Student Registration For Spring

Hi Everyone-

Registration for the spring semester has begun and I'd like to ask all of you to encourage your students to register early and register often. This semester it has been particularly easy to concentrate on the challenges we've all had to manage around the various technologies, both Banner and Vista and forget that we are still doing well what we always do well -- helping students meet the learning outcomes for all of their courses and p[repare for their future.

Today after Ateam I sat down and looked at a summary of the semester to help myself put problems into perspective.

• We began a day late to ensure a more complete student load.
• The first week had the same problems as usual -- lost UserID's and PIN's -- but twice as many as usual because everyone had a new ID and PIN. It took a week to respond to all student calls as opposed to the usual 2 to 3 days.
• Stuck threads began causing slowdowns mid-October, shortly after the start of fall 2. Slowdowns were intermittant.
  
• Vista was down Oct. 22 for the failed attempt to install App Pack 1 and Service pack 1.
• BB added 2 nodes to our installation on Nov. 3 to solve the stuck thread problem.
• Vista was very slow Nov. 13-15 due to runaway query. Active monitoring has "solved" this problem.
• Vista down Thanksgiving am 12:00-4:00 and the 28th 2:00 to 4:00 am for installs.

While I'd like to be able to say the semester has been trouble free, there has been time for students to complete their coursework. And it's been much less troublesome than the semester we spent with that other hosting company..... remember the fall of 2002? :^)

You the faculty, the design team, and the training and support group have done a wonderful job of moving courses, learning the new software, and making sure the students are able to meet the learning outcomes. I don't think we can give Vista the "A" grade I'd give all of you, but certainly not an "F" either.

At this point in the semester it's important to help our students end on a positive note (most of them anyway) and to encourage them to register for the spring semester, not just for cynical financial reasons, but because you really do do a better job teaching than most other programs. And at a lower overall cost to boot!

I'd like to pass on the note Donna Welschmeyer sent to the accounting faculty, because I thought she said it all better than I can:

Hi everyone. At A-Team this morning, we had a brief discussion about Vista and a tendency for Vista-bashing. While we continue to work through some issues with both the Vista software and the hardware serving it, overall the move to Vista has worked well. Approximately 80 percent of the problems we had early on were related to the same issue we always have: students didn’t know their login information (obviously not related to Vista).

We were reminded this morning that even though we may get frustrated with the system from time to time, it IS, after all, technology. We need to be sure we have backup plans in place for technology that may fail or be slow, just as we always had backup plans for those days in the face-to-face classroom when the VCR didn’t work. Most important, we should be very careful how we discuss the “problem” areas of Vista with students. We had email from a student today (not an accounting student, thankfully), served up as a “petition” and saying that she, her fellow classmates, AND HER INSTRUCTOR all hated Vista and thought that we should not use it at all.

I cringed at the thought that we might have instructors out there who are taking part in Vista-bashing conversations with students instead of providing a positive, supportive, and encouraging environment for students.

I share this with you NOT because I have concerns about how any of you are handling Vista oddities, but more as a thank-you for what I’ve always seen as competent, professional delivery of your courses and interactions with your students. The old saying “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” is so true, and I’m forever grateful that you all are SO easy to work with!

Thanks! Hope the remainder of your semester goes smoothly. In the next few days you will be seeing information about a NEW process for submitting grades, so just be aware that the process will change and we won’t be using Web4Faculty for grade submission.

Donna

Thanks Everyone!

Lisa

And a Note from John Schmahl, Director of Student Services

We hope the process for student ordering of textbooks using their financial aid that John describes below will be easier for everyone, even the students. :^)

As some of you may have heard, Linda Freund will be retiring at the end of November. We will miss her very much here at CCCOnline and wish her the very best in the future (and, of course, she is always welcome to come back anytime J).

With her retirement, we will be changing the way we process financial aid orders slightly. Where students in previous semesters used the Voucher, students wishing to use FA to purchase materials for their CCCOnline delivered courses for Spring will need to contact MBS directly at 1-800-325-3252 and identify themselves as taking a CCCOnline delivered course. MBS will take the order and place a “Hold” on it. Then, MBS will e-mail CCCOnline for confirmation of the student’s FA award (John, Roxanne and Randy will be receiving these e-mails and tracking them). CCCOnline will forward the request to the student’s home college who will verify the student’s FA award. Once verification is received, CCCOnline will contact MBS and they will contact the student and ship the materials.

Student’s who have questions about pending orders, or who need to make changes to their orders can simply contact MBS through the 800#. We hope this new process will improve the accuracy of orders by allowing student’s to contact the bookstore directly (taking CCCOnline out of that part of the loop should remove one step from the old process) but still ensure that only students with verified FA awards receive materials.

We will be advertising the 800# on our web site this Thursday, November 30. If you have any questions or concerns about this process, please feel free to contact me.

