Ancient History Ramblings

Thoughts Before Teaching Online

Bill Caraher pointed out an excellent blog to read if you are thinking about or are preparing an online course. It is part of the Teaching Thursdays blog which is a teaching Blog from the University of North Dakota Office of Instruction Development and often has very intriguing posts to read.

RSM

Internet Censorship

If you are interested in how censorship is affecting the web, you can check out a new report from Google on the subject. Google's Transparency Report lists the number of requests from a particular government about specific users, and its requests for content to be removed. The report is in an interactive format and is quite interesting to look at - with some unexpected numbers.

RSM

Course Management System Carousel at IUP

When I first started teaching at IUP, the university was using WebCT. WebCT was eventually purchased by BlackBoard and phased out - leaving IUP to go out and choose another system. After a fairly exhaustive process, IUP chose to go with Moodle. I resisted making the switch until the last moment - which was this summer. I was a bit unhappy about how much work it took to learn the system, much longer than I expected. So, I spent some time before the semester started converting my classes to Moodle and am finally set and actually feel pretty good about my abilities with Moodle (in most areas). So, it should not have surprised me to learn last week that IUP is being forced to go with the new CMS system used by the State system - D2L. Needless to say, the faculty at IUP are a bit unhappy...including myself. Should I learn this one or wait for next year's choice?

RSM