11/7/2007
Students at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, the only liberal arts university in the world for the deaf and hard of hearing, are benefiting from lecture capture software that includes closed captioning. That lets students view videos of lectures on demand, complete with text captions along the bottom of the screen.
11/2/2007
Louisiana State University is replacing two learning management systems on its campus with Moodle, an open-source LMS/CMS popular in higher education and elsewhere. According to information released by LSU's Office of the CIO, the move comes on the heels of a two-year system review process headed by the university's Flagship Information Technology Strategy (FITS) Task Force for Teaching and Learning that gathered input from the entire campus community.
10/31/2007
Chat software (text or media-based) provides an excellent tool in supporting academic dialog (exchange), critical thinking, and knowledge building. The immediacy of the technology provides students with a direct connection with the instructor as well as other students. While chat software is usually used for "chatting," and, therefore, it has a relaxed and colloquial protocol, with a little thought and planning, it can also be used well to support instruction.
10/31/2007
The University of Akron is replacing its previous learning management system with Desire2Learn's Enterprise eLearning Suite. The move is designed to facilitate both online and Web-enhanced delivery of courses.
10/29/2007
Education technology developer Elluminate is bringing its Live! collaboration suite to the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment, an open-source learning management system. The move is part of a new alliance with Unicon, a company that specializes in providing support and services for open-source software to education.
10/26/2007
Microsoft has rolled its Office Live Workspace technology into Live@edu, the company's portal, communications, and collaboration suite for higher education. According to Microsoft, this is but the first in a "new wave" of Office Live services making its way into the higher ed space. The Live@edu service itself has also been upgraded to provide greater storage capacity and additional features.
10/25/2007
Small and medium-size institutions looking for ways to beef up technology programs without adding staff might consider outsourcing some or all of IT. At Ocean County College on the coast of New Jersey, an outsourcing partnership has resulted in a popular and growing selection of online courses.
10/24/2007
Audio and even video capture of lectures is becoming more common on college campuses, which post the material to their Web sites so that students can revisit a lecture after the fact. But Drexel University....
10/24/2007
Mineral Area College in Missouri is deploying Jenzabar EX Total Campus Management. INTEC, signing on for licenses for Jenzabar's ERP, portal, and learning management solutions to improve administrative efficiencies and supplement learning the school's traditional learning techniques with online technologies.
10/23/2007
The University of Northern Iowa, like a large number of universities in recent months, is deploying a classroom capture system to record lectures and make them available via the Internet. This one, though, is being used not only to provide access for UNI's students but also for an audience of K-12 teachers who will use the content to further their professional development.
10/18/2007
Campus Management has completed beta testing on a program to integrate Moodle into its administrative and academic tools for higher education, including CampusVue. The result is a newly released learning management system called CampusLearning, which works with CampusVue, providing commercial support for the open-source platform and synchronization with the company's student information system.
10/18/2007
Angel Learning this week announced new support for the IMS Global Learning Consortium's Common Cartridge standard in its learning management system, Angel LMS. The standard, developed through IMS GLC's Common Cartridge Alliance, is an open standard for content sharing. Angel last year contributed intellectual property for its development.
10/18/2007
The University of California, Los Angeles is continuing its phased deployment of IP audio encoders for its classrooms. According to information released this week by Barix, the vendor supplying the Interstreamer encoding systems, UCLA's Office of Instructional Development has so far installed the devices in 43 classrooms, with plans for 200 classroom installations eventually.
10/17/2007
Results from an initial study by a professor at Coppin State University in Baltimore indicate that class capture technology that allows students to view lectures online after the fact can improve course retention rates and grades. Chris Brittan-Powell, a psychology professor at Coppin State, developed the study to see whether using technology from Tegrity helped student grades and retention in his courses over a semester.
10/16/2007
Education technology developer Wimba has released Wimba Voice 5.2, an update to the company's audio module for its Collaboration Suite, which also includes Wimba Classroom, Wimba Create, and Wimba Pronto. The new version expands the tool's functionality and end-user features and enhances some existing features.
10/15/2007
Spurred by growth in collaboration and communications technologies, the academic computing market is forecast to hit $419 million by 2010, according to a forecast from education consultancy Eduventures.
10/12/2007
Angel Learning has contributed more of its source code to the open source community. The company this week made its TiddlyWiki customization technology freely available for development for educational purposes through Eduforge.
10/11/2007
Hitachi Software Engineering America has debuted its new StarBoard FX 77 Duo, an interactive whiteboard that supports multiple simultaneous input. Targeted toward the education and presentation market, the whiteboard uses Hitachi Soft's StarBoard software to allow multiple users to interact with the device at the same time and to allow for gestural control of presentation materials.
10/10/2007
Regulation drives a surge in innovative solutions for stormwater treatment. As fun as creating a course in Moodle is (the subject of part 1 of this two-part series), eventually it will go live, and the real excitement can begin as administration kicks in. The first thing you will come to realize is that while you believed you had thought through every single thing, you missed about half.
10/10/2007
Earlier this year, three universities in the U.K. formed an alliance for collaborating on biological and biomedical sciences called the South West London Academic Network. Now the collaborative alliance is deploying technologies to deliver a series of courses that share resources between the three participating universities.
10/10/2007
Stanford University librarian Michael Keller will join other leading digital archiving experts November 14-16 in Paris for the inaugural meeting of the Sun Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group, a group dedicated to working on the unique problems of storage and data management, workflow, and architecture for very large digital repositories. The Sun PASIG brings together a large group of organizations for an ongoing global discussion of their research and sharing of best practices for preservation and archiving. Here, CT asks Keller for his perspectives on the effort and the goals of the Sun PASIG.
10/10/2007
It was more than two years ago that Blackboard Inc. approached Seton Hall University to join its product development partner program to work on the Blackboard Outcomes System. Now, technology leaders at the university expect that in the coming year the system will be in use across the campus for reporting and learning outcomes.
10/9/2007
Campus Technology will host a live Webinar Oct. 16 on the topic of classroom capture and its impact on enrollment and academic outcomes. The Webinar will present a case study on the University of Alabama, which has increased enrollment 30 percent over the last three years while also improving student retention and outcomes.
10/4/2007
Education technology developer Tegrity has launched a new program for its flagship classroom recording system, Campus 2.0: free, semester-long trials for higher education institutions.
10/3/2007
In a recent article, I mentioned my newfound affection for the open-source course management system Moodle. It's a great CMS, but there's not a lot of current information available on it. So, in this two-part tutorial, we'll walk through the use of it, starting in Part 1 with the creation of a class and setting up the resources needed for it.