November Featured Faculty: Dr. Peter Jeschofnig

Greetings All,

In the tradition of prior Faculty Features in the Teaching Tips Newsletters, I asked Peter if he would like to update his bio. Here it is :).

Dr. Peter Jeschofnig

I am a professor of science at Colorado Mountain College in Glenwood Springs, where I teach mainly chemistry and physics. Prior to starting my teaching career in 1988, I spent many years as an international exploration geologist in Africa and the Middle East. I have been teaching physics for CCCOnline since 2002, and during 2003-04 I taught my CCCOnline classes from Windhoek, Namibia while on sabbatical as a Fulbright professor at the University of Namibia.

As a strong believer in hands-on education, every summer I take students on rainforest ecology or marine biology field courses to Central or South America. In the past we have studied rainforest ecology in Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, and Honduras plus marine biology in Belize, Honduras, and the Galapagos Islands.

My degrees include a B.S. and M.A in geology/anthropology, an M.A. in science education and a Ph.D. from Colorado State University. In 1995, I was named CMC's professor of the year, and in 2000 TELECOOP's distance educator of the year. I spent my 1995/96 sabbatical as a Fulbright professor at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia.

My wife, Linda, was a CPA, and taught marketing and management courses as an adjunct professor at Colorado Mountain College for 17 years before recently retiring. She now runs a successful e-commerce business.

Teaching Tips Newsletter Goes Blogging--Today's the Day

Greeting Everyone,

In a few minutes you'll see the blog post for November's featured faculty, Dr. Peter Jeschofnig.

The faculty feature was one of the former sections of the monthly faculty newsletter, and it will be released through the CCCOnline Faculty News blog.

By moving to some new communication tools, we hope to provide shorter pieces of information more frequently, provide an archive so you can more easily retrieve data, and allow timely updates and faculty contributions of knowledge throught the wiki.

So we have two blogs and a wiki: CCCOnline Faculty News, CCCOnline Faculty Source (Instructional Resources),and the CCCOnline Faculty Wiki. If you find yourself wondering how to keep track of mutliple sources, we've had the same conversation here. If you bookmark this blog,it contains all the links to the others (scroll down to the Links section of this blog).

We welcome feedback on your new tools --

Best to each of you,

Alice

Vista Updates—Downtime Midnight to 8 AM this Friday

Vista Updates—Downtime 12-8 AM this Friday, plus Weekly Re-start 1-3AM Saturdays.

Academic Technology Dean David Chatham has this information to share:

In an effort to improve Vista operations, we have requested that Vista Hosting utilize an eight hour window (Thu Night-Fri Morning: Nov. 3, Friday 12 AM - 8 AM) to add more application nodes to the CCCS configuration.

This means that students and faculty will not be able to access the Vista server during that time. It is possible that the server will be available before 8 AM, but a splash page will be in place until the server is back online. The new configuration will deal with some of the slowness we have experienced lately.

Other maintenance changes include a weekly restart of our servers every Friday night-Saturday morning, 1 AM to 3 AM. This will mean that users will not be able to access Vista during this period every week.

Regards,

Alice Bedard-Voorhees
Associate Academic Dean

Nov. 1: CE is back up

Hi All,

CE was down today from about 1:30 - 2:30, but is now back up.

Best,

Alice

Vista Faculty Guides on the Wiki

Hi Everyone-

Phyllis Dobson and Sharon Taylor have created a series of fabulous faculty guides to Vista. These guides can help you with common problems and issues within Vista or just let you know what is available.

The guides are located on the faculty wiki at www.facultywiki.ccconline.org. Follow the link to WebCT Vista and then to FAQ. If you sign in on the wiki you will be able to comment directly on the guides by using the discussion tab. Please do comment if you see an error or have a better way to accomplish a task or just have a general comment on the tool/software. If you have a topic you think should be included, feel free to add a page.

I'm also taking comments on the wiki, how we should use it, what information should be included, how it should be organized, etc.

best,
Lisa

Browser Updates -- How to Uninstall IE 7 and Firefox 2

For anyone who installed the latest browser updater -- IE 7 and Firefox 2: Neither of these updates are supported by Vista and Banner. If you want to uninstall them, FRCC staff have set up a website with directions at http://www.frontrange.edu/FRCCTemplates/FRCC1.aspx?id=5343.

best,
Lisa

3pm Monday--Vista Back to Speed

Hi All,

Vista has fixed the slow-down--I've already gotten feedback here, that it's back and running.

Best,

Alice

Monday Afternoon Oct. 30 --Vista's Slow

Hello All,

We are aware that Vista has been slow off and on since 1:30 and have a ticket them into them again. We are now waiting for a response and will continue to communicate as needed.

Regards,

Alice

Common Grading Symbols

Below are the definitions the Educational Services Council members are voting on. Everything was approved a year ago with the exception of the two new "place holders" to handle the requirements of Banner.

INVENTORY OF COMMON GRADING SYMBOLS

(Implementation of the Common Grade Symbols to be effective Fall 2006.)

A	-	Excellent or Superior
B	-	Good
C	-	Average
D	-	Deficient
F	-	Failure
I		Incomplete
S	-	Satisfactory
U	-	Unsatisfactory
S/A	-	Satisfactory (A-level) work in a developmental course
S/B	-	Satisfactory (B-level) work in a developmental course
S/C	-	Satisfactory (C-level) work in a developmental course
U/D	-	Unsatisfactory (D-level) work in a developmental course
U/F	-	Unsatisfactory (F-level) work in a developmental course
W	-	Withdrawal
AW	-	Administrative Withdrawal (available as an individual college option)
AU	-	Audit