Thanks for your support!

John H Schmahl

CCCOnline

Student Service

s

Vista Downtime -- Note from David

Hi Everyone-

Here's a note from David Chatham, Dean of Academic Technology:

Blackboard has confirmed that the functional index is causing the Instructor comment field to display incorrectly for students. The data is not lost and, as many have pointed out, if the student enters the assignment they can see the correct instructor comments. Blackboard would like to remove the functional index patch tonight to restore the proper functionality of the student view on Instructor comments. I believe that is the prudent thing to do at this time. It would avoid further confusion for students and instructors viewing the comments. BB plans to continue working on this on the QA server for us. Once it is resolved, we can look at re-applying it late at night.

I have heard some concern about whether this would adversely affect the performance of the server to undo this functional index. At this time, I don't believe we can demonstrate that this change gave us a performance boost. It's purpose was to control SQL queries that were eating up processor resources. This can also be managed by constant monitoring by Vista hosting. The run away away SQL hasn't been "acting up" since November 15. Performance is also affected by the number of users on the system at one time, and I am not sure the level of activity has completely returned today from what is was prior to last week.

I will put up a notice for all users that the server will have maintenance tonight from 2 AM to 4 AM MT (Tuesday)

David Chatham

Lisa

Late Work Update

Hi everyone-

I just filled up your email boxes, for which I humbly appologize. I thought I turned off the email forward from this blog, but obviously did not.

I've gotten so many good comments re the Late work policies posts that I finally decided to just post them in the comment section to the original post, so please go take a look at them there.

Al Turner is running an experiment for us -- Al was my textbook faculty for strict no late work rules (and yet I never had a student complain - so if you want to go the very strict route please talk to Al about how to handle that so students still think you are the kindest instructor they ever had.) This semester he is going to waive that policy and try the other end of the spectrum -- recommended due dates, but nothing firm until the week before the term ends. (And no, I didn't even suggest this. :^)) Al, we expect to hear from you next spring.

From a pedagogical perspective I think the half-back option provided by Bill Kiele is awesome. Anything that talks students into reviewing and reviewing again will be good for learning and retention. A long time ago I used to let students correct exams and re-write essays for extra credit -- at some point I stopped, now I think I will have to revive that pracitice.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Lisa

Maintenance Window for Vista Thanksgiving morning

Blackboard is planning on installing a patch that may help the rogue querie problem Thanksgiving morning from midnight to 4:00 am. THey will need to bring the system down during that time. I truly hope there aren't many of you who were hoping to be online at that time. :^)

I am hearing from quite a few of you regarding late work policies. Karen commented that she doesn;t ask learners to give a reason for late work when it is less than a week. After that she imposes a penalty. Kevin extends deadlines during holidays as a part of active and empathetic course management. He also leaves the dropbox open for an extra 2 days automatically -- although he doesn't advertise that fact.

This semester of course most of you teaching in Vista are being very relaxed about deadlines.

Thanks for the feedback!

Lisa

Late work policies

I'm getting a little tired of typing away about Vista, so how about something more interesting - late work policies. :^)

I began thinking about late work policies while reading the syllabi my high school daughter brought home this fall, many of which included policies which were simply unworkable. Shortly after that I read a post on Liz Kleinfield's revision-spiral blog discussing Liz's thoughts regarding her late work policy http://revisionspiral.blog-city.com/rethinking_my_late_work_policy.htm

We have late work policies that run the entire gamut from "No late work ever" to "whenever you want to get it in as long as the semester hasn't been over for more than 3 months." My own person late work policy tended towards a fairly relaxed "I do accept late work, however you need to let me know when you will be able to get the work in. I do not accept work which has missed a deadline that you set. If the deadline you set falls in a busy period for me grading may be substantially delayed." I felt like learners who set their own deadlines (preferrably while feeling guilty for missing a deadline) were more careful to meet the next deadline and less likely to ask to have it moved a second time.

I tend to feel that we have adult learners in most of our classes who do have very busy and complex lives. Flexibility on our part tends to make the semesters run more smoothly and help keep the learning experiences positive. Most students appear to try very hard to meet all deadlines. On the other hand, our lives are equally complex and careful planning and adherance to schedules is the only way we can assure our students prompt feedback. I try to remind my students of that and let them know that if they help me I will in turn help them.

An interesting variation on the no late work policy is the "only if scheduled in advance" policy. This one appears to me to be particularly problematic, since it is at the root of many faculty/learner complaints. It can be hard to decide what sorts of problems qualify for late work and whether or not the learner can have known about the problem in advance. Say their mother goes into the hospital for surgery - they may have known, but possibly hadn't figured out how much it would disrupt their life. Did you really want them to schedule late work on the theory they might be late? And would you have told this student "No way" if faced with a question in class ahead of time?

