Desire2Blog

Once again this year I chose not to attend the D2L Users Conference . I attend 6-8 conferences per year and this one just has too many conflicts or near-conflicts for me. Scheduled July 30 - August 2 this year it is just too close (again) to the Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning in Madison which this year is August 2-4. This year I also chose not to go to Madison and will for the first time attend the MERLOT Conference in Ottawa, Canada on August 8-11. I've attended the Madison conference several times and just decided to try something different this year. I'm hoping to get a report for the blog from the D2L conference soon since a couple of LSC employees are attending. I wish I had seen the RFI from D2 L a little earlier and I might have submitted a proposal for them to hold the next D2L Users Conference in Duluth at the DECC . Maybe in 2008.

The latest version of the D2L Community Newsletter included an article about D 2L Checklists by Barb Brown of the Calgary Catholic Schools. While reading the article it occurred to me that our faculty have largely eschewed this tool in D2L. Many of the points mentioned in the article are geared toward a K-12 environment, but I'm wondering if we shouldn't take another look at the usefulness of this tool. In the article she mentions using dynamic (not static) checklists for a) organizing content, b) differentiating instruction within a course, and c) differentiating courses from one another. A couple of quotes: Teachers releasing dynamic checklists, customized and sensitive to the needs of the student, have noted an increase in student engagement in their courses. As courses become saturated with content files, it becomes difficult for students to locate the correct files needed for particular assignments. Teachers use the checklist to organize the learning activities and due ...

No, I didn't go to the Spam Hall of Fame or whatever it is called in Austin, MN for my vacation. Just before I left for an 8-day hiatus from work (and blogs), this blog got hit by about 100 comment spam messages. Therefore, I have changed the setting so that all comments have to be approved before they will be posted. Sorry about that, but until I find a better way to block comment spam, I'll probably have to moderate the comments. BD Photo courtesy of kunstler45

Minnesota Online announced today that they are completing contract negotiations with SMARTHINKING to provide online tutoring support to the students taking classes through MnOnline. They have a new tutoring website with information about the deal-ee-oh. LSC Online has used SMARTHINKING for the past three years with good success and satisfaction. The best thing about this deal is that we will now need to buy fewer hours out of our budget to supplement the hours that will now be paid by MnOnline. As a college, we will continue to offer the online tutoring service to all of our students as we have done for the past three years. The MnOnline hours are expected to be used only by students enrolled in online courses. I have no doubt that approximately 80-90% of the hours used at LSC in the past three years were used by online students. However, it is still an important service to provide to all students. Technorati Tags: MnOnline , LSC-Online , SMARTHINKING

PSOL Strengths for Lake Superior College Our 2006 Institutional report for the Noel-Levitz PSOL identified the following strengths for LSC Online (listed in rank order beginning with the strongest item). 11. Student assignments are clearly defined in the syllabus. 18. Registration for online courses is convenient. 33. Logging-in (managing usernames and passwords) for various services across the campus is easy and consistent. (Campus item 7) 6. Tuition paid is a worthwhile investment. 25. Faculty are responsive to student needs. 7. Program requirements are clear and reasonable. 3. Instructional materials are appropriate for program content. ** 23. Billing and payment procedures are convenient for me. 13. The frequency of student and instructor interactions is adequate. ** Note: I am not willing to consider this a strength since our satisfaction score is slightly below (-.03) the national average for this item. Strengths are defined as those items above the mid-point in importance ...

I'm attending the annual Noel-Levitz conference in Denver this week. Tuesday was the first day of a client workshop on the various N-L surveys of student satisfaction and importance, such as the SSI (Student Satisfaction Inventory) and the PSOL ( Priorities Survey for Online Learners ). They have just updated the overall results for the PSOL. There are now just over 34,000 student survey submissions from 78 institutions. This is approximately a doubling in the number of records since the 2005 data was released. Here are a few of the demographics of this group of online learners: Female: 68%, Male: 32% Age 24 & under: 19%, 25-34 years: 30%, 35-44 years: 27%, 45 & older: 24% Enrolled primarily online: 82%, primarily on-ground: 18% Full-time class load: 57%, part-time: 43% Employed full-time: 71%, part-time: 16%, not employed: 13% Educational goal associate degree: 14%, bachelor: 34%, master: 26%, doctorate: 22% Current online enrollment: 1-3 credits: 27%, 4-6 credits: 34%, ...

