An update from Learning Technologies...

Good Morning ESU Canvas Community!

It has been a month or so since I sent a Canvas update. Since that time two additional Canvas updates were rolled out:

Product Releases:

August 27^th   Detailed Release Notes & Screencast

September 17^th  Detailed Release Notes & Screencast

Learning Objects CampusPack

A reminder that we are not planning to renew CampusPack for the spring term.(Appears as a sidebar option in Canvas called CampusPack Tools.) This will be the last semester we license the product. There are several reasons why: The company has ceased product updates; there are better products that do the same thing for free; and usage is dropping. Instead, we plan to incorporate Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft OneNote, and enhanced Google Apps for Education to replace the collaboration features (blogs, journals, and wikis). Podcasts can be added as media elements to Canvas. Our Instructional Design team can assist faculty with migrating content from CampusPack. We encourage faculty that still use CampusPack to explore the Microsoft and Google options with our ID team.

UDOIT

We’re super excited to launch UDOIT (Universal Design Online Content Inspection Tool) – a new feature developed by the University of Central Florida for checking accessibility in your Canvas courses. You’ll find UDOIT in your course menu. Refer to this video for a brief overview of how it works: https://vimeo.com/126968075  Using UDOIT you can run an inspection of your course for accessibility concerns. UDOIT does not auto-correct PowerPoint, Word, PDF and videos, but provides links that show you how to modify those files for students with disabilities.

Online Readiness Course

Learning Technologies is currently piloting an Online Readiness Course (ORC). Dr. Anna Catterson is leading this effort, but the entire Instructional Design team is involved. A group of volunteer faculty and staff are participating in the pilot course and will provide feedback in a few weeks. The modified course will be rolled out the spring term to all faculty.

Learning Technologies Blog and Twitter Feed

If you want more information about anything you read here, check out our blog at http://emporiastate.blogspot.com/ or follow us on Twitter @esulearningtech. Our Twitter feed was recently ranked as one of the top educational Twitter feeds in the State of Kansas.

Welcome back!

Good Morning ESU Canvas Community!

Welcome to our newest members of the ESU faculty family! There are more than 30 new faculty joining us this semester! As part of a new program we’re rolling out, we’re pairing these faculty with our Instructional Design team to provide in-depth support and technology consultation. If you would like to be included in that program, drop me a note!

Product Release: The latest 3-week product sprint (update) was released on Saturday, August 6^th. New features in this update are listed in detail below.

August 6^th  Detailed Release Notes & Screencast

Learning Objects Campus Pack

Learning Technologies reviews its service portfolio on a regular basis in order to determine which technologies should be abandoned and, conversely, which technologies should be adopted. We’ve been looking carefully at Campus Pack developed by Learning Objects for over a year. ESU has licensed this technology for about 8 years. It was licensed at a time when our former LMS did not support social media technologies. A lot has changed in 8 years. Reviewing a combination of faculty survey input, usage data, licensing cost, and product support we’ve decided that we will not renew our license with Learning Objects in January. The product has not been updated in over a year and, more importantly, there are better technologies available now to do the same thing (wikis, blogs, journals, podcasts). Soon, Canvas will be unveiling a new product integration with Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft OneNote, and a deeper integration with Google Apps for Education. These options will provide a much more robust integration experience and better mobile accessibility. Hence, we’ll use this semester to begin assisting faculty with migrating content off Learning Objects. We still have 5 months before the license expires. By that time we expect to be fully migrated to Microsoft Office 365 and OneNote. If you would like to see a glimpse of what’s on the horizon, refer to this video from the recent InstructureCon conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdK4N3BYW3E

Panopto (Lecture Capture) Updates

Over the summer we migrated Panopto to the cloud. (Note, this did not affect the Earl Center due to HIPAA compliancy.) By moving Panopto to the cloud we reduced the licensing expense, improved product support, and expanded storage capability. Panopto Cloud offers ESU unlimited storage, so we will no longer bump up against storage constraints that affected system availability and performance. Note that you may need to update your Panopto Recorder to point to https://emporia.hosted.panopto.com  We’re redirecting vulcan.emporia.edu to point to the new address for the next couple of months. Along with this update, we added some graphical and color enhancements to the Panopto portal. Functionality with Canvas has been tested. No video data was lost in this product migration, but we did cull duplicated, triplicated, and quadruplicated videos to reduce transfer time.

Kaltura Video Quizzing

We’re super excited to announce a new feature in our streaming media product: Kaltura. You will know Kaltura as “My Media” and “Media Gallery” inside Canvas. This new feature allows faculty to overlay simple quizzing questions (MC and T/F) on top of the videos you assign. You can add as many quizzes within a video as you desire. The responses are automatically tabulated in the Canvas gradebook. So, if you assign students videos to watch you can assess that they understood the content. Learn more here: https://goo.gl/86fSc7    Or, talk with our Instructional Design team to learn how to add quizzing to your course videos.

Learning Technologies Blog and Twitter Feed

If you want more information about anything you read here, check out our blog at http://emporiastate.blogspot.com/ or follow us on Twitter @esulearningtech.