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 ...