audience-is-any | Thomas' Work Space

What are best practices for recycling Moodle course teaching content? A running log

2011/12/08 plagwitz Leave a comment

Guiding Questions:
I am in the process of creating Moodle assignments with instructors. I am inclined to tell them that this is best done now, before the term starts. I have met several instructors who seem to redo all their Moodle assignments and other content, for each term and each section, and who change Moodle courses on the fly, in the middle of the term, adding identical assignments to multiple sections. When I taught with the LMS (in Blackboard environments), the entire course (content) was “rolled over” between terms (and copied into sections), after subtracting student data. What are best practices in Moodle for reusing/recycling such course content, across terms, sections, and instructors?
Is it possible to get entire course+instructor combinations recycled centrally and automatically, whenever an instructor teaches a course again, from the archive of the last version of the course, sans student data?
Or does each instructor, any time she reteaches a course, have to manually reimport all materials she wants to reuse from her old courses? So far, I have followed this page: http://teaching.uncc.edu/Moodle/how-to/importing-Moodle-course (here is an example of using the import feature when adding assignments into multiple sections in the middle of the term: https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/importing+moodle/). Can this be done before term start at least into one section, from which the other section is created by copying? What would be the cut-off date for that?
Would instructors use the last live version of the course to go forward, like I did with Blackboard, or are instructors advised to develop all content in separate development courses, and selectively import content from there into live courses? Does each instructor have a development course by default? Is it possible/advisable for an instructor to have one development course per actual course she teaches (repeatedly)? Does access of instructors to past courses expire when they get archived, and when would that be?
Finally, how could assignments be exchanged between instructors who teach the same courses?
Courses seem to be complex packages. Repackaging individual assignments from one generic development course into course packs while importing seems administrative overhead, unless there is a in-built support for packaging that allows to add course tags to content. On the other hand, courses need to be easily updateable: student data needs to be added and removed easily. Teacher content needs to be refined, possibly updated with some current materials each term.
Exploration:
1. files planning:
2. importing
  1. importing steps see here.
  2. To be seamless, source and target course need to have the same format (settings / topical, weekly or other). Otherwise, your exports from a weekly formatted course into a topically formatted course will get put into the topic number corresponding to the week # (which, if you have set to fewer topics than you had weeks, may effectively hide them. Not to worry, you can still retrieve them by adding topics to your course, then moving the assignments where you want them).
  3. backing up/restoring
    1. backing up see here
    2. restoring see here
    3. more on backup/restore from the Moodle docs FAQ
    4. primary instructor can use assign roles to add other teachers to give them access to importing; better create an intermediate, not student-accessible Moodle course for sharing instead

Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-manager, audience-is-language-learning-center-staff, e-learning, lms, service-is-learning-materials-creation Tags: backup, collaborating, moodle, restore

Logging off fails on teacher station?

2011/12/08 plagwitz Leave a comment

Symptoms: Cannot log off.
Diagnostics:
1. Not even after taskkilling so far (got to around “S” in process name initials)).
2. When did this behavior first manifest itself? This week? MS-Office 2010 upgrade? Novell upgrade?
Workaround: Current best workaround is power-cycling the computer.
Solution: Problem seems to have disappeared. Cause and resolution unclear, though.

Categories: audience-is-IT-staff, audience-is-language-learning-center-manager, audience-is-language-learning-center-staff, audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, audience-is-teachers, e-infrastructure, Glitches&Errors, Presenter-Computer Tags: windows-xp

Screencasts for Fall 2011 Workshop: Computer classroom management in the LRC using Sanako Study 1200