Place Holders

SP	-	Satisfactory Progress
Z	-	Grade not yet reported
R	-	Repeat Field
CPL CNG	- -	Prior Learning Credit Conversion – No Grade
		AU- Audit By auditing a course, a student may participate in course activities, but does not receive a formal transcript grade. Students must indicate intent to audit a course at registration or by the deadline listed in the course schedule. Audited courses are not eligible for the College Opportunity Fund stipend. Students will be responsible for the full in-state or out-of-state tuition. Audited courses do not meet the credit hour requirements for financial aid or veteran benefits and may not be applied to certificates or degrees. I- Incomplete The "Incomplete" grade is a temporary grade and is designed for students who because of documented illness or circumstances beyond their control are unable to complete their course work within the semester, but have completed a majority of the course work (defined as at least 75% of all course assignments and tests) in a satisfactory manner (grade C or better). If circumstances beyond the student's control prevent the student from completing a test or assignments at the end of the term, then it is the student's responsibility to initiate the request for an "Incomplete" grade from the instructor. The instructor will determine whether the student has a reasonable chance of satisfactorily completing the remaining course activities in a timely manner. In requesting an "Incomplete" grade the student must present to the instructor the documentation of circumstances justifying an "Incomplete" grade. The instructor will complete and sign an "Incomplete Grade Contract” and will submit it to Student Services with final grades for the semester. Student Services will send a copy of the "Incomplete Grade Contract" to the student. Instructor must assign an Incomplete Grade on the regular grade roster in a timely fashion. Incomplete Grade Contract must include the following information: 1. Student Name (F, MI, L): 2. Student ID #: 3. Course Number and Section: 4. Reason for assigning a grade of incomplete (statement of extenuating circumstances): 5. Work to be completed for removal of incomplete grade (instructor should be very specific including the work to be done and how the final grade is to be calculated): 6. Evidence of completion of 75% of the semester course work: 7. Completion of a work plan that includes the following: · What, when and how assignments and tests will be submitted to complete the course, · The time period in which the work must be completed. 8. Instructor Signature and Date: 9. Student Signature and Date: Students are encouraged to let instructors know, as soon as possible, if they are having difficulties with any part of the course. In the event that a student and instructor cannot reach resolution concerning an Incomplete, then the student should contact the Instructional Officer of the college. Military personnel and emergency management officials who are required to go TDY in the middle of a term should contact their instructor for special consideration. Documentation of official TDY assignment is required and must be approved by the Chief Instructional Officer. Incomplete grades which are not converted to a letter grade by the instructor after one subsequent semester (not including summer semester) will revert to an F grade. If the student would have earned a letter grade higher than an F without completing the work, faculty may submit that higher grade before the automatic conversion to F. S- Satisfactory The satisfactory grade is equivalent to a grade of “C or better”. The course will count in attempted and earned credits, but will not carry quality points. U- Unsatisfactory The unsatisfactory grade is equivalent to a “D” or “F” grade. The course will count in attempted credits, but will not carry earned credits or quality points. S/A, S/B, S/C These are satisfactory grades awarded only for developmental courses. The A, B, and C indicate the level of satisfactory performance. These grades are not included in the GPA calculation. The course will count for attempted and earned credits. U/D, U/F These are unsatisfactory grades awarded only for developmental courses. The D and F indicate the level of unsatisfactory performance. These grades are not included in the GPA calculation. The course will count in attempted credits, but will not carry earned credits. W- Withdrawal The “Withdrawal” grade is assigned when a student officially withdraws from a course. A withdrawal can only be processed during the first 80 percent of the course. No academic credit is awarded. The course will count in attempted hours. AW- Administrative Withdrawal This “withdrawal” grade is assigned by the college when a student has been withdrawn administratively for administrative reasons. No academic credit is awarded. The course will count in attempted hours. Place Holders SP- Satisfactory Progress This symbol is limited to certain approved courses that extend beyond the end of a normal semester. No academic credit is awarded until the course is completed. Z- No Grade Submitted The symbol of “Z” is a temporary grade entered by the Registrar when a grade is not received from the course instructor. This “Z” grade is replaced and credit is awarded upon the Registrar’s receipt of the grade. CPL-Prior Learning Credit Within Banner there must be a symbol in the Grade column. A symbol of “CPL” indicates that the course and credits to which it is attached were awarded according to BP 9-42, Credit for Prior Learning. CNG – Conversion No Grade In the Legacy System, courses could exist on a transcript with no grade posted. These courses have been migrated to Banner with a symbol of “CNG”, defined as Converted No Grade. Repeat Field The Repeat Field on the transcript will be marked I – Include in hours and GPA calculation, A – Exclude from earned hours and GPA calculation, or A Exclude from earned hours but count in GPA calculation.

best,

Lisa

Dear Faculty:
Below is an analysis from Blackboard on our server capacity and upgrade. They will be adding two additional nodes to our configuration at no additional cost to our current contract. David will be sending more information on the next available upgrade opportunity when Blackboard determines the root cause of the upgrade failure. Thanks for your continuing patience.

Rhonda

Dear David Chatham:
The following note has been added to Case ID 422935 Case Summary:Upgrade Software {Note Created Date: 10/26/2006 11:29AMNote Summary:

David, The following report has come from the HostingTeam:---There are currently 108,230 accounts that are enrolled in at least onecourse across all institutions. The breakdown by institution is asfollows:
Arapahoe Community College 8218
CCCOnline 8697
Colorado NW Community College 1314
Community College of Aurora 5626
Community College of Denver 10327
Front Range Community College 40304
Lamar Community College 1029
Morgan Community College 1896
Northeastern Junior College 2302
Otero Junior College 1594
Pikes Peak Community College 11965
Red Rocks Community College 7325
Pueblo Community College 5860
Trinidad State Junior College 1773
-------Total 108230
Understanding that many courses with enrollments are not currently being taught, the data was reduced to only those accounts that have logged induring the past 30 days. This number is the best approximation to what Blackboard terms "active users". The total active users = 19,645.

Based on further investigation, usage by these users indicates a veryhigh level of activity (probably close to 10% concurrency) which placesthe current deployment at full capacity. As such, we recommend addingtwo additional application nodes to the cluster to alleviate congestionon the application tier and to provide a buffer if one node has to betaken out of commission for any reason.

Further details on the analysis are included at the end of this document in the Appendix. This will be provided to CCCS at no charge for the remainder of thecurrent contract due to the immediacy of the need. Blackboard is moving hardware into place immediately to perform this addition and needs to schedule a period of downtime with CCCS to complete the work. The investigation into why the product upgrade was taking an extended period of time is still under investigation with Product Development. We fully intend to schedule the upgrade with CCCS as data on the rootcause becomes available.

----Once the team has some windows to provide me with I will communicate those back to you.
Best regards, Larry DonnellTeam Lead / Client Support ASP Blackboard

Tuesday--Nothing New from WebCT Vista

Greetings All,

Just to let you know, Blackboard/WebCT is still investigating our recent issues. So at this end, it is business as usual.

If VISTA issues show up, please report them to your Vista Volunteers as you have been doing.