Because I can be critical of things that need improvement, many people get the impression that I am a hater. For example..."you must hate D2L since you criticize them all the time." Not true: a) I don't criticize them ALL the time, and 2) I still think that they have the best IMS/LMS/CMS platform out there. However, that doesn't mean that they don't need to continually get better. They do. And telling them that they are great when they aren't is no way to encourage them to get better. If we were using Blackboard I would hate critcize them five times more than D2L. They deserve it. BlackCT has a huge market share and has been at the game longer and still their product sucks, I mean their products suck. Big time. If I were a Moodle user I wouldn't be happy. Not yet anyway. To their credit they have made an incredible amount of progress in the past 2-3 years. If they duplicate that in the next couple of years then they might be ready for prime time. By ...

We've had an online faculty lounge for several years now and occasionally the conversation gets revved up in there. The past couple of days there were a few posts from faculty members who are still unhappy with the D2L quiz feature. They have been waiting for a long time for the ability to export quiz questions out of D2L, and their frustration levels are once again reaching a peak. Here is part of that exchange that took place in the "D2L Suggestions" forum (quoted with permission, but without names). Initial post: "There is a feature sorely lacking from D2L that is paramount to criminal on the part of D2L imho. I can see no way to export a set of quiz database questions to csv file format. Since D2L can import a D2L formatted csv file, there is no rational reason that the developers of D2L can not add an export feature; the only reason I can think of that they have not added such a feature is that they want to hold D2L users "hostage" to continued use of...

Moodle Hands-on Lab (2:30-3:30) Michelle Moore was the presenter and did a great job. She works for Remote-Learner dot net and appears to be a Moodle evangelist. Remote-learner.net provides training and hosting for Moodle, among other things. Moodle is based on social constructionist pedagogy. FOSS (free and open source software): large community of developers and Moodle can be modified for your purposes. Over 13,000 sites using Moodle in 158 countries (plus plenty of unregistered users). Used in 73 languages (via language packs). You can create your own free demo account at: http://moodle.remote-learner.net Homepage is similar to D2L with things that are similar to D2L widgets, but appears to be a little easier to customize. The html editor works well with Firefox but occasionally has problems with IE on a Mac and a few other possible variations of OS and browser. Forum Module (called Discussions in D2L) Provides area for group discussions Can be restricted in various ways, such as (...

This item is related to, but not exactly the same as item #1 (see post below). The Minnesota Online website pulls all courses from the record system and calls them online courses if they are coded as such (media code 03 in ISRS) by the host campus. The problem comes in the fact that a single course code does not cover all the possible variations on the theme of an online course. Most troubling to me is the difference bewteen (A) an engaging course with a great deal of interaction among students and between student and instructor, and (B) an EIS/ECC (either electronic independent study or electronic correspondence course, take your pick of the terminology). I have no doubt that it makes a difference to the student which type of course they are enrolling in. Part of this is related to the students' needs for full disclosure about what to expect in an online course. However, I didn't want to lump it in with agenda item #1 since this one needs to be dealt with regardless of whether...

So far I have a list of probably ten items that I want to work on next year with the MnOnline Council. Clearly that is more than can possibly be done, especially with a group that meets only five times a year. Some things will need to sent to the Council Workgroups for their attention. I'm not going to post them all right here right now. That would be information overload and some of the ideas need a little more time to ferment before I express them. But here's one of them. Major issue: I think students have far too little information about the online courses and programs for which we are enticing them to enroll. If I told you I had a car for sale, would you buy it on that info alone? Is there a chance that you would want more information? For the most part we tell students that we have an accounting degree program available or a Cultural Anthropology course available online, tell them the price, tell them when it starts and ends, and assume that they don't really nee...