Desire2Blog

So far there are 125 responses to the informal poll about whether we should start the process now to review IMS platforms for the MnSCU system. Basically the question was should we start a process now that might result in replacing D2L at the end of the five-year contract or wait it out a while longer before starting the process. Of course the other possible outcome of starting a process now is that D2L again be selected as the best available IMS for the system in which case we would likely negotiate a new long-term deal. We are able to wait longer if desired since we have a series of five one-year contract extensions available that can turn the five-year contract into as much as a ten-year contract, or anywhere in between. Those contract extensions might also be valuable in delaying a new long-term contract which will almost certainly be at a higher annual cost than the current contract. The poll results are as follows: 79 out of 125, or 63% say we should wait longer before starting t...

This is about a 9 minute podcast where I review some of the open-ended written comments about D2L in the MnSCU I.T. survey for faculty. You might want to put on your headphones, unless it is okay to have some fun at work. Added in 2022: Apparently I didn't think this was good enough to be part of the Desire2Podcast series. Looking back from 16 years later, it's some of my finest work. (LOL)

We just received our campus results from the faculty I.T. survey. One thing I find interesting is how many of the faculty systemwide have never used WebCT. We hear so much about the old "WebCT days," and yet across the system, only 35% of those who have used ANY IMS have used WebCT. If we were to adopt WebCT across the system, it appears that there would be a very large need for faculty training. Click chart to enlarge.

During the first week of May I'll be moderating an online discussion for the University of Wisconsin Distance Education Certificate Program . This is a special topics course where the group explores a different topic for one week at beginning of each month. The Topics are: February: "Real" Ways to Promote Interaction for Effective Online Learning March: Learning on Demand: Using the PDA for Mobile Course Delivery April: Creating and Using Learning Objects with Open Source Tools May: e-Learning Quality Improvement Through Peer Review I'll post more about the course quality discussion later, but for now I'll just tell you that I'm excited to use Moodle during the week of the discussion forum. Moodle is the one of the open source IMS/CMS/LMS (take your pick) platforms that has seen a great deal of development over the past couple years. Nancy Rebholz of UW has given her permission for me to post this link to a 12 minute Camtasia video about Moodle . This was mad...

MnSCU folks only please! Take this instant poll. Should we start evaluating IMS platforms again, or should we just ride it out for a while longer? With the end of the D2L 5-year contract staring us in the face, should a full review process begin now for an RFP (request for proposals) leading to a new long-term contract with whichever IMS rises to the top during the process, or should we delay beginning such a process and take advantage of the series of 1-year extensions to the D2L contract until such time that the system is ready to engage in another full-blown RFP process? Begin RFP process now Delay RFP process for at least a couple of years powered by Vizu.com : See what the world thinks

On the recent satisfaction survey (Noel-Levitz PSOL) administered at 17 of the campuses within MnOnline, question 28 stated: "The online course delivery platform (Desire2Learn or D2L) is reliable." 2,818 students submitted the survey. Of the 30 comparable items on the survey, this was rated as the most important item with a score of 6.61 on a 7-point scale. On the satisfaction scale, it rated a score of 5.74, which results in a performance gap of .87 points (difference between importance and satisfaction, which could be viewed as the room for improvement). Overall, that is a pretty good satisfaction score, although clearly not as good as it could be based on the size of the gap. There are only three items on the survey that the students rated higher for satisfaction, which means that the students were more satisfied with D2L than with 26 of the other items on the survey.

These were a few of the takeaways for me from the D2L session in Chicago. All of these are features for version 8.x, which means we have no idea when we might actually see them in production. Internal email function: the first glance at this tool looked pretty good. It appears to be a combination of a true email client and an internal IMS tool, such as the internal "email" in WebCT, which of course wasn't really email, but it was a private communication device. From what I could see, it looks like real email in that you can send and receive messages to and from the world outside D2L. It also functions as internal email by placing class messages into a separate folder for each class. My biggest question is how well it will integrate with the various email clients in use at different campuses...or more to the point; will it integrate nicely with our employee GroupWise and student NetMail systems? D2L is extending the Journal tool into a blogging tool. They didn't provid...