Web Accessibility: Required, Not Optional

Did you get the memo on website accessibility? With the latest legal and regulatory developments, you’d better make sure you did. The time is now for web accessibility in higher education.

Read more here.

Copying & Pasting from Word to Moodle

Just an reminder to avoid copying from MS Word and pasting into a Moodle course. Microsoft Word is notorious for including bits of formatting code that wreak havoc on web pages. We have seen a number of issues crop up recently in LBCC Moodle courses, including a pop-up like this that appears when a user tries to go to a course start page:



Imagine being the Instructor whose course delivered the above pop-up, and emailed us, saying "All of a sudden most of my moodle site disappeared. I can see only week 1 and 2. I can jump to later weeks but they are not visible." As you can imagine, this could throw some of your students into a near-panic. This is a known issue that is much easier to avoid than to diagnose and fix after-the-fact.

I have seen this happen with text copied from Word for Windows and Mac, so the best solution for Word users is to copy from Word and paste into Notepad (Windows) or TextEdit or Bean (Mac), and then from there into a Moodle text input box to appear in assignments, forums, Moodle web pages, etc.. You will lose any text formatting you incorporated into the Word version of your document (I have had success keeping formatting from Bean documents!), but any effort spent to reformat your text in Moodle itself is much easier than fixing the issue that pasted Word text can do to your Moodle course. I drafted the copy for this forum post in Word and copied/pasted from Bean - it looks great, huh?

This issue has been a big reason I shy away from Word, and use Bean and Google Docs more and more.

As always, comments and questions are welcome!

You Want E-Learning Success, But Are You Prepared to Go All the Way?

Many of us take a Field of Dreams approach to elearning. If we build it, they will learn. But the reality is that elearning is just an event in the timeline of learning and not the entire learning process. And in some ways, the elearning course is an intrusion on the person’s natural learning process. Because of this, we want to make sure that the investment we make in elearning produces the results we desire.

Read more here.

Online Student Experience

This video portrays what we DO NOT want to be delivering in our eLearning courses.

Your thoughts?

Connecting With Online Students and Assessing the Connection

Teaching online courses presents many of the same conundrums as teaching face-to-face classes. Participation in class, whether online or face-to-face, is traditionally difficult to encourage and to assess. Does just showing up or logging in count? What if a student is present, yet silent? What if a student raises a hand or makes a posting simply to gain the incremental peg count toward full participation points?

Read more here.

10 Google Forms for the Classroom

We're excited about Google Forms, and are always looking for new ways to deploy them to make our work easier and/or more effective. Here is a great article on Google Forms for the Classroom.

Create Your Syllabus With a Spreadsheet and a Calendar App

By George H. Williams

"I'm going to show you how to use GoogleDocs and Google Calendar to create a dynamic calendar for a course. This calendar can be displayed as a web page or embedded in a course web site. Why would you want to do this? Well, if you're happy with using a printed syllabus only—which is perfectly fine, of course—then there's no reason for you to try this. However, the method I explain below is useful if you'd like a little added flexibility and efficiency when updating a course syllabus from semester to semester. Plus it's kind of nice to have an online syllabus that will always show the immediately upcoming events and assignments for your course."

Read more here.

YouTube Adds Unlisted Video Option

Today, YouTube announced a feature I have been wanting for years: the ability to designate a video as "unlisted." Before today, we had two choices for video access: public (viewable - and searchable by anyone, and private - up to 25 other YouTube account holders. Recognizing the need for a third option, YouTube delivered the new "Unlisted" option.

"With this feature, you can mark your videos as "unlisted." This means only people who have the link to the video will be able to watch it. It won’t appear in any of YouTube’s public pages, in search results, on your personal channel or on the browse page. It’s a private video, except you don’t need a YouTube account to watch it and there is no limit to the number of people who can view it. You’ll get a link when you upload the video and then it’s up to you to decide who to share it with."

Read more here.

Oregon Offers Google Programs to Schools

3 Stories:

Oregon became the first state in the nation to sign up for Google Apps for Education, which is free, in kindergarten though 12th grade classrooms across its 197 school districts. Read more here.

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Oregon will be the first state to offer Google's free Internet communication and collaboration service to its public schools. Read more here.

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Oregon educators hope a free Web-based software application will help students become digitally literate while saving money for struggling school districts. The Oregon Department of Education began offering Google Apps for Education to public school districts on Wednesday. Read more here.

Moodle Testing Security Options

From time to time, I am asked "How can I make my Moodle tests more secure and prevent cheating?"

I wish I had a definitive answer for you, but in reality, securing an online quiz is somewhat difficult, as is that of a traditional quiz. Although the methods used to secure an online quiz will differ from that of a traditional quiz, one needs to look at the whole process and find a solution that works.

One can never totally prevent someone from cheating on a test, but only make it less fruitful to cheat.

Take a look at the Quiz Settings page in Moodle. There are many options there that can assist. This link can help explain some of the settings for quizzes.

I would offer the following as potential "options" you may want to use for general quiz security:

1. Change the "Browser security" drop-down to "Full screen pop-up with some JavaScript security" from "None"
2. On the "Display" section, select "1" for "Questions per page" (this help to negate printing out the entire quiz).
3. Set a time-limit for the quiz (this helps to negate the use of textbooks or other materials).
4. Hide any of your course content on the day of the quiz (except the quiz) so students don't have access to any notes or other content while the quiz is open.
5. Only allow the quiz to be open for a certain time period and make yourself available during that time for technical assistance.
6. Randomize questions from a large question pool.
7. Set a time limit for taking the test.
   

There are other settings and practices that you may want to consider as well.