Technology & Instruction for UNEX

Moodle.org says that the release of Moodle 2.0 should happen this week. Once it's available, we will install it on our test site and determine how soon we can put it on our production site. Once we move over to Moodle 2.0, we will be making some changes to our site, most notably the use of a custom theme. We will use that theme for all of our online courses and we will eliminate the use of other themes. The new theme looks good and will bring some consistency to our online courses.

Cheating is commonplace in education at all levels. Face-to-face or online, it makes little difference although it can be more difficult to catch online. A recent article on chronicle.com by a guy who writes student papers anonymously gives a pretty good picture of how easy it is for someone with the money to get any kind of paper, report, proposal, or thesis written. He even impersonates the students online: I have completed countless online courses. Students provide me with passwords and user names so I can access key documents and online exams. In some instances, I have even contributed to weekly online discussions with other students in the class.  Maybe there is more collaboration going on in online classes than people realize...

Scrivener 2.0 was recently released. It's a writing tool for the Mac with a Windows version coming next year. I've used Scrivener to organize online courses as well as to develop instructional manuals and I like the way it works. Since it accepts many file formats, you can easily drag in PDFs and other files to keep all of your course materials/writing resources together.  To get everything out of Scrivener and into Moodle, for example, you can export each document in your Scrivener project as a separate file in PDF, RTF, or html format, among others. So everything could go into one folder and you could zip that folder and upload it to Moodle and go from there. If you like to break your projects into smaller pieces and integrate your online research, planning and writing, Scrivener is a nice tool. Mike Wazowski made a short video last year showing how he uses Scrivener for course design. There was also a fairly extensive review of Scrivener 1.x on chronicle.com earlier ...

This is an interesting talk about schooling and all the negatives that go along with it. While I've heard the same ideas many times for many years, Ken Robinson puts them together in a coherent narrative that comes to life with the incredible RSAnimate cartoon annotation technique. Should be required viewing for all current and future school administrators and teachers, as well as parents who've been told their child can't learn.

I have been watching some of the videos in the Learning to Teach Online series from the University of New South Wales . The series covers various topics related to online teaching and they are divided into episodes which include a short video plus a PDF. I had some trouble getting the PDFs to download, but the videos played fine for me. I think the Managing your Time video is a good one for new online instructors: Overall, this looks like a good resource.

I've always found the quiz feature in Moodle to be a little complicated, but if you create your quiz in the right format outside of Moodle using a text editor, it's very easy to import it and get everything set up pretty quickly. The key is to use one of the quiz formats that Moodle can read and to save that file in the UTF-8 file format. Many text editors will allow you to save in UTF-8. Once you've done this, you can import the quiz and everything will be added with no copying and pasting required. I like the Aiken file format. I don't believe that it was developed by Clay Aiken, the singer from American Idol, but who knows. The Moodle help pages explain the Aiken format in enough detail to get going: You just need to make each question in your quiz look like one of these two and everything will go smoothly. What is the correct answer to this question? A. Is it this one? B. Maybe this answer? C. Possibly this one? D. Must be this one! ANSWER: D Which LMS has ...

Chronicle.com has an interesting article about the pros and cons of videotaping lectures. It seems like a lot of work and time for a limited payback, although if you videotaped the lectures ahead of time and then devoted class time to something else, it might have more value.

I'll need to revise my advice to instructors about using copyrighted videos in online courses after reading this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education . In short, The Association for Information and Media Equipment contacted the university in the fall, alleging that UCLA had violated copyright laws by letting instructors use the videos, which were accessible only to students then enrolled in specific courses and included works such as Shakespeare productions, foreign-language films, and documentaries. The university temporarily stopped using online videos beginning this semester and is negotiating with the trade group. This goes counter to my understanding of the Teach Act , as well as fair use, which I thought allowed for the use of copyrighted material in a password protected course under certain circumstances.

This week's edition of the BBC's Digital Planet podcast has some interesting stories related to distance learning and the use of technology in education. I didn't know that degrees were offered via distance learning as early as the 1800's at the University of London. Technology has changed drastically since then, but teaching methods still have a ways to go.

Our face to face class, Teaching Online with Moodle , started on Wednesday. It's free and lasts only 3 weeks, but it's not too late to sign up. Call UCR Extension Student Services at (800) 442-4990 and ask for course # 093MSCC04.