Thanks again,

Alice

Vista is up, but upgrade abandoned

Dear Faculty,
The upgrade to App Pack and Svc Pack 1 was not progressing as planned, so the Blackboard engineering team rolled-back to our existing version of Vista. Service was restored about 10:30 p.m. Saturday evening. Below is an explanation from David Chatham. More information will be available during Monday's Elluminate meeting. Many thanks again for your patience.
--Rhonda

Update: 11:11 p.m. Saturday, Oct 21
The roll-back version is in place. We have BB's attention if there are any issues tomorrow. I had a concluding talk with our technical support manager a few minutes ago. He pointed out that we fixed a couple of situations with the upload schedule and the over-sized section, which he believes has been a contributing factor. All said, we will get to see whether things work better or not. We don't have the bug fixes for now, so there is no way not to be disappointed in this weekend's activitiy.
On Monday, we start talks with support, hosting and development to see what our options are. We still may be able to add more nodes in the next few days, if that is warranted. We are due a hardware analysis. That could help performance. So, I ask you to test your courses when you can and let me know how your instructors are doing. Remember to use the information that Rhonda resent on Friday so that we can get both the replication of the error and the node information.
David

Vista Update 5 O'clock Saturday

Dear Faculty,
Thanks to each of you for your persistence.
Regards, Alice

Here is the most recent update from David Chatham:

The Upgrade Process has slowed and is not making reasonable progress. Within the last hour, a roll-back procedure was started also on another server, so that one way or another we can get students and faculty back into their courses by tomorrow morning. Probably, the roll-back will occur before that, but estimating so far has been off the mark.

Since both the planned update and the emergency roll-back will be proceeding at the same time, there is a small chance that the Update will still succeed, but if not, the roll-back will allow users to re-enter their courses. The roll-back will not have the benefits that we were looking to have with the update.

David

Update on Vista Upgrade

Dear Faculty - I am sorry for this inconvience and frustration.
12:10 PM: Update. The revised estimate is 8 - 10 hours. We expect another review at around 4 PM.
From David:
The update is progressing with out problems but it is just really slower then anticipated. Frank Vazquez will be monitoring the situation from 12 noon until about 3 pm today. He will send out updates during that time. I suspect that this has interrupted plans for many. Our scheduled testing will now not likely happen until this evening. You may want to communicate with your faculty, students, etc. We have a page up on the login site at BlackBoard.

Vista Upgrade taking longer than expected

From David Chatham:
As of 6:30 a.m. the estimate is that the Vista upgrade will take another four or five hours. The upgrade is progressing with few errors so far. When there is an error, the engineer has to stop the upgrade and fix the error then start it again. So far, he hasn't seen any errors, but they underestimated the time to process this size installation.
One other thing I need to mention. If the upgrade bombs and they get a fatal error, then they have to abandon the upgrade and restore to the original instance. This could take eight hours. Originally, I was given an estimate of 8 hours, including a potential roll-back if necessary. I am keeping my proverbial fingers crossed that we don't have that rare situation.
I plan to monitor this and will provide an update when I have one or when the process is done.
David

Vista down tonight

Hello Everyone-

The WebCT Vista server will be down this evening, Friday, October 20th, from 11:00 pm until 7:00 am, Saturday, October 21st, for maintenance.

Due to performance issues, a special maintenance window has been provided to the Vista hosting group to upgrade the software in order to fix many of the performance problems all users have experienced in the last week. This maintenance does not affect courses on the Campus Edition server. All faculty have been informed about this downtime.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

Students have been emailed a similar message, the website reflects this information, and a pop-up announcement regarding it shows up wen anyone logs into Vista.

best,
Lisa

November Featured Faculty: Dr. Peter Jeschofnig

Greetings All,

In the tradition of prior Faculty Features in the Teaching Tips Newsletters, I asked Peter if he would like to update his bio. Here it is :).



Dr. Peter Jeschofnig

I am a professor of science at Colorado Mountain College in Glenwood Springs, where I teach mainly chemistry and physics. Prior to starting my teaching career in 1988, I spent many years as an international exploration geologist in Africa and the Middle East. I have been teaching physics for CCCOnline since 2002, and during 2003-04 I taught my CCCOnline classes from Windhoek, Namibia while on sabbatical as a Fulbright professor at the University of Namibia.

As a strong believer in hands-on education, every summer I take students on rainforest ecology or marine biology field courses to Central or South America. In the past we have studied rainforest ecology in Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, and Honduras plus marine biology in Belize, Honduras, and the Galapagos Islands.

My degrees include a B.S. and M.A in geology/anthropology, an M.A. in science education and a Ph.D. from Colorado State University. In 1995, I was named CMC's professor of the year, and in 2000 TELECOOP's distance educator of the year. I spent my 1995/96 sabbatical as a Fulbright professor at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia.

My wife, Linda, was a CPA, and taught marketing and management courses as an adjunct professor at Colorado Mountain College for 17 years before recently retiring. She now runs a successful e-commerce business.

Vista Application pack 1

Since it looks like we are going to Application Pack 1 just a little ahead of schedule, here's a link so you can check out what you get out of it:

http://library.blackboard.com/docs/AS/Bb%20Learning%20System%20-%20Brochure%20-%20App%20Pack%201%20for%20Learning%20System.pdf

A couple of you had wanted the ability to manage "Who's Online" on an individual basis -- it's in here.

best,
Lisa

We have an update for you after our meeting with Vista Hosting, BB Support and others. In general, BB has been looking at our server performance and what may be contributing to the erratic issues and general slowness that we have seen recently. I will list them here and the actions for each. This is not in the order of importance, as it is hard to quantify how intensive something degrades performance but the order that BB addressed them:

1. One section in one college had 10's of thousands of enrollments in a general purpose student orientation course. When the students in this section would get particularly active, it was tying up the threads. Hosting was seeing page requests in this section logging 15 - 30 seconds and at an extreme 15 minutes. As more and more users were trying to access course tools, the software was getting further and further behind in processing these requests. They had to restart the node to get it cleared out. The normal range for section enrollment that Vista has seen work is up to 2000. This is not a hard and fast rule, but CCCOnline experienced some issues on Campus Edition in the past when we had 5,000 enrollments in our Student Orientation class. We had to do our orientation outside of WebCT and created web pages for that.

Solution -- This issue is currently being addressed by the college.

2. The scaling of our hardware to the user level needs to be reviewed. We do upload all users from Banner for the term for each college. Not all of these are active users and would affect the performance of our servers, but we really don't know whether our five node system is scaled for the level of users we actually have. We do know that we are increasing our users much more quickly than originally planned.

Solution -- Hosting will be doing some analysis in the next week to see whether there is a capacity issue. The analysis would be based on who has actually accessed a section in the last 30 days. If extra nodes are needed, these will be deployed by BB hosting immediately.