2011/12/08 plagwitz Leave a comment

The workshop stayed “this side of the digital audio lab”, i.e. focused on those generic teaching tasks that the Sanako Study 1200 can facilitate which have the widest teaching application (including in, but also beyond language-skill-courses):
1. remote controlling student computers,
2. screen sharing, collaborating with students,
3. launching applications on students computers,
4. sending students to webpages,
5. launching handout files to students and collecting their input back
6. locking their computers, screens or keyboards,
7. “clicker” classroom polls, for which I have written a PowerPoint Template you can base your own clicker-like face-to-face class exercises on.
8. and more…
9. Here are two screencasts of my presentation:
  1. one for the right screen/participant screen (using the Study1200 teacher to student screen casting). Requires Windows Media Player on PC, like in the LRC: download from MS-SkyDrive.
  2. one for the left screen/projector, where I displayed mostly a PowerPoint. You can watch this in parallel using another player, e.g. the VLC player, like in the LRC. However, it can also stream from MS-SkyDrive.

Categories: audience-is-teachers, e-learning, LRCRoomCoed434, Presenter-Computer, Screencasts, software, Student-Computers, training, workshops Tags: 2010, ms-powerpoint, sanako-study-1200

A PowerPoint Template to base your clicker-like face-to-face class exercises on

2011/12/08 plagwitz 2 comments

Enables easy exercise creation:
Resides on S:\coas\lcs\labs\lrctest\templates\Teacher.pot;
Requires MS-PowerPoint 2010, as installed on the teacher computer in LRCRoomCoed434.
Training videos are available for download here (requires Windows Media Player on Windows, as installed in the LRCRoomCoed434).

Usage samples available on request from

German Beginners,
Intermediate
and Advanced Classes.

Categories: audience-is-teachers, e-learning, learning-materials, Presenter-Computer, presenter-computer, Screencasts, software Tags: 2010, ms-powerpoint, trpTeacher

PowerPoint 2010 upgrade from 2007 disables setup show display on secondary screen

2011/12/06 plagwitz Leave a comment

Symptom: Without hardware changes (a visualizer that seemed to enter into the equation as an AV source seems to have been ruled out as culprit), PowerPoint cannot display show from primary right screen to secondary left screen.
Cause: Upgrade to PowerPoint 2010 from 2007, but seems really an underlying video driver limitation that has given us grieve in our – admittedly uncommon: 1024*768 on secondary, projector-connected screen, dictated by the projector – setup before.
Workaround: Make the 1024*768 left screen the primary screen.
1. Upside: this allows to project the show to the class, but teacher can still move the underlying PowerPoint presentation onto the right screen (for previewing answers. The PowerPoint 2010 upgrade did fix the PowerPoint 2007 bug that interactive animations from PowerPoint 2003 where briefly revealed on slide load before they went into the default hidden state).
2. Downsides:
  1. Presenter view is still not possible, complains about seeing only one screen connected, even though “Check” button brings up the windows screen properties dual screen.
  2. The Windows taskbar displays on the left screen, so teacher staging is visible to the class when projector is on (as it always was with a single screen. Only the secondary right screen added a staging area for the teacher).

Categories: audience-is-IT-staff, audience-is-language-learning-center-manager, audience-is-language-learning-center-staff, Glitches&Errors, Presenter-Computer Tags: 2003, 2010, 207, dual-screen, ms-powerpoint

How to book LRC resources – explained in one screenshot

2011/12/02 plagwitz 3 comments

You can come to the LRC reception desk to book an item (you will still need to log into your NINERMAIL). But you can also self-help, and get immediate confirmation, from any device with access to your NINERMAIL:

If you have a basic LRC classroom booking scenario, send to the room lrcroomcoed434@uncc.edu what looks like “an email that includes times”: Go to your Ninermail inbox. Using the little triangle icon, unfold the “New” menu. Click menu item “Meeting request”. In the window, that opens, in the “Resources:” field, put lrcroomcoed434@uncc.edu. In the “Subject:”, put your course number. Enter start and end times of your classes visit. In the upper left, Click “Send”. Within a few seconds you receive a response email from the room in OWA: If you did not check the “Scheduling Assistant” tab, you may be asked to reschedule because of a conflict. If you fail to get a response, something went wrong, did you mistype the address? OWA remembers and suggests it after first use, but the first time you need to get it right.