Steve "The Investment Dude"

In addition to being our college’s VP of Finance and Administration, Steve Ward also teaches business classes here at Centralia College. He gave me permission to share this great video he made.

It is so funny! It is obvious he is really enjoying teaching and this video is a great example of the effectiveness of humor.  He uses Tegrity a lot in his classes and it is great to see him have some fun with his content.  I’m sure his students enjoyed the moment of levity!

A little context: Steve is providing his BA 225 Money and Banking students with a tongue-firmly-in-check example of what to look for in investments.   Also, he had Kathy look this over to help him resolve an audio-popping issue you’ll notice.

Great stuff, Steve!

Within a week or so, each of the vendors will be required to provide sandboxes for our use in testing their product.  Testing will be conducted by faculty, eLearning Admins and some students.  This will last about 4 weeks to allow enough time for the State Board to review all of the rubrics submitted.  Once the sandboxes are set up and accounts are created, we can begin testing.

By the end of March the State Board will be announcing the vendor of choice and begin negotiating a contract with them.

On July 1, 2012, the contract will be in place for the new vendor.  This does not mean that we will be moving to a new Learning Management system at that time.  We will probably be looking at Summer 2013 as our migration time, but have not set anything in stone at this time.

Stay tuned for more information regarding the new LMS.

Classrooms are Created: February 27

Classrooms Open for Students: March 26

Class Begins: April 2

Last Class day Including Finals: June 15

Classrooms Close: June 22

Grades Due: June 18

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For Shared Courses (there are only a few)

Classrooms Open for Students: March 22

Class Begins: March 29

Last Class day Including Finals: June 6

Classrooms Close: June 22

Grades Due: June 11

The top vendors are Blackboard, Desire2Learn and Instructure (Canvas).

The vendors were selected based on scoring of an extensive list of functional requirements and on vendor pricing. My personal thanks to the members of the committee for wading through over 1200 pages of vendor materials in order to score the proposals. The technical requirements were developed with the ELC, ITC and informed by a faculty survey last fall.

For more information on the process and a list of committee members: http://www.sbctc.edu/college/_e-elearningprojects.aspx

Next steps:

USER TESTING

The top vendors will provide opportunities for user testing, which will include the following:

• Training webinars for testers
• Faculty, staff and student accounts for testing
• Both empty and populated classrooms for testing SBCTC will provide each CTC with $1000 to compensate faculty who test all three products using a standard rubric. We will pay $500 for one completed rubric; $1000 for two. Some colleges are adding their own funds to increase the number of faculty testers. We welcome as many as will fill out the complete rubric for all three vendors.
• The vendors will also supply generic accounts for faculty, staff and students to test without going through the whole rubric. That feedback will be gathered separately.
• College staff will be able to test administrative functions.
• We will have dedicated testers for accessibility issues and mobile technology functionality.
• This testing will begin as soon as we can set it up and continue for approximately four weeks. We strongly encourage wide participation in the testing. Please help us reach everyone who has an interest.

Vendor References and Live Demos

During March the committee will continue checking vendor references. At the end of the month the vendors will do live demos, and after that the final vendor will be chosen.

Contract Negotiations

In April we will begin negotiations with the apparent successful vendor. We will negotiate for the optimal price based on active users aggregated by participating colleges and universities in Washington and premium hosting. If we cannot reach an agreement on price with the apparent successful vendor, we will begin negotiations with the next vendor.

Contract and Implementation

The new contract will begin on July 1, 2012. We have planned two full years for implementation to coincide with the end of our ANGEL contract in June 2014. The successful vendor will be integrated with both our current SMS and the ctcLink. We do anticipate that colleges will be able to move to the new product earlier if they choose.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Are any of the top vendors open source?

A: None of the proposals we received relies completely on open source software. All responding vendors use some proprietary programming to provide all of our requirements for an enterprise system.

However, all top vendors do have some features or provisions for using and sharing open content.

Q: Are colleges required to use the LMS chosen through this process?

A: No. We hope all colleges will participate in order to save money and to maximize our programming, our open content development and sharing, and our professional development efforts.

Q: Will the cost model still be $4 per active user?

A: We don’t know yet. The more colleges that participate, the better deal we will be able to make.

Q: What happens to other elearning tools that are integrated into current LMSs?

A: SBCTC has extended the contracts for ANGEL and Bb Collaborate (Elluminate) and Bb Student Services (tech support) through June 2014. We are in year two of a three-year contract with Tegrity, and our current plan is to extend that contract. SBCTC’s intention is to continue to provide these services as long as colleges use them. Blackboard tells us that Collaborate and the help desk will continue to be available to non-Blackboard LMS clients (as they are now). However, we might choose as a system to make changes based on the functionality of the new vendor product.

P.S. We do not have access outside of the campus.

 If you have any questions please contact me at dcarroll@centralia.edu

You can easily access these courses yourself, just point your web browser and:

go to http://angel.waol.org   (do not start at angel.centralia.edu)
username:  guest_ocl
password:  ocl

Then click on a course you’d like to explore!

If you like what you see, you can download the course by going to our state board’s Connexion Site.

And – the main page for each course also included download links.

Now, I’ve got a third approach to student communication. I’m going to fall back on good ol’ gmail. I’m getting ready for any potential bad weather to come, and those of you that use technology to communicate with students might want to do something similar.

First, I printed my student Angel roster (Communicate, Course Roster), which includes student personal email addresses. I’ll keep a copy of this at home.  BTW, in Angel there are about three ways to find a roster of students; only the one under the Communicate tab will easily show you their email addresses.

Second, I’ve created a brand new gmail account specifically for emergency use by my students. I’ve carefully explained to my students that this is NOT an account I’d check with any regularity, unless college email and Angel are down.

I went to gmail (mail.google.com) and set up a new gmail account:  KBrooksEmergency@gmail.com    <== notice the name!

I’ve already given this email address to my Angel students.

A hint? Log in to your new gmail account and set up a filter so all incoming email is automatically forwarded to a different, personal email account. Don’t forward them to your college email, since that may be inaccessible during bad weather.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s free OpenCourseWare already includes nearly 2,100 courses and has been used by more than 100 million people.

Full article here.

Students

• New Twitter hashtags for each course with automatic tweets announcing new recordings.

Instructors

• Selection of the display/monitor to record when starting a recording on the Mac.
• More visible ‘recording paused’ indicator on the Mac and PC.
• Copy and move for student and test recordings.
• New ‘Properties’ action to modify the name, date, owner, and type of a recording.
• Re-upload a downloaded Tegrity recording using the ‘Upload video as class’ feature.

You should be able to find these folders within any Centralia College Angel classroom:

• Tegrity – requirements to make a recording
• Tegrity – making a recording using two webcams - YouTube recording
• Tegrity – view recordings on an iPhone or Droid
• Windows – using the Snipping tool (fabulous!)
• Windows – modifying your Taskbar
• Angel – grading dropbox submissions off-line
• Angel – creating surveys
• Angel - submitting multiple documents in one dropbox
• Blackboard Collaborate – creating a session
• Blackboard Collaborate – finding session links
• Other – clearing your browser cache