Campus Technology

In this online Article at campustechnology.com, it talks about a topic that has become rather important at Rider University, Emergency Preparedness. In my meetings about this topic, it’s specifically about technology, e.g. how to keep the web server up in the case of a blackout. This article talks about a presentation done by the people at Tulane, who had spotlights of national coverage on them regarding their response to emergency and their preparedness during Katrina, and the focus is that they realized the people are so much more important than the technology, and it’s actually possible to over prepare in terms of technology. I’m not saying that we’re over-preparing at Rider, but maybe we should consider the length to which we’ll rely on technology as a focus in the case of a real emergency.

Campus Technology
Moreover, they added, no level of hitech preparedness can ever be guaranteed to be enough, or to be precisely the right kind of technological preparation for any given disaster. How easy it would be to assuage our fear of future catastrophe by constructing a fortress of systems and tools! But that would not only be no assurance of safety, the panelists pointed out, it would represent a conscious decision to move dollars (always a finite commodity in institutions of higher education) away from the provision of learning—and the mandate to educate our students is the reason that institutions of higher learning exist.

Open of Course - free open content courses and tutorials - Home

Here is another great resource for freely available course content and howtos for any who wish to learn.

Open of Course - free open content courses and tutorials - Home
Here you will find a growing amount of free online courses and tutorials. By “free” we not only mean free as in “free beer” but also published as open content . Our focus is at the start mainly on open source software courses but as we grow more will be added.
Our goal is to create a multilingual platform for free quality educational information.

You can help realize this in several ways:

* Tip us on free available courses and tutorials on the internet
* Become a coordinator for your language section
* Add free online courses or tutorials to our platform
* Translate available courses into other languages
* Promote Open-Of-Course on your website, weblog or anywhere you like or just by voting on us at Squidoo or at Stumble Upon Toolbar

More info on helping..

If you don’t feel like helping, just enjoy our free online courses! At the moment content in these sections is available:

* Multilingual courses and tutorials:
* English courses and tutorials:
* Dutch courses and Tutorials:

Educause: Measuring Student Experiences with Course Management Systems

I recently had the chance to read an article published by Educause called Measuring Student Experiences with Course Management Systems. I think its a great eye opener for anybody that is a user or maintains a CMS. Here is a summary I wrote on the article. At the end, I try to answer the questions that the article proposes to the reader. My answers are based off of my opinions and my experience as a student (used Blackboard for 7 years) and as an instruction technologist. If you are interested in reading the article yourself, please visit this link:

http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?page_id=666&ID=ERB0619&bhcp=1

You will need to sign-up to access the article.
Summary of Measuring Student Experiences with Course Management Systems

This article discusses how you can measure the use of a CMS (course management system) by faculty and students, and what features are most important the users. The first section discusses different methods to measure how a CMSs effects teaching and learning. One method is to record and look at CMS usage data through reports and usage logs (like the Tracking feature in Bb). Another method is to poll faculty on how they use the CMS, how it effects or enhances their teaching in the classroom, and to ask them what functions they use in the CMS to teach their subjects. The short side is that these methods can not measure learning. These methods can, however, measure topics such as student’s grades, how they interact with the CMS, and what functions interest the student in the CMS.

The second section discusses student experiences with CMS. Again, it discusses the use of log data to see how the student engages in the CMS. They mention an open source tool called CourseVIs. CourseVIs can transfer log data into graphic data (again, like Tracking feature in Bb). One study (Kvavik & Caruso, 2005) found that students visited the Syllabus more than any other feature in the CMS. Similar to students, faculty members (Morgan, 2003) accessed their Announcements the most, then their syllabus, then course documents.

Students say that having a reliable and available (24 hours x 7 days a week) CMS ranks high on their list of expectations. In one study, students commented on how having couses and its material on-line opened their selection of courses they could participate in (Kavavik & Caruso, 2005). Another study (Rivera & Rice, 2002) found that student were not satisfied with their on-line course because of technical issues, a big learning curve for the CMS, and the students themselves not having a thoro techincal background for the basic of computer technology.

