Spring Moodle courses have ended

Our Spring Moodle courses for instructors ended today. The experiment with Twitter was a partial success and it turned out that LinkedIn was a better resource for finding potential online instructors. We had a huge increase in enrollments -- 36 in our Teaching Online with Moodle and 28 in Producing Media for your Online Course. In the past when these courses were only open to people already teaching at UCR Extension, we had enrollments between 2-5 each quarter and in some quarters we had no students at all.

As might be expected, actual participation in our free courses was not as high as our enrollments. Probably half of those who enrolled actually participated at all, and a smaller number were active throughout the course. We had a small number of people who were already teaching at UCR Extension, and the benefit for them was the vast experience shared by many of our other participants. Several of them have been teaching online for many years and had not used Moodle in the past, but since our emphasis is on online teaching, they were able to share many good resources and suggestions.

We will offer our courses again in July and August. So far, the Teaching Online with Moodle course is ready for registration:

Here's a link to the catalog page. You can register there. Note that the course description is not accurate and needs to be updated. The course is open to anyone.

Course ID: 111MSCC80
Register online using the course ID or by contacting Student Services:
Tel: (951) 827-4105 or (800) 442-4990 toll-free
E-mail: register@ucx.ucr.edu (include your full name, address, phone number and email address)

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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.

Change the Text Editor in Moodle

This lesson shows how to choose an alternate text editor in Moodle. Edit profile After you login, click Edit profile under My profile settings in the Administration block. If you have moved the Administration block to the dock on the left edge of your browser, you can choose Edit profile from the menu by moving your mouse over the Administration menu on the left edge of the screen. Text editor The currently selected text editor is shown in your profile in the General section. Change the editor Click on the Text editor menu to choose a different option. The TinyMCE HTML editor was the default editor in versions of Moodle prior to 2.7 and it has a few more options than the new default editor, the Atto HTML editor. The Atto editor works with all browsers while the TinyMCE editor does not work completely with Chrome or Internet Explorer. Update Click Update profile at the bottom of the page to save your changes.

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.

Technology & Instruction for UNEX

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