A New Year, a New Semester and there is cold and flu out there!

All does not have to stop.  Yes please all be careful but with the aid of our technological devices, we can continue to deliver course material to students during a shutdown.   Preparedness is the key.

All faculty should have all course content on blackboard or some other web site for students who can’t get to class.  Such blackboard sites need not be elaborate.  OET can help set up these “emergency” blackboard courses but it does need to be done in advance.

Students can’t make it to class but the faculty can

If a class with absences is normally scheduled in a classroom with mediasite recorders, we can simply activate the recorder during class.  We can then deliver these lectures to selected students.  Note that we have fine granularity and can make the presentation available to individual students for instructor-specified time periods.

But if you can’t make it in there is Mediasite Desktop Recorder (MDR) which can be used from any location with an up to date operating system, Windows or Mac. Contact OET for access.

For courses currently being recorded but not normally providing viewing access to in-class students, upon faculty request we can give access to selected (or all) in-class students for a faculty-specified period of time.

Faculty absences or university closure

If we know about this enough in advance, we can make some recordings before the university shuts down.  Students can watch them during the closure since the mediasite and blackboard servers will, presumably, remain up during closure.

OET absences

OET personnel have access to all necessary equipment from home.  To such extent as the security of our own homes allows, we will continue operations as usual from home.  We can consult with faculty by e-mail, skype, lync or telephone.  We can manage mediasite recordings and delivery.  We can provide on-

Reading, writing and everything else!

Yes today is Reading Day and hopefully students aren’t trying to read, watch, etc their class content from the beginning of the semester!  Remember to download grades go to grade center and click work offline to download to an excel worksheet.  Be a good steward of student information and make sure you save this file to a pirate drive location not your desktop of flashdrive.  If you Safe Assign remember to “Synchronize your course” each time you submit a Safe Assignment so that it checks against the most up to date database.

Need to create your final exam quickly in Blackboard?  Use Respondus Test Generator it can convert a word document into a Respondus file which uploads to Blackboard.

Need help with weighting grades, or spring prep contact OET and check out our training calendar.

Learning on the Go!

Mediasite recordings can be easily uploaded as podcasts or vodcasts so students can make long commutes profitable by listening to lectures after class on their mobile devices.  Still time to to add them to your course!

From a recent article –

  1. Mobile learners study 40 minutes more each week by studying everywhere they go.

  1. Students with smartphones are twice as likely to study between 6a.m. and 8a.m.

Check out this infographic on the fact that Mediasite never sleeps either!

Just under three weeks . .

And no I will not start the countdown for the end of classes as I did for the beginning of the semester!  Just a few tips as we get closer –

  • Downloading your grade center? remember put it on your pirate drive not on your hard drive be a “good steward of student information”,
  • Want to make a review for your students, consider using Mediasite Desktop Recorder, quick install and you can do it right from your office,
  • Distance Ed students asking questions, you can get great analytics from Mediasite to find out who watched what, for how long and when,
  • Respondus Test Generator makes test creation simple and uploads easily to BB
  • Thinking about Spring Semester, contact OET for consultation and some new ideas!

And since this is my blog I can brag so let me introduce you to my newest grandchild, Claire Amelia, born 11/11/14,

Claire Amelia

In case you hit delete . . .more on security

So much comes across our desks but take time and review –

Ensuring the security of your Internet sessions and sensitive information
Posted 10-17-2014 http://www.ecu.edu/cs-itcs/allnotices.cfm 

Please use the following directions to disable SSL on your Windows computers that are not installed by ITCS. This is the only way toensure the security of your encrypted Internet sessions and the sensitive information they contain.

The SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption protocol has been used for many years to establish secure connections between computers (e.g., for credit card transactions on the Internet). However, the SSL protocol no longer provides adequate protection for encrypted Internet sessions.

On the ECU campus, ITCS will disable SSL in Microsoft Internet Explorer on university-owned faculty and staff Windows computers connecting to the campus data network. However, ITCS cannot fix this condition in other browsers installed on university computers or on any browser on your home computer.