Monday, July 31, 2006

CCCWeb Down

For those of you who use CCCWeb on a regular basis -

CCCWeb is down on both the faculty and the student side for at least another 24 hours.

Lisa

Vista Vision and Beyond: 2006 Faculty Conference

Dear CCCOnline and ACC Faculty,

Save the Date and Call for Session Proposals!

This year's face-to-face faculty conference is scheduled for Friday, September 22, 2006. There is no conference fee; we ask only that you register. Check-in and a continental breakfast will begin at 8:00 am, and sessions will run from 9:00 to 3:30.

ACC has graciously offered their campus for this year's event. We welcome all ACC faculty to join us as participants and presenters!

Theme and Call for Sessions: Share the Wealth with your peers

This year's theme is Vista Vision and Beyond. We'd like to invite you to submit a proposal for a 45 minute session or a 25 minute round-table discussion.

To-date we have proposals from a panel of ACC faculty who are teaching in Vista with different types of deliveries (online, hybrid, etc.), a possible session on virtual worlds/online gaming, and a session on Vista tools that will add 'Snap, Crackle, and pop' to your courses.

Please submit your proposal by Friday, August 11th, with the following information:
  • Session Title
  • Presenter names, phone numbers, and email addresses
  • Type of session (45 minute or roundtable)
  • Brief Description (up to 50 words)
  • Outomces/Goals for the presentation
  • Tech support needed (projection, lab, etc.)
I am looking forward to hearing from you and seeing you at the conference. Online registration for this conference will be available in mid-August, information coming soon!


All best,

Alice Bedard-Voorhees
Associate Academic Dean and 2006 Conference Coordinator
CCCOnline
Alice.Bedard-Voorhees@cccs.edu

Friday, July 28, 2006

Password Changes Coming

As many of you know the community college system is implementing a new student information system, human resources management system and financial resources management system collectively called Banner. As a part of this change we will all get new userID's and passwords. At CCConline we will manage this change differently for the Vista and for the Campus Edition (CE) learning mangement systems (LMS).

CE will retain your current user name and password. Vista will move to the new user names and passwords.

This is because Vista is fairly tightly tied to Banner and will import the new user names and passwords from there when we load enrollment information. Our Academic Technology group is working on passing the information back and forth between CE and Vista, but many of you will find yourselves teaching in both LMS for the fall and thus may be using two user names and two passwords. Sorry -- it's only for one semester!

Lisa

Thursday, July 27, 2006

RSS Feed

If any of you use an RSS reader the feed link for this blog is http://ccconlinefacultynews.blogspot.com/atom.xml.

My browser of choice is Firefox. I find Sage to be an easy reader to use with that Firefox.

Lisa

Link to Student Orientation for Vista

The link to the student orientation for students using Vista:

http://www.ccconline.org/support/vista/

We will send that out to students and post it on their MyCCCOnline page. You will be able to post it in your classes as an announcement or in the discussions or anywhere else youthink it needs to be.

Let us know what else you think we need to include.

Lisa

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Summer Student Survey

In the interests of time (limited) this summer we will survey only one section for each instructor. That means if you are teaching three sections this summer only one will be surveyed. The sections to be surveyed were chosen randomly by David Chatham, our Dean of Academic Technology. If it turns out that you have two fabulous section and one not-so-fabulous section and that we managed to survey the not-so-fabulous section we will be sure the QA coordinator, Linda Shaw, looks at the fabulous sections. If it looks like survey results will affect your pay level we will carefully review all courses you taught in the summer to make sure we are looking at an accurate and consistent picture of your teaching skills.

This fall we will return to surveying all sections taught.

Thanks for your patience everyone!

Vista Migration

Update on the Vista migration process:
  • The summer pilot of 19 courses has gone very well. The student support center has had almost no student calls other than the common "don't know the user ID or PIN" questions.
  • Summer pilot faculty have had some technical difficulties, primarily java issues.
  • We are surveying students and beginning a discussion with pilot faculty later this summer.
  • This fall will initiate the Vista Volunteer program. Each of you teaching in Vista will have a designated mentor -- one of the Vista Volunteers (who are paid for providing this support). You will be able to turn to your VV for assistance should you have technical difficulties with Vista.
  • Professional Development workshops: Vista Basic Training and Vista Next Steps are both available in Vista now for anyone teaching in Vista. If you aren't moving to Vista this fall, but you want to get a taste of Vista from the student perspective the discussion workshop is currently available in Vista and Respondus is coming soon.
Plans for fall
  • A student orientation is available in Vista, as is a trouble-shooting page.
  • As students enroll in classes an email will send them to a test website where they will be able to log into a Vista course shell and test their computer set up. Instructions will help them trouble-shoot any technical issues.
  • All students will begin in the CE and be sent from there to their Vista courses. We are working on having both versions of MyWebCT (CE) and MyCCCOnline (Vista) list all courses whichever LMS (learning management system) they are in.
  • We are going to migrate about a third of our courses into Vista. The design team is working very hard on this project so you have a reasonably complete course to begin with.

WebCT Conference

This month several CCCOnline staff members were able to attend the WebCT conference in Chicago. We spent the week going to presentations and learning about all of the exciting things we will be able to do in Vista that we can't do in Campus Edition!

We have quite a few new tools coming in application pack 1, which will be installed on our server between the fall and spring terms. These tools include an internal blog, gradeable rubrics, and an interactive goals page. For more information see the WebCT site at http://www.webct.com/software/viewpage?name=software_application_pack_1.

Faculty at the conference were excited about the use of blogs, wiki's, RSS feeds, and the use of virtual worlds in courses. Administrators were excited about the data that will be available from Vista - specific information on the use of each tool for example - and the possibility of predicting student problems early enough in the term to be able to provide some assitance.

Forecasts regarding the future of online learning leaned heavily on the idea of customized learning paths -- standard material with many possible paths through the content. Lots of great ideas -- implementation may be a little tricky. :^)

Fall Enrollment

Today's enrollment numbers are looking up - we have 3,822 enrollments, whereas last year at this time we had 4,509. That is still down 15%, but three weeks ago we were down 32%, so the gap has been cut in half. CCCOnline traditionally enrolls students very late in the enrollment period, giving us more time to communicate with students.

Our grass roots efforts have included emailing and mailing past and present students, redesigning the website, and asking faculty to post registration directions in your summer classes. I currently expect this fall 1's enrollment to be the same as last fall's enrollment. Fall 2 may catch all of the growth we don't expect for fall 1, so fall 2 may be quite a lot larger than fall 2 last year.

Lisa

Lisa Cheney-Steen
Co-Executive Director for LEarning Technology, CCCS

Friday, July 21, 2006

Save the Date! Fall Faculty Conference and Discipline Meetings

This year the annual Fall Faculty Conference and Discipline Meetings will be held at Arapaho Community College on Friday, September 22nd. The call for proposals is forthcoming.