ebyblog students and information

Blackboard Patents LMS

Somehow I missed this one but it appears Blackboard has been awarded a patent that covers quite a bit of modern Learning Management Systems do. They have already taken legal action against Desire2Learn.

AUG2006: 24/7 Asynchronous Learning / Online Workbooks

The final two sessions I went to. I only caught the last part of the 24/7 Asynchronous Learning one but it again used actions and reports to allow students to get constant feedback and instructors to stay in control of large courses.

The workbook section was by Elsevier and Learning Objects. They have taken the workbook [...]

AUG2006: Blending Learning Initiative

This presentation was by Allan Gyorke of Penn State. It was another one about using Resource Libraries which I think may be underused here.

about 7500 courses, 63500 students, 191000 enrollments (about 3 courses per student)
Scattered across the state
Blended learning: combine scattered students into one course, integrity across courses, overflow for high enrollment
Share objects across courses, [...]

AUG2006: Management of Large Enrollment Courses

This presentation was also presented by the University of Waterloo. The presentation was mostly about the team features. The university of waterloo has apparently been giving quite a bit of feedback regarding the team features and what they have become. The example course in this case was a 800 student course with 4 sections.

Each student [...]

AUG2006: Building a Helpdesk out of Duct Tape

This presentation was about having a helpdesk on absolutely no budget (on the side). In this case it was for the Southwest Virginia Education and Training Network which includes quite a few different schools and grade levels. They wanted a timely helpdesk but due to the finances could not do 24/7. There are really only [...]

AUG2006: Sessions.edu Student Tracker

Sessions is an online school for graphic design. Students enroll and eventually have a curriculum that they go through online. To help automate things they built an application called Student Tracker which allows students to keep a grip on their program. Some points:

Three systems linked together. ANGEL, SIS and the Tracker
When they login to ANGEL [...]

AUG2006: Extreme Action and Triggers

This presentation was by Victoria Neeshan of Independence University which is completely online, rolling enrollment. They’ve used the ANGEL actions to automate many processes and to allow large courses to be taught by a single professor. Students are given constant feedback during the course and the professors are emailed updates when needed. One example given [...]

AUG2006: Resource Library Usability Study

This presentation was about the resource libraries (now LOR in 7.x) in ANGEL and was presented by some of the staff of the University of Waterloo. They have a rather large resource library available which faculty are allowed to contribute to (peer-reviewed). It contains learning activities along with global documents such as student policies. They [...]

AUG2006: Don’t Play It Again Sam

This presentation was by Peter Friesen of Plattsburgh State University of New York and probably had the most take-home ideas of any. The presentation went over problems and workflows that were just too complex to expect faculty to complete.

Originally a SLN (apparently lotus notes based??) user they moved to ANGEL and experienced some problems getting [...]

AUG2006: Intro, Keynote and Future

I attended the ANGEL Users Conference this year and found it well worth the time. It helps to see what other people are doing with a product and how they are taking advantage of certain features. There’s quite a bit that can be done with some of the tools we’re not taking advantage of.

For those [...]