Common advice for helping students meet deadlines is to break large projects up into smaller bites through the creative use of deadlines (this is good anti-plagiarism advice also) and to avoid deadlines during times when you know learners will be busy (Thanksgiving). Many of our math faculty drop one of the exams when calculating the final grade, thus allowing learners to miss an exam if needed. From the perspective of the dean, I like all of these suggestions.

Last, there is the fairness to all learners issue. If you let someone turn work in late how does that affect the learner who turned in a less than perfect paper, but got it in on time? My experience has been that late assignments tend to be of lower quality than timely assignments, but that is really just begging the question, not responding to it. It is important to remember that learning is not a zero sum game, so raising one person's learning, doesn't lower another. And as long as you are not grading on a curve it doesn't change their grade either.

If you have a creative and successful late work policy go ahead and post it in the comment section of this post so we can all see it.

best, Lisa

Monday's Vista Update

Hello Everyone-

I had hoped to have actual news for all of you teaching in Vista this semester, but I really don't. The rogue querie has been quiet for 4 days now. BB is in the process of testing a functional index (no, I don't knwo what that is really. :^)) to improve performance. We may apply that fix in the next couple of days.

Plan B is to shut down and restart the system whenever the querie brings everything to a halt. That process will take about an hour. Of course shutting the system down kicks everyone out and causes loss of data. In order to avoid data loss please be sure you save any long projects (for example, compose long emails or discussion posts inyour word processing software and copy and paste to Vista.) So far the only way we have to warn people of an impending shut down is to email them externally. That will not be particularly useful, so the real warning will be the very slow system response time.

The best solution still appears to be the upgrade to application pack 1 and service pack 1. Unfortunately the time estimate for that upgrade has increased to a minimum of 48 hours, so we do not plan to do that until after the semester has ended.

Are you all having a good time yet?

Lisa

Practicing What She Teaches: Art Review

Practicing What She Teaches

Sandra Phillips not only teaches Art Appreciation and Art History, she provides the experience for the public through the Sandra Phillips Gallery on Santa Fe. She was kind enough to share a link to a recent review of the current show at her gallery.

The Sandra Phillips Gallery

Westword Art Review

Having seen the show, the review really undercuts the impact! If you get the chance, go!

Cheers,

Alice

Post conference call updates on Vista

Hi Everyone-

We have decided to not decide on a Thanksgiving day upgrade to application pack 1 and service pack 1. Turns out we have to install the fix to the upgrade tool before we do the upgrade and that takes 30 hours, putting our total estimated downtime at 47 hours. The recommendation from BB changed between conference calls in a 30 minute period today -- that also makes us very nervous.

So.. the downside is that no one knows what is causing the rogue code that is eating up system ram to run. The only solution we have to that issue at this time is a complete system re-boot. That means if we slow down again we will be down long enough to perform the re-boot.

The upside is, no scheduled downtime and we won't have to deal with the known issues in application pack 1.

We have more calls scheduled for next week. I will continue to pass on information as I have it.

Sigh.

Thanks to everyone for your patience and hard work this semester!

Lisa

Vista Update

From David:

I just got off the phone with Melissa Burke (manager of hosting services). We are scheduling a conference call for 2:30 PM (MT). They plan to provide some recommendations at that time.

Overnight, one of the DBA's created two indexes on our system to help fix the "runaway" SQL issue. They are waiting for business to pick up to see if that controls the issue. They are also looking hard at Chris Dos' suggestion of providing a hot fix -- rather, pulling out the specific fix for the SQL problem from AP1/SP1 upgrade, so that we are not forced to do the entire upgrade early. She said the whole company is rallying around trying to fix these issues for us.

We are tossing around the idea of trying the upgrade (application pack 1 and service pack 1, currently scheduled for Dec. 20th) again on Thanksgiving day. Nothing is decided yet and we would prefer to not do that, but this is a head's up for all of you. Upgrading would mean that Vista would be inaccessable from 11:00 Wednesday night through around 4:00 Thanksgiving afternoon. Our traffic typically drops by about 50% on Thanksgiving, making it the lowest impact day to choose between now and the end of the semester.

I've also asked BB hosting to seriously consider whether or not they can handle our increase in load for the spring term. More news when they get back to me on that.

Lisa

Grades

Fall 1 and Fall 2 terms will both end on December 10th; grades will be due on December 14th as usual. Frank Vazquez is developing a form for grade entry that will be very similar to the form you used in the past on Web4Faculty. As usual you will need the student's grade as well as the last date of access for any F-grades. John Schmahl will send out the URL for the form during the last week of classes.

In an earlier post on this blog I sent over the allowable grading symbols. Developmental faculty should note the change for them to S/A, S/B, etc.

If any of you need to submit grades for some students before classes end, please send those grades to Roxanne Manske as usual. Also, no change in the incomplete policy -- Roxanne