3. Erratic Vista performance, various tool and access issues for the last week.

Solution -- Application Pak 1, Software Pak 1 upgrade recommended for stability and bug fixes. This application pack came out this summer and Hosting recommended we wait until their was a bug fix for this, as they were aware of potential issues. The fix has now been incorporated into the Application Pac, which also upgrades several tools and such. The only known bug in this upgrade is the inability for faculty to upload a grade book or .CSV file into Vista. The application pak has been used for other large institutions both Vista hosted and large self-hosted configurations. Vista Hosting has scheduled many such deployments for the next several weeks. They have not seen any adverse affects and believe the risks are minimal. That said, we are making arrangements to check the application once it is deployed early Saturday morning. With an 8 hour window, we have time to fall back to our original setup, if need be. I will send out further details for those of you that would be willing to check your institution early Saturday morning for any issues.

4. Our enrollments and user files were running past a deadline we had set to not cross. We have not been able to monitor this because the imports have been emailed directly to the college vista administrator and not to us at CCCOnline. Because of the extensive missing users issues we had from Banner for most of September and into October, we were sending full enrollment imports at 10 AM and 11 PM each day, but we were trying to avoid mid-day through the evening when most users were in Vista.

Solution -- We have a new improved script starting in the next day and our imports to Vista beginning last night and today are only differentials or changes in enrollments, rather then full for each college, which cuts dramatically the processing time for Vista. This takes some of the load off of the server.

Finally, we want to be more proactive on maintenance. We would like to schedule a maintenance window for each weekend during which time BB hosting can check the servers and do a re-start. The re-start will help to clear out threads and clean things up each week. We will contact each of the colleges next week to talk about a time to do this each weekend. Vista (BB) Hosting has also indicated that they will help us clean up the various databases and eliminate the extraneous users that are currently included in those databases due to course migration from BlackBoard, WebCT and Vista4 Hosting services.

In summary -- we are working on a three pronged approach to the problems we have been having recently: changing a few business practices, adding hardware, applying software fixes. By Saturday morning we hope you will all see significant improvements.

David Chatham
CCCOnline

VistaVision Conference Evaluations

Thanks to so many of you who took the time to fill out the VistaVision 2006 Conference Evaluation (87 out of 137 Attendees).

Session Descriptions and Available Handouts can be found at
http://www.ccconline.org/FacultySC/Training/ccco_conf/2006/

Positive Remarks:
Facility
Many positive remarks about peer presentations
Like the opportunity to meet with colleagues for the day

To Improve Upon for Next Year:
Multiple Sessions for High Demand Topics
More Water
More Time for More Table Topics
More Space between Tables for Table Topics

Thanks Again!

Alice

Vista still slow...

We wanted to let you know that we have a conference call today at 1:00 with Blackboard hosting. We also wanted to let you know that we have escalated the problems we are having to executive levels of Blackboard, and the president of Bb North America (Peter Segall) has assigned a VP of Client Support to be our point of escalation. He will be on our call today as well. We will update you again after the call -- but basically wanted you to know that we have escalated our situation beyond the Bb ticketing system. David's team and the hosting team are working very hard to solve the problems we are having with Vista.

The proposed solution will require some system downtime currently scheduled for Friday night beginning at 11:00 through aound 7:00 Saturday morning. We will let you know as soon as those times are confirmed.

Lisa and Rhonda

Vista may be faster....

Hi All-

Blackboard has done a rolling reboot on our nodes (completed around 8:00 this morning) and that seems to be helping the slowness problem. If you are still experiencing extreme slowness let your Vista Volunteer know, but also try exiting and logging in again. You might end up on a different and much faster node.

I'll let you know as soon as I have additonal updates.

Good-luck!
Lisa

Vista is S...L...O...W

Access to Vista is very very very slow. We have a ticket in to Blackboard support and have escalated the ticket as high as possible. We hope BB will be able to solve the issues soon. More updates as soon as we have them....

Lisa

Time-out in Vista

Good Morning Everyone!

We currently have the time out setting in Vista set for 60 minutes. That is a very long time in terms of lab security. Consider the student working in a common lab setting -- s/he logs into his account, spends 5 or 10 minutes on classwork, then leaves without logging out. The next student sits down at the computer and discovers he can access the previous student's class. I'd like to believe there is no potential for trouble in that scenario, but have become more cynical than that.

On the other hand, we have you the instructor writing a discussion post. You get half-way finished, then are distracted by other urgent student emails. When you return you have been timed-out and your half-finished post is lost. If you haven't clicked you are timed-out, so spending a lot of time writing a post or setting up groups can cause lost work.

Given those two scenarios, what is the most appropriate amount of time before the system logs you out? I tend to think 60 minutes is too long and 15 minutes (recommended) is too short. Folks with strong opinions should comment on this blog post (so everyone else can read your opinions, as opposed to just me).

Thanks-
Lisa

Vista Technical Difficulties

Good Morning All!

We've been experiencing some Vista technical issues this week - you might be having problems with

• Not being able to open/close discussions.
• Not being able to post announcements.
• Not being able to upload/download attachments.
• Getting Remote Access errors.

We are aware of these issues and have sent in tickets to BlackBoard for technical help. Unfortunately these seem to be intermittant problems and sometimes there is a "window of opportunity" to open/close discussions etc. If you continue to try you may find the problem goes away when you least expect it.

Please let your Vista Volunteer know if you have experienced any of these isssues, particularly if you are able to replicate the problem.

Also.........Microsoft issued an Internet Explorer update the other day. Information from David:

IE 7.0 is an unsupported browser. That means it'll probably work with most stuff but may have issues with others. They'll get the browser check message telling them so. Also, it is not supported in Banner.

best,
Lisa

What to do When Your Student Might be Dangerous

Hello Everyone-

The recent incident at Platte Valley High School and the incident in the Amish school have highlighted the need to react appropriately and quickly to potentially dangerous problems. On occasion we at CCCOnline have had students make inappropriate posts that involve physically threatening other students or their faculty. Please let Alice Bedard-Voorhees, myself, or Rhonda Epper know of any of these threats as soon as they occur. In most cases they can be dealt with by having one of us call the student, but we have asked campus security and local police to contact the student when that was necessary.

We do have the added security of physical distance between ourselves and our students, but frequently our students are also students on a campus. We would prefer not to create unnecessary difficulties for our students, but it is best to err on the side of caution.