Students highly valued these two features about their CMS: they could see their grades on test and assignmenst, and they could access sample test and quizzes via on-line. Online discussion boards were valued the least (Kavavik & Caruso, 2005). Another study (Burger, 2006) showed that student ranked syllabus, online readings, sample quizzes/tests, and turning in assignments online were most helpful; least helpful were logistics, chat, and online office hours.

Taking quizzes online has mixed reviews for students (depending on the course that is being taught online). Students that did not favor online quizzes where students that had to “show the work” or write paragraphs out for essays. If the online assessment tools didn’t fit the subject well, the students gave it a low review (Kavavik & Caruso, 2005).

Students only found discussion boards useful if the discussion was interesting and carried into the classroom or if they received a grade for it (such as participation) and wasn’t a waste of time. Students only valued the discussion if they felt they learned something from it or got something out of it (such as a higher grade).
In some studies, students felt that IT and CMSs improved their learning. When the student had a very positive experience with their CMS, they highly agreed that IT in courses improves learning. The top seven benefits cited by the author from students were:

1. access to sample quizzes and exams for learning purposes.
2. access to audio/video materials
3. sharing materials among students
4. online readings and links to other text-based course materials
5. online discussion board
6. taking exams and quizzes online for grading
7. getting assignments back from prof w/ comments and grade (Hanson, 2003)

A study (Rivera & Rice, 2002) investigated to see if IT really improves learning. 3 sections of the same business class where compared (one traditional-face2face, one hybrid, and one web based). The results demonstrated little difference in exam scores among sections. More research has to be done to come up with a more precise conclusion to this topic.

In conclusion, the following questions that the author proposes should be asked when a faculty member ventures into using CMS for their teaching (suggested by Parker, 2004):

-What is the purpose for offering this course?
-Do we know what we expect students to learn?
-Do we have the tech infrastructure to support our students? Is it up-to-date?
-How skilled are our course developers and instructors in the online environment?
-What tech assistance do we have available?

CMSs are, without a doubt, developing new features to use in the classroom. Institutions should be encourage explore these new and needed features as they become developed in a CMS (such as blogs, discussion boards, video). This research also shows the need by faculty and students to explore, in more depth, the existing features in the CMS. To explore these current features will, in turn, engage students more in the subject matter being taught via the CMS. The author suggests asking these key questions when evaulating your CMS (I also added my own interspersed answers to these questions outside of the blockquote):

-How can our institutions measure student use and satisfaction w/ CMSs?

Give end of the semester surveys via the instructor or by looking at data logs, help logs, and help calls via the help line.

-What can the usage of data of the CMS features tell us?

It can tell us what features faculty and students are comfortable with. It can also tell us what features users are not comfortable with and design training around the features that are not intuitive. It can also help us explore different solutions that we can add or supplement the CMSs.

-How can our institution increase CMS reliability and availability?

Help lines, on-line tutorials or forums for help.

-What are the most important considerations in faculty training in the use of CMSs?

Level of computer knowledge. Are faculty comfortable with the technology? Do they really want to need to teach using the CMS? How can they translate the basics of their course into a CMS environment?

-What can institutions learn from each other in seeking to improve student satisfaction with CMSs?

See what features work, what features need an easier user interface for students.

-What future feature developments in CMSs will contribute most to learning?

I believe video, audio, blogs and wikis will contribute most to learning in the future. Some of these features are now being introduced into CMSs. With Web 2.0 becoming a big part of students’ regular on-line life, their on-line lifestyle will start to effect their learning style in the classroom.

~Angel Brady

Technophilia: Get a free college education online - Lifehacker

This is a great collection of online course materials and open course media. It’s really amazing how many course materials have become available in the last 5 years or so. Podcasting, recorded lectures, PDFs, flash and other media come together to give you a wealth of primary and supplemental education materials for your own academic benefit.

Technophilia: Get a free college education online - Lifehacker
Not headed back to school this fall? You could be, minus the exorbitant tuition and without even leaving your chair. The web has made it easier than ever before to get a free education, and you’d join the ranks of great thinkers in history who were also self-taught, like Joseph Conrad, Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Paul Allen, Agatha Christie and Ernest Hemingway. You, too, can be an autodidact; the breadth of free educational materials available online is absolutely astonishing.

