Wednesday, July 23, 2008

July 25 - Ready to Play Webinar?

Do you want to engage your students and excite them about content? Do you want to incorporate more practice activities before an exam or project?

Come join us July 25 for our Ready to Play? Learning with Games in Online Courses webinar. This session will be facilitated by FRCC's Chris Luchs and Kay Novak. The session's focus is to emphasize how you can incorporate games into your online courses for engaging AND effective learning experiences.

FRIDAY, July 25, 2008 from 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM (Mountain)Access from this link (opens Elluminate): http://elm.elluminate.com:80/FRONTRANGE/join_meeting.html?meetingId=1212175519275

Friday, July 18, 2008

Save The Date

Mark your calendars! We will be Celebrating a Decade of Innovation at our Faculty Conference October 17th at Arapahoe Community College. Together we will reflect on our accomplishments but more importantly look to our future.

Come celebrate CCCOnline's 10th Birthday and look for our Call for Proposals and additional information on this fun and informative event coming soon!

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

LMS Update


Hi Everyone-

Julie Witherow from PPCC sent out an excellent update on the future of our learning management system, which reminded me that you are all probably interested as well.

As many of you know our contract with Blackboard expires June 30, 2009. Due to the size of the contract we need to do a careful survey of the market and go through an RFP process before writing a new contract.
The Learning Technology Council with representatives from each of the colleges as well as CCCS-IT and a member from the State Faculty Advising Council will sit on the RFP committee both for writing and review purposes. This is a fairly large group, but we all have worked together for several years now managing Blackboard Vista and I expect the process to go smoothly.

As a group we plan to write the RFP this month and next month, possibly releasing it to the potential vendors towards the end of August. In preparation for that process we have spent the past few months inviting LMS vendors to come present to the LTC. We've had representatives from all of the major LMS vendors, as well as companies who host the two major open source LMS's. Those are Angel, Desire2Learn, and eCollege on the commercial side and Sakai and Moodle on the open source side. A sub-committee has followed up with each potential vendor on the more technical issues. We are also piloting a few courses in Moodle this summer to help us test that LMS more thoroughly.

We may very well go through this process and choose to stay with Vista. Many of us, myself included , really enjoy teaching in Vista. Its shortcomings have tended to be the stability of the product and the weakness in the administrative side. However, going through a thorough needs analysis and market survey of support software will help us plan the future of online, hybrid, and community college education in general in this area.

As a side note, I'd also like to mention that Blackboard 9, the combined Vista/Blackboard Enterprise product is due to be released in December of this year. That release will put us on a track to essentially change software in the next two years irrespective of our choices around the RFP, making it a good time to go through this analysis.


This will be a time-consuming , but exciting process and I will try to keep you current as we move through it.


best,
Lisa Cheney-Steen

Monday, July 14, 2008

MOre Resources

This is actually a better link than the last one as it's both more current and includes the library information:

http://www.studentwiki.ccconline.org/index.php?title=WebCT_Vista_General_Questions#Library_and_Writing_Resources

Writer's Toolkits

I know many of you are probably beginning to think abut next semester's course and what you want to do with it to make it new and fresh. If you are considering expanding your student's writing assignments let me remind you of some of the resources Alice Bedard-Voorhees developed for both faculty and students a few years ago. These resources are available on the website.

Students:

http://ccconline.org/students/rw_student_toolkit.htm

Faculty:

http://ccconline.org/FacultySC/TeachingResources/WritingResearch.htm


Teach on!

Lisa

Friday, July 11, 2008

ADA Webinar Cancelled

Hope you all are staying cool this summer! I am very excited to be your new Director of Training and Professional Development and to work closely with so many people I admire including Lisa Marie.

We will be hosting one webinar a month for the remainder of the year. Our ADA webinar that was scheduled for July 18th is cancelled. However, we will be creating a Just in Time Training on this important information soon. Be looking for more on this topic later this fall.

Please join us for a very cool webinar- Ready to Play? Learning with Games in Online Courses - on July 25 th from 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM (Mountain)Access. This webinar will be facilitated by FRCC's Chris Luchs and Kay Novak. The session's focus is to emphasize how you incorporate games into your online courses for engaging AND effective learning experiences.

Join us on FRIDAY, July 25, 2008 from this link (opens Elluminate): http://elm.elluminate.com:80/FRONTRANGE/join_meeting.html?meetingId=1212175519275

Have a wonderful weekend!

Karen Kaemmerling

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Changing Leadership

Hi Everyone-

I have good news and good news for you today. Karen Kaemmerling, our program chair for Social Sciences has agreed to take on the leadership of Training and Professional Development for us. Karen has been with CCCOnline both as faculty and as program chair for several years now and brings a wealth of experience and leadership with her to this position. You might also recognize Karen's name as one of the winners of BlackBoard's greenhouse awards for exemplary courses.

I am sure the next question for many of you is "What's up with Lisa Marie?" Lisa Marie is staying with CCCOnline, but she prefers to spend her time teaching, and designing and facilitating workshops rather than managing the program. She is also working on her doctorate and needs to find some time in her schedule to focus on that also. That means we will all continue to be the beneficiaries of LisaMarie's expertise and enthusiasm, while she gets to concentrate on the part of the job she likes best.

So welcome Karen into this exoanded leadership role, but don't say good-bye to LisaMarie!

Lisa Cheney-Steen