Stanford courses on iTunes

Open Culture notes today that Stanford is moving beyond posting lectures to iTunes U and have now made some full course available to the public. One such course is The Literature of Crisis. The course has a weekly lecture which is available for download. In the spirit of equal time for my other Bay Area alma mater, UC Berkeley has a very extensive list of courses which you can get via iTunes.

The question for me is whether or not people actually go out and buy the books, do the reading and listen to these podcasts in an effort to learn the stuff or if the podcasts really just end up being used by students who choose not to show up for class. It might work for some highly motivated people, but I bet they would be the exception. What might be nice would be for someone to set up a discussion board or online area where non-students could engage with others interested in learning from these materials. The social interaction, whether it's in person or online, is the missing piece. Of course, the podcasts could also be used by other instructors of similar courses or maybe someone could set up a self-paced learning environment based on the podcasts but including some assessments and additional materials.

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Blackboard Podcasts

I've been searching for podcasts about Blackboard and have come across a few. Some are too site-specific while others could use a little more polish before I would recommend them to others. However, one podcast I did find to be useful and high quality is Teaching with Blackboard by Jason Rhode at Northern Illinois University. Episode 5, posted last week, discusses how to incorporate RSS feeds into Blackboard using Feed2JS , a website and tool for converting an RSS feed to JavaScript which can be copied and pasted into your Blackboard course. This gives you a relatively easy way to add dynamic content to a course. For many instructors, RSS may be a foreign language, but I think if you listen to the five minute podcast, you will learn enough to get the idea. If you want more, Jason's previous podcast covers RSS and podcasting in more detail.

QuickSource Guides to Blackboard

The Resource Network in Harrisonburg, Virginia, publishes fold out guides to various software applications like MS Office, WordPerfect, Adobe Acrobat and more. They have student and instructor guides to BlackBoard for $4.00 each. Prices are lower if you buy in bulk. I got mine yesterday and they look nice and are easy to read. Each one covers the important things you need to know to use Blackboard as a student or instructor. They are also available through Amazon.com for $4.95 each.

Avoiding lost work in Moodle

When students are working in our installation of Moodle, there are some common ways that their work can be lost. Because Moodle doesn't save what you've written until you click Save (assignments) or Post to Forum in Forums, anything that interrupts your connection to Moodle can lead to lost work and frustration. Interruptions include computer problems or network outages or disconnections. If you are writing anything longer than a paragraph, it's a good idea to use a text editor to do your writing and then copy and paste into Moodle so no matter what happens, you won't lose any of your work. If you combine your use of a text editor with an online backup plan, you'll have a secure backup of all of your work even after the class ends and you can no longer access it (see below). You could use a word processor like Microsoft Word, but you may need to save your work as plain text first to avoid seeing formatting errors when you copy and paste from Word into Moodle. A...

Technology & Instruction for UNEX

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