Students Rebel Against Database Designed to Thwart Plagiarists - washingtonpost.com

Rider uses Turnitin.com and it is a favorite tool of many faculty here to combat plagiarism. The real problem that I see is that plagiarism is really a result of bad assessment design. If faculty were to take the time to design projects and essays that could not be answered with papers they find online or fraternity files, or whatever, Turnitin.com would be unnecessary. At any rate, it turns out that people don’t like putting their written work into a massive online database that someone else is getting rich from, and I don’t blame them. Let’s make our assessments better and put turnitin.com out of business. Need help? Call the Rider University Center for Innovative Instruction at 609 896 5000 x7489.

Students Rebel Against Database Designed to Thwart Plagiarists - washingtonpost.com
But some McLean High students are rebelling. Members of the new Committee for Students’ Rights said they do not cheat or condone cheating. But they object to Turnitin’s automatically adding their essays to the massive database, calling it an infringement of intellectual property rights. And they contend that the school’s action will tar students at one of Fairfax County’s academic powerhouses.

SourceForge.net: ASuite

Have you attended any of the CII Technology Training Sessions? They’re available to faculty at http://ghost.rider.edu/insttech/about-the-cii/cii-sessions-fall-2006/ and include a session on USB keys where we talk about Portable Applications, Personal Encryption schemes, and give you your own USB key. One thing we haven’t talked about, but which is very interesting is the ability to use an application launcher to manage the portable applications you have on your USB key as though it were a mini start button just for those apps. The most popular by far is PStart, but I just read about this open source one called ASuite. If you are into the portable apps thing, you should see this.

SourceForge.net: ASuite
ASuite is an application launcher. It is designed to work with removable storage (uses relative paths) media like USB sticks, hard drives, iPods, etc.

Yale University to post courses on Web for free - Yahoo! News

This is particularly interesting considering that Angel just came back from an NJEdge meeting where one unscheduled topic was “Why should I put up wikis/mp3s/video of my teaching for free for anyone to see?”

Personally, I think this is a short sighted argument. If all someone needs from you as a teacher is a recording of a single set of lectures to render you all used up, you’re probably not doing your job as a teacher properly. Open learning just creates one more resource for people to use to learn.

Yale University to post courses on Web for free - Yahoo! News
BOSTON (Reuters) - Yale University said on Wednesday it will offer digital videos of some courses on the Internet for free, along with transcripts in several languages, in an effort to make the elite private school more accessible.
While Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and others already offer course material online without charge, Yale is the first to focus on free video lectures, the New Haven, Connecticut-based school said.

The 18-month pilot project will provide videos, syllabi and transcripts for seven courses beginning in the 2007 academic year. They include “Introduction to the Old Testament,” “Fundamentals of Physics” and “Introduction to Political Philosophy.”

index - Terminal Emulator Poderosa

I just found the potential replacement for PuTTY as an Open Source SSH client for Windows: Poderosa. There are some things that are caveats, such as missing portability (this must be installed to work), and the fact that the .Net framework is required for it to work, but other than that it seems like a genuine improvement over some of the inconsistencies in PuTTY, like the nonstandard private key. I especially like that you can set your options globally, instead of per connection. (that’s just me, I’m sure)

At any rate, I’ve only been using it a few minutes, but I like it a lot. Due to PuTTY’s portability, I’ll probably be keeping that handy on my USB key for a while. - j.

index - Terminal Emulator Poderosa
Against common terminal emulators such as Putty or TeraTerm, Poderosa has following features.

Tabbed style GUI
It is convenient to open multiple connections at the same time. Moreover, you can split the window into panes and allocate each connection.
Many differnt ways in connection method.
In addition to Telnet and SSH1/2, local cygwin shell and serial ports are supported.
Fulfilling options and tools
A lot of functions for terminals are available. For example, SSH2 port forwarding tool, SSH Key generation wizard, SOCKS connection.

Plugin architecture
You can extend the feature of Poderosa by plugins like Eclipse. Actually serial port and X/ZModem are provided as additional plugins. A manual for plugin developers is included the installation package.

Support of government
In 2005, the government of Japan chose us as one of originative software projects and promoted financial resources.

Sizzle: DVD Authoring Tool for Mac OSX

Few months ago, I worked on a project that involved digitizing video from a VHS tape and making a DVD with a menu. You may ask yourself “But she’s on Mac OS X, why doesn’t she just use iDVD to make the DVD?” Well I did try iDVD and I wanted to get all my files onto one 4.7 GB DVD. iDVD only allowed me to put 90 minutes on the DVD because of the way iDVD converts the files into mpeg2 for the DVD and for DVD players to read. I will take you through the process of taking your VHS and putting it on a DVD.

First I imported the VHS video into iMovie, which converted them into BIG DV files (digital video). From there, I joined together the DV clips that made up each episode (when importing footage into iMovie, the clip only hold about 9 minutes then spills over into a new clip, example- you have a 15 minute episode, iMovie makes the first 9minutes of your episode clip 01 and then automatically continues importing the rest of the video as clip 02, so that’s why you join the 2 clips and export as one file). I exported the files as mp4 files out of iMovie.

The files were rather large, 500mb, but the quality was decent. The setting I used to export the mp4 files from iMovie were as follows:

1. Export Movie to Quicktime
2. Click on Options
3. Video Settings MPEG4 Video
4. Quailty between medium and high
5. Key Frames: Every 24 frames
6. Data Rate: Restrict to 6400 kbits/sec
7. Click ok
8. Audio format: ACC
9. Bitrate: 96kbps
10. Click ok-Your clips start to export

Since I am more concerned with size than quality (I know, but you have to sacrifice) I brought each .mp4 file in VLC Player.

Open VLC Player. Click on File-> Open file–>Click Browse button, find your mp4 files and click choose.

Check the check box (in the open source box on your screen) that is labeled Advanced Output. Then Click on the Settings button to the right of the Advanced Output check box. I transcoded the video but not the audio.

For Output options I clicked Browse, then chose the file name and place of where the new file was to be created. For encapsulation method I chose Quicktime (from drop down). Transcode options: for video I chose mp4v from drop-down and bitrate 128. I left the video alone. Then I clicked ok. In the Open Source box I clicked ok. VLC starts to transcode your file. Like a good shampooing, I repeated this method with each chapter I had.

After I had all my reduced mp4 files, I opened up ffmpegX. I used ffmpegX to transcode my files into files that Sizzle could read to build the DVD menu and DVD from (in iDVD I could just drop the mp4 files into the program and iDVD changed them to mpeg2 files for me). Sizzle needs mpeg2 (MPG, MOV) files for video (it could import a VOB as well) and MPEG Layer-II (”MP2″), Linear PCM (”LPCM”), Digital Theater Sound (”DTS”) or Dolby Digital (”AC3″) for audio.

In ffmpegX, I imported my mp4 file. Then for the export settings I chose MPEG-TS, the video was mpeg2 [mpg](ffmpeg), and the audio was MP2. You end up with one file (Quicktime file) .MPG file to import into Sizzle. You can also use the DVD (ffmpeg) setting in ffmpegX as well to transcode the .MP4 file into 2 files, video file .MPG and audio file .AC3.

Once you have all your files (they increase in size because they are not as compressed as .MP4) you can open Sizzle. To add a clip (chapter) to Sizzle, click Add Title. You can then look at the bottom right window where your clip was imported into, click on your clip to highlight it, click audio above the window, and you’ll see your clip again listed in the audio (or this is where you can add your .AC3 file that is associated with your video file). To have the buttons link properly to your video clips in your TOC (DVD menu) select the button (say you named it Chapter 1) and click Edit Button. In the Edit box, choose “Jump to menu” in Action drop-down menu and then choose the clip in the Destination drop down. If this doesn’t give you the navigation you desire, play around with the Edit Button window until you get the settings and navigation you want. After you have the navigation linked up properly and you previewed the DVD image you can build the image (click on Save Disk Image in the top right of the Sizzle window). Once you build your image you can use a DVD burning program such as Toast to make your DVD (I used Sizzle 0.5b2, but I heard some people had problems with that and they used 0.1 version, I had no problem with Sizzle 0.5b2). I shrank the size of the DVD image by using a DVD shrink program. I did this to make sure it fitted onto a 4.7GB DVD. Enjoy!

~Angel Brady