Thank you,
Lisa

Online Docs and Spreadsheets

Google has set up a way for anyone to create documents and spreadsheets online. This may be very useful to any of you who have students without access to spreadsheet or word processing software. From the website:

If you've ever struggled to keep track of different versions of spreadsheet or word processor files sent over email, Google Docs & Spreadsheets may be right for you. Google Docs & Spreadsheets is a web-based word processing and spreadsheet program that keeps documents current and lets the people you choose update files from their own computers. You can, for example, coordinate your student group's homework assignments, access your family to-do list from work or home, or collaborate with remote colleagues on a new business plan.

The URL is http://docs.google.com/

this should help a LOT of folks out there :)

Lisa

CCCOnline Website down Sunday

Hi Everyone-

The www.CCCOnline.org website was down from 7:00 Sunday morning through 9:00 that evening. Anyone going directly to the classes through those server URL's didn't notice that and was able to get into classes. Students who access the classes through the main website were not able to get to classes. It looks like students in Vista are tending to access through the Vista server URL (Online.CCCOnline.org), so most of them were in classes on Sunday. CE students on the other hand, seem to access classes primarily through our main website.

Going forward we will make more of an effort to let all students know the "backdoor" url.

FWIW, the reason it took so long to get it fixed is because the notification software we use was pointing to the older version of the main website instead of to the version we are transitioning to. We have now transitioned the notification software. :^(

best,
Lisa

Monterey Institute for Technology -- Digital Content

CCCOnline has joined the National Repository of Online Courses (NROC), a project of the Monterey Institute for Technology in Education (www.montereyinstitute.org). NROC is a growing library of high-quality online course materials for students and faculty in higher education. This project, supported by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, facilitates collaboration among a community of content developers to reach students and teachers worldwide. What does this mean for CCCOnline faculty? There is a wide range of learning materials in a variety of subjects available for integration into your courses. For an overview of this material, see www.hippocampus.org. Stay tuned to the faculty blog for further information on how to access the faculty resources through NROC.

There will also be opportunities for CCCOnline faculty to participate in collaborative course development through the NROC "Social Authoring" initiative. Courses in the NROC library are contributed by developers from leading online-learning programs across the country, including CCCOnline. All courses are assessed to ensure they meet high standards of scholarship, instructional value, and presentational impact. NROC works with developers and contributes resources to improve course quality and to provide ongoing maintenance.

Rhonda M. Epper

Co-Executive Director, Learning Technology

Colorado Community College System

Turnitin and Plagiarism

Hi All-

There was an interesting article and set of comments on plagiarism and services such as Turnitin in Andy Carvin's blog last week - http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/learning.now/
2006/09/the_ethics_of_plagiarism_detec.html.

At CCCOnline our tack so far has been to focus on teaching learners about plagiarism and designing assignments to limit plagiarism (Alice and Phyllis have designed a great workshop and toolkit), but other system colleges have also licensed the services of companies such as Turnitin.

Lisa

Students with Technical Difficulties

Hi Everyone-

Please ask students who are having technical difficulties to either submit a help request via the support form or via the 800 number.

The URL for the support form is http://www.ccconline.org/support/form/

The phone number for support is 1-800-801-5040.

There is a link from the home page of the CCCOnline website to the student support center. The support center has a lot of good information for students with technical difficulties or other types of difficulties and misunderstandings. If they go check there first they may save themselves a lot of time and effort.

Thanks-
Lisa

Our numbers are UP!

The numbers are in for today -- Session 2 credit hours are up 31.7% over last year's first day of classes. Enrollment is up 28.7 over last year!

From John:

Here are the numbers for the first day of session 2. We are at 4,340 enrollments for session 2 with 14,260 credit hours. Last year we had 3,372 enrollments on the first day of session 2 for 10,824 credit hours.

Thanks Everyone! If you can hold onto these students we will end the semester up just a little over last year for both sessions.

Flickr Show -- Gold Medal Faculty

Check out the pictures of all of our wonderful Gold Medal Faculty!!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ccconline/
sets/72157594304475308/show/

Lisa

CE - Too Many Students in C21 Sections

To those teaching a C21 section in WebCT Campus Edition:

The sectionizer didn't do exactly what is was supposed to do before the student load for fall 2 and all students showed up in the C21 sections. That's okay if there is no C22, C23, etc. section, but if you are teaching the C21 section of a fall 2 course that typically runs 8 or 9 sections it can be a little startling to see 100 plus students in your section. Try to ignore that for the rest of today. David and team are on the case and will have it straightened out very shortly.

It's probably best to not send out a welcome email to students' external email addresses until late tonight or tomorrow am.

Lisa

Dr. Bedard-Voorhees

I am very pleased to announce that our Associate Academic Dean, Alice Bedard-Voorhees, successfully defended her disertation yesterday afternoon! We can all now refer to her as Dr. Alice Bedard-Voorhees.

Her topic was "Prepardness, Performance, and Persistence in Online College Algebra Courses".

Congratualtions Alice!

Lisa

New Blog for Students

I have gotten a lot of positive feedback regarding this blog for you folks, so based on that we decided to begin a blog for students also. You can see that blog at CCCOnlineStudentNews.blogspot.com. Feel free to email me with items you think belong on that blog (Lisa.Cheney-Steen@cccs.edu).

Thanks!
Lisa

Latency Issues

CE Issue:

We have had some network latency issues the past 4 nights beginning at 10:50 and lasting for around 2 hours. Some students and faculty will have had no trouble accessing their courses, but some will have had difficulties. Response time may have also been slow.

CCCS-IT staff are working on this problem and expect to have it resolves soon.

The Vista server lives back east instead of here with us at Lowry, so is not affected by our local network issues. :^)

Lisa

2006 Gold Medal Faculty

Every year each program chair nominates a small number of the instructors with whom they work for the Gold Medal Faculty award. Gold Medal Faculty must have achieved matrix 2 status for the previous year and must be a stand-out intructor beyond that.

Biographies and piuctures were posted in the eating area for the conference. We also expect to have them up on the CCCOnine website shortly.

This year's awardees are:

Accounting: Betty McKie

Languages and Literature: Richard Thomas, Jennifer Ray, Sean Law, Ed Raetz

Arts and Humanities: Chris Levesque, Janke Camp, Cherry Ellis, Donna Wickham

Social and Behavioral Sciences: Derek Lopez and Kathy Rousset

Mathematics: (The Digital Content Team) Cheryll Wingard, Louis Sass, Dean Barchers, Erica Johnson, Heidi Barrett, Jon Sherrill, James Gray

Business: Sharon Taylor, Wendy Lewis

Criminal Justice: Diane VanOs

Computer Technology: Phyllis Dobson, Kevin Stever

Sciences: Dan Branan, Trina Riegael, Jessy Devasia, Jess Huguley, Dave Trott

Early Childhood/Education: Jan Ferrari

Nursing: Stephanie Beplay, Kathy Kohler

Congratulations Everyone!

Lisa

Students and Section Switching

We've had a sudden rash of students who want to switch sections. Reasons have ranged from "My best friend is in so and so's section and I want to be with her" to "My instructor hates me". I have to tell you, my answer to those students is almost always no. There are several reasons for my position.

The first is pedagogical - at this time in the term you've already done a lot of community building work with your students, so subtracting one from one section and adding one to another section can create problems for the classes, particularly if the new section uses any group work. Students with friends in a different section can also have all the benefits of discussing the course material with those friends, but with different assignments for grading purposes.

Then there is the practical side - students who switch sections either lose the work they have completed in the first section or require extra work on the part of both instructors to pass those grades over along with the student. It also creates work for John, Roxanne, and David, none of whom need more to do.

And lastly, the financial side - COF has made it difficult and frequently impossible for us to move students around after census day without causing the student to lose their COF funds for the section they moved from. (COF is the $80 or so the student receives from the state of Colorado to supplement standard tuition. It replaces the old FTE reimbursement system. Students have a limited number of COF dollars attached to their names.)

So...... unless the faculty and the student are at odds in such a way that causes me to believe that the learning environment for the student has been irretrievably ruined I tend to say no to section switching requests.

best,
Lisa

Faculty Conference Wrap-Up

We had a fabulous faculty conference this year! There were just over 140 attendees. Alice had organized several really good workshops, the program chairs held discipline meetings at lunch, then we wrapped up with round table discussions and a last set of workshops. It sounded like everyone was happy to get a chance to meet with thier peers in a face-to-face setting.

I will have link to presentation handouts available later this week.

On a completely different note: Fall 1 bonus contracts (for those of you with more than 20 students in your section) will begin seeing the extra amount from payroll on the October 27th check. Fall 2 payroll will also begin on October 27th.

Happy Autumn!
Lisa

Rainy Morning

Hi Everyone-

Alice Bedard-Voorhees, our Associate Academic Dean, says we have over 130 participants registered for the faculty conference tomorrow. I am really looking forward to seeing everyone! We have many wonderful workshops planned plus the chance to have lunch with your colleagues. If you are still wondering how to get there, you will find maps on ACC's website at www.arapahoe.edu.

Stephen Downes' OLDaily had a link to a directory of open access journals today that you may find useful. It's available at http://www.doaj.org/articles/about. There seems to be more than one online journal for almost every discipline now, probably including yours.

********

Vista Gradebook Note: If you use partial points in your grading be aware that Vista will round those to the nearest whole number for display purposes unless you set the gradebook to show decimals. So a 3.5 will look like a 4 to your students unless you set the column to show the places after the decimal. This can cause your students to believe they have earned a higher grade than you think they have earned. We have a couple of cases where rounding did change the final grade, so be careful you are clear with your students.

********

See you tomorrow,
Lisa

F2F Conf: Check-In and Breakfast

Are you getting ready? Registration check-in and breakfast take place at the lower level of ACC's main building. The room is M1900,Main Dining.

Packet pick-up begins at 8 am and a continental breakfast, juice and coffee will be available. You can also have a digital picture taken at that time :). The opening session begins in the same room at 9 am.

Building Map (And there will be one in your packet):
Building Map

Looking forward to a great day.

If you haven't see the schedule, the post appears below, as does the parking info. (No Passes Required -- Use regular faculty and student lots.)

Best,

Alice

VistaVistion Conference Parking

We look forward to seeing you at the Arapahoe (host) campus on Friday.

No parking passes are necessary. You can park in any of the public lots like A,B,C on this map:

ACC Map

Cheers,

Alice

Course dupe information David sent to your chair

Hi Everyone-

Below is the text of the email David Chatham, Dean of Academic Technology, sent to your chairs regarding the course duping process for fall 2. Note th number of times he tries to make sure faculty have been contacted before we dupe to make sure we get the correct section. :^)

Hi there,

I hope you survived the beginning of Fall. Fall 2 is around the corner, so I wanted to provide you with a little more direction on the dupe process that can begin on Friday. When you go to create a dupe request, you will immediately face the decision of whether to request a Vista dupe or a CE dupe, just like you did for Fall 1.

[I suggest you pre-organize what is on Vista and what is on CE before you get to this stage. Of course, discussing this with your faculty first is also helpful. Sometimes changes have to be made, but I noticed this time as in times past that things that have to be changed after they are duped are more likely to be really screwed up. The process maps the courses and instructors to the students that get loaded, and our problem areas this semester were those few courses that for whatever reason, had to be re-done. Like I said, sometimes when an instructor quits in the eleventh hour there isn't anything you can do.]

On the CE side, it is the same process. Select the courses, sections, instructor, assign and submit to the WebCT administrator. Use the comment field to communicate to me something special or the dupe source, if not seen in the selection boxes.

On the Vista side, you will not be able to select the dupe source, but I intend for you to tell me in the new comment box, what to use. All courses in Vista for Fall 2 already have one running in Fall 1. I need the Course - Section - Instructor to find the right one. All that information is readily seen on your Chair login for Vista: adXX07F.

Designers will see your requests and if they have questions about it, they will let me know or perhaps contact you. If you have faculty that will be doing multiple sections but not necessarily in order, your request might represent this type of pattern for a Vista request:

BIO201C21 Aarthi Ramesh - [Comment: dupe from BIO201C12 07F]
BIO201 C22 Jessy Devasia - [Comment: dupe from BIO201C11 07F]
BIO201 C23 Jessy Devasia - [dupe from C22 when it is ready]
BIO201 C24 Aarthi Ramesh - [dupe from C21 when it is ready]

So, if we allow the instructor some time to setup his course, then once you have confirmed the section is ready, I can dupe the others and save faculty that setup time.

Also, your request maybe for the template. If the faculty are using a common template and there are no significant changes from the current Fall 1 section, you can request the common template for that courses. Be sure to discuss with faculty first.

Thanks,

David

Lisa

Pay Dates

Hi Everyone-

The first pay date for the fall term was Friday, 9/15. Paydates will be every other week thereafter. Remember that bonus contracts for faculty with classes with more than 20 students are calculated based on enrollment on census day (last Thursday).

Email Randy Macy (Randy.Macy@cccs.edu) with questions.

Best,
Lisa

Statistics

Here are some numbers from Randy Macy, Faculty Coordinator:

I thought you might find some of the following statistics interesting:

Spring 2006 we offered 362 sections session one with a total of 7184 students - average of 20 per section.

Fall 2007 we offered 333 sections (down almost 10%) session one with a total of 6017 students - average of 18 per section.

Spring 2006 we had 169 (47%) of the sections paying bonus contracts at an average of $371.33 per contract.

Fall 2007 we have 100 (30% - down 17%) of the sections paying bonus contracts at an average of $247.50 per contract (down $123.83).

We have four classes whose enrollment dropped by half fall semester compared to Summer and Spring Semesters:

GER 112 - 5

HIS 102 - 9

MUS 100 - 8

SPA 212 - 7

RDM

Lisa

Deadline to Drop is Midnight Tonight

Students have until midnight tonight to drop their course and receive a tuition refund.

Lisa

Vista Faculty - Dropped Discussion Posts

Hi Everyone-

Several of you have mentioned a problem with dropped or missing discussion posts. Frequently the best way to find these is to set your pagination so you see more thna 10 posts at a time. For directions on how to do this see http://www.ccconline.org/support/vista/PageDisplay/PageDisplay.htm.

If that doesn't solve your problem please contact your Vista Volunteer.

Good-Luck!
Lisa

Reminder to Drop email sent to students

The following final reminder about the last day to drop with a refund was sent to all session 1 students today.

Thanks!

John


This note is a final reminder that tomorrow, Wednesday, September 13, 2006, is the last day to drop your CCCOnline delivered Fall session 1 course(s) with a refund.

If you do not plan to drop your course(s) or have already dropped your course(s) please disregard this reminder.

Session 1 courses are those courses with a section ID starting C1 or C3 (example, ENG 121 C11 or PSY 101C31)

**Contacting your instructor(s) will NOT result in your being dropped or withdrawn from your course(s)**

To "DROP" your course(s):

go to http://ccconline.org/start/college_table.htm or your home college web site
click on the “Self-Service Banner” link for your home college
Select “Login” and enter your Student ID and 6-digit student PIN
click “Enter”
Select the “Student Menu” and then the “Registration Menu”
select “Add or Drop Courses” and follow the steps to get to your “Current Schedule” of courses
on your “Current Schedule”, use the Drop Down box under “Action” and select “Drop Web”
Click “Submit Changes” at the bottom of the page
check your “Current Schedule” to make sure the course(s) has been dropped

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us or your home college.

Thank you for your time and we hope you continue to have a great and successful semester!

CCCOnline
Student Services
1.800.801.5040

http://ccconline.org/support/

Rosters in Banner (or not)

Hi Everyone-

We have received requests for rosters from several of you. Unofrtunately the best we can do at this time are the rosters that are currently loaded into your CE and Vista gradebooks. The CE version is best since that version includes the student email addresses. (Vista faculty should have access to a CE shell with the email addresses. You also should have received an email from David Chatham with your student's email addresses.)

I know some of you also want student phone numbers. Your best option is to ask students to send you those directly.

In the old student information system CCCOnline had it's own area; that is not true of Banner. In Banner we are spread out over all of the colleges. That means to get a roster you would have to log in and out of each section at each college. This semester you can't even do that as we didn't have the code written to officially assign you to your section at each college.

Going forward we are noting these problems and discussing how to best correct them. Meanwhile, everyone has less information than we are used to having. Sorry -- we will get better with time. We did have a meeting with the new CIO for the system. He is aware of our needs and is working on solutions with us.

Thanks for your patience!

Lisa

VistaVision Conference Descriptions and Registration

VistaVision and Beyond CCCOnline 2006 Conference
Friday September 22 Arapahoe Community College
To Register: http://www.ccconline.org/FacultySC/Training/ccco_conf/2006/

Opening Session:9 - 10:00
VistaVision and Beyond will open with a welcome and introduction of this year’s Gold Medal Faculty. Next, you’ll have the chance to hear from the CCCOnline Team, the people who assist with CCCOnline matters beyond your course content.
Panelists are John Schmahl, Director of Student Services, Roxanne Manske, Registrar, Judy Patrick, Advising, and Deb Michel, Student Support Desk, and Instructional Coordinator, Randy Macy.

Session I: 10:15 - 11:00

• Smarthinking Presents: Writing Services to CCCOnline. CCCOnline contracts with Smarthinking for tutoring services in a number of area. This session specifically provides information about writing services available to CCCOnline learners in your courses. Presenter: Jim Sigman

• Across the Board Faculty Panel: Come hear how Vista is serving tech-supported, hybrid, and fully online classes.
Presenters: Lee Christopher, Robbie McGurran, Mary Sloan, Dave Trott, Dr. Gloria Griswold, and Dr. Kathy Winograd.

• Video Voodoo: An Odyssey in the Production of AV Content. Technology has enabled even the neophyte an opportunity to produce educational content for students. In this presentation, we follow the odyssey of one such person through the world of videography. Questions to be explored will concern the learning experience for the educator, writing script and content, planning the “shoot”, talent release forms, video and editing equipment, software, editing talents required and production. A recent video project will be used to illustrate the points about what is required to successfully produce a teaching or training video.
Presenter: Marge Vorndam

• Sandbox Lab: Come play with various applications for your courses. (with guides Beth Kitts and Phyllis Dobson)

• Learning Connections in Vista: Making the Most of Your Vista Tools (Vista Lab). Find out about Vista features that support increased usability for you and learners in your courses.
Presenters: Cheryl Comstock, Mary Cash, and Aaron Leonard.

Session II: 11:15 – Noon

• Keeping Them Coming Back for More: Discussion as a Retention Practice. Learners may think that discussion is an activity they just have to do for the grade, but discussion plays a part in connecting the learner to community and content, from course beginning to end.
Presenter: Diana Hart

• Creating Learning Objects for Your Courses: What’ All the Buzz About? What prompts instructors to decide that digital interactivities would increase engagement and learning? Two faculty present what prompted them to create Learning Objects/interactivies for Courses. Flash Designer Beth Kitts talks about her part in melding the ideas with the technology.
Presenters: Cherry Ellis, Becky Mangin, and Beth Kitts (Lab Session)

• No More Textbooks? Visiting the Digital Content Courses. CCCOnline has three courses (History 101, MAT 121, and BUS 216) which contain all materials within their virtual walls. (Some can be printed). Come look at and hear about these innovations and what this means for learners.(Lab Session)
Presenters: Rhonda Epper and Karen Kaemmerling (Lab Session)

• Giving and Getting: Building, Sharing, and Using Content within the Higher Education Community. CCCOnline has a membership with a consortium that can provide content for use in our courses. Find out what the possibilities are for CCCOnline courses.
Presenter: Terri Rowenhorst, Monterey Institute for Technology and Education

• Showing the Way: How to use Vista “descriptions” to provide an instructional chain for assignments, discussion and more. Use Vista tools to create a path through the course content, so learners can more clearly understand what they are supposed to do, and more
easily focus on the learning activities.
Presenter: Kathy Miles

Discipline/Program Meetings:Noon - 2:00 (Rooms listed in Conference Schedule)
Labs are open from 12:30 – 2:00 for those not in scheduled program meetings.)

Round Tables Discussions: 2:15 – 3:00The Round Table discussions provide an opportunity to sample short topics with a facilitator and peers. Each session will last 20 minutes and then you’ll be able to move to another table and another topic. ((Main Dining Room, M 1900)

Topics include
• Meet the Vista Volunteers (Your change to get an autograph or even a photograph!)
• Course Mapping (Phyllis Dobson)
• Now about the QA….
• Where Does it Hurt? (Visit with Dr. V’s PA’s)
• Looking Into the Future: Vista’s Application Pack (LisaMarie Johnson)
• Bringing Guest Experts to Your Classes (Alice Bedard-Voorhees)

Session III: 3:15 - 4:00

• Connecting Discussions to the to the Grade book in Vista: A Love-Hate Story Vista now offers a way to link discussions to the grade book for more efficient grading of discussions. Experienced presenters explain how it’s done. (Vista Lab Location)
Presenters: Aarthi Ramish and Jose Garcia-Paine

• What in the Virtual World: Learning Experiences in Virtual Environments (Introducing Second-Life and Others) Virtual simulation environments offer new “classroom” settings and learning at a different level. See them and learn about which features and considerations are pertinent to educators. (Sandbox Lab Location)
Presenter: Rick Hadley

• Lively Math Discussions: A Brainstorming Session
Looking for livelier discussions in math courses? Come brainstorm topics and strategies with three experienced online math faculty!
Facilitators: Mary Sloan, Ann Piletic, Louis Sass

• Sandbox Lab: Last chance of the day to play in the sandbox

Enrollment

Hi Everyone-

Today credit hours are up just over 11% over census day last year. Of course we aren't to census day yet, so we have some drops to go. I am still hoping for a flat fall 1 though. We are starting to see some growth in the fall 2 enrollment, so I hope you are saving some time and energy for those classes.

Most of the student access problems have been solved. We had a whopping 9 new support forms sent in on Monday; the majority of those were students with session 2 classes or classes with other colleges. Only 2 were still access issues. You should see all of your students this week. :^) If you haven't please email them at their external email address and remind them to come to class. (Vista faculty -- those email addresses reside in the manage students section of the CE shell mirroring your Vista shell.)

Judy Patrick has emailed all students again reminding them to login.

The Tech Team has figured out a work around for the access issues some Vista faculty were having, so I don't believe you will see that again.

We'd love to see all of you at this fall's faculty conference -- September 22nd at ACC. You can register now (link was a couple of posts ago). We're trying to get a headcount for food so we don't under-order. (We did that one year. 60 of you registered, but 80 came. Some of us didn't get to eat, that tends to make people crabby.) Dean Alice has a great list of workshops plus we have time scheduled for discipline meetings so you can talk with your fellow faculty.

Hope to see you there!

Lisa

Vista Faculty Only - Access Denied

Hi Vista Faculty-

We are seeing some access denied to classes (not to Vista itself) for some faculty. This is strictly a faculty problem, no students, and so far is random enough that we haven't been able to pin down the cause. At this point we think it has to be in a program we are running that is supposed to be doing something else.

Right now everyone should have access to all of your classes, but I was the one returning access this evening, so I may have missed a few of you. Sorry! I expect some instructor access to go away again with the morning load process, so I will check everyone again tomorrow morning.

With any luck the Technology Team will locate and solve the problem before the afternoon load. :^)

best,
Lisa

Happy Labor Day

Hi Everyone-

Hope you aren't reading today's post until tomorrow. :^) We made it through Saturday and Sunday without any more wide-spread login problems, so the change to the Vista login page appears to have solved that.

Students services and academic technology personnel worked through the weekend to catch-up with last's week's deluge and only a very few new calls and support form requests have come in from students. We still have students who don't know what their S# and password is, but they are getting into class as soon as they hear back from student services. The more technical problems have pretty much gone away.

Vista Faculty:

It just dawned on me that we solved the external email address piece for faculty teaching in Vista a long time ago... we've been working madly on sending a list to you via email because we weren't able to list them in the Vista gradebook. They are listed in the CE gradebook though and all of the students are enrolled in a CE version of your class also. So you have access to all of the external email addresses there. yeesh. Took a long time for the penny to drop. We will continue to work on sending you a list of email addresses though. :^)

All Faculty:

Now about those external email addresses... technically students are required to give the colleges a correct email address when they register. Practically, registration was so very challenging this semester that many colleges did not insist. Thus, we are missing many external email addresses for students. The only way to solve this problem is to assign email address to students, which the community college system will go once we go to a portal system. Of course, we will then have a new problem -- getting students to use that email address. In the end, we communicate with those who make it possible.

It was a challenging beginning to the semester, but I hope we can all focus on learning outcomes from here on out.

Happy Labor Day!

Lisa

CCCOnline F2F Conf Info

We hope to see you at the F2F Conference on September 22nd!
This year's theme is VistaVision and Beyond.

Here's the link to conference registration:

http://www.ccconline.org/FacultySC/Training/ccco_conf/2006/

Best,

Alice

Alice Bedard-Voorhees
Associate Academic Dean

End of Day 3, Beginning of Day 4

It was a tough night for the night owls. Sometime after 8:30 or so it became pretty difficult, if not impossible to get in to Vista. David and the WebCT support team were able to correct that, but it took until this morning (about 10 minutes ago). You all should be able to get in to Vista again, so give it a try and let David know if you can't. Probably you will still need to clear cookies, your cache, etc.

Fortunately this was only a problem at CCCOnline. We turned off SSL to try to speed things up and that caused Vista to not play well with our entry page. None of the other colleges had that problem.

CE students only have problems if for some reason they are not in the CE databse. We still are missing around 100 students, but are adding them as fast as we find them. I added almost 20 from and ENG 121 class yesterday afternoon. There may still be large blocks like that out there, but we don't think so.

So... be patient with your students. Most of them should be able to login by the end of today.

Thanks-
Lisa