting up the quiz, depending on the kind of accommodation required by the student.

  1. Go to the Quizzes tool in your course
  2. Open an existing quiz, or click on the New Quiz button to create a new quiz.

3.

Setting Special Access 1

4.

Setting Special Access 2

5.

Setting Special Access 3

6.

Setting Special Access 4

7.

Setting Special Access 5

8.  Note that you cannot Preview the Special Access version of the quiz yourself, but here is an example of what the student with Special Access will see


Setting Special Access 6


as compared to the “regular” access

Setting Special Access 7

Things to remember

If you will be requiring students to complete their quiz in the Respondus Lockdown browser, make sure to include this information for them somewhere BEFORE they click on the quiz (for example, in the title of the quiz) so that they know they need to go to Respondus LockDown Brower BEFORE opening the quiz.

Specific accommodation considerations Special Access WON’T help with

If you have students requiring spellcheck to be on you will likely need to set up a separate quiz to accommodate for exams with long answer questions if you want to keep spellcheck off for other students.

If you have students requiring larger font for their questions as well as for question textboxes (i.e., for answering Long Answer questions), note that this issue is still being explored and solutions will be added to this tutorial as they are discovered.

Reminders for the week

Remember the ID drop-ins.  Only 2 weeks left!

  • Tuesday,. March 31 from 12-1 at Lansdowne, in LLC156
  • Wednesday, April 1 (it’s no joke) from 12-1! at Interurban in CC235

And don’t forget to register now for our Distributed Education Spring 2015 Workshop Series.  Only one month before the excitement begins!!

The Distributed Education (DE) Workshop Series is designed to assist faculty (beginner to advanced) with incorporating various educational technologies (including Desire2Learn (D2L) and Camtasia) into their teaching.  Make sure to register for the session(s) you would like to attend (click on the links below to view the sessions, and then on the Register Here button at the bottom of the page) so that we can notify you if there is a room change or cancellation.

Note:  This schedule is subject to change.  Please check back to confirm dates, times and locations for the workshops.  Don’t see what you’re looking for?  Contact DE Support (desupport@camosun.ca) to book a consult with an Instructional Designer.

Go to DE Workshop Series – Spring 2015 for more information, and to register.

Friday Fun Fact: Back in the day…

I thought today I would share what I think about when I hear people complaining about the speed of their Internet connection and computers, and the lack of memory on their various devices (and, yes, I have been known to be one of those people).

Does anyone remember this?

Commodore PET computer

The Commodore PET

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 France license.  Attribution: Photograph by Rama, Wikimedia Commons, Cc-by-sa-2.0-fr

THIS was the first computer I ever used.  I was in grade 11, and our high school had just started its first Computer Science (I think that’s what it was called) class.  And we used PET computers.  What a disappointment – I was expecting Star Trek, and I got a teeny tiny monitor (the Commodore site – http://www.commodore.ca/commodore-products/commodore-pet-the-worlds-first-personal-computer/ – says it was 9 inches), and a “practical storage device”, in reality a cassette tape drive (yes – cassette tape!), which took FOREVER to save the simplest code onto.  I don’t remember much about what we coded into the PETs, but I do remember having to spend hours and hours flowcharting everything first, and then hours and hours entering code praying it would work, then hours and hours saving the code onto the practical storage device to hand in.

I didn’t touch a computer again for several years.  I was in university, and it was my brother’s Apple IIE– or was it an Apple IIc, no definitely a IIe…  Anyway, it had no hard drive, but at least saved everything onto a floppy disc instead of a cassette tape – a 5 ÂŒ inch disc, mind you.  But that’s a story for another day.

The Apple IIe

The Apple IIe computer

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Italy license.  Attribution: http://www.allaboutapple.com

D2L Tool Tip of the Week: Hiding Topics and/or Modules in the Content tool in D2L

This tutorial will cover the steps involved when you wish to hide topics from students NOT using the dates and restrictions option.

1. Go to the Content tool in your D2L course.

2.

Content-HidingTopicFromStudents1

3.

Content-HidingTopicFromStudents2

4.

Content-HidingTopicFromStudents3

5.

Content-HidingTopicFromStudents4

6.

Content-HidingTopicFromStudents5

Things to Remember

Setting Topics to Draft requires that you go back to Content and Publish them for your students to see them.  You can also set a Topic to Published, but Add dates and restrictions to automate its release to students.

Don’t forget to register for May/June Workshops!!!

Register now for our Distributed Education Spring 2015 Workshop Series!

The Distributed Education (DE) Workshop Series is designed to assist faculty (beginner to advanced) with incorporating various educational technologies (including Desire2Learn (D2L) and Camtasia) into their teaching.  Make sure to register for the session(s) you would like to attend (click on the links below to view the sessions, and then on the Register Here button at the bottom of the page) so that we can notify you if there is a room change or cancellation.

Note:  This schedule is subject to change.  Please check back to confirm dates, times and locations for the workshops.  Don’t see what you’re looking for?  Contact DE Support (desupport@camosun.ca) to book a consult with an Instructional Designer.

Go to DE Workshop Series – Spring 2015 for more information, and to register.

Friday Fun Fact: What was the first ONLINE LMS (Learning Management System)?

The critical word here is ONLINE, because according to a brief scour of the Interwebs, the first LMS’s were actually developed in the 1920s (one of them at the University of Alberta – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_virtual_learning_environments), but those most assuredly would NOT have been online since the Internet was not around quite yet (there’s another fun fact – when was the Internet “invented”, although I am sure you all know the answer to that one!  And if not, go to http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet).

Now, the first online LMS I remember (and worked with) was WebCT.  It no longer exists as WebCT, but was subsumed under Blackboard in 2005.  I’ve also worked with Moodle (an open source LMS) and am now working with Desire2Learn.  I’ve also taken courses in Angel (which was acquired by Blackboard in 2009) and Canvas (another open source LMS).  There are MANY other LMS’s out there.  Here is a list at Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_learning_management_systems.

But enough of that.  Back to the original question:  the first online LMS.  Why is it so hard to find an answer to these questions?  Right now, my bet is on something called EKKO, which was an online LMS developed at NKI Distance Education in Norway in 1987.  What did EKKO look like?  I’m not sure.  It’s referred to as a computer conferencing system (http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/17/354) and consisted of “four main modules:  user directory, email, bulletin boards, and conferences.” (https://books.google.ca/books?isbn=0262082365)  What I can say for sure is that it did NOT look like any of the LMS’s we are used to seeing today.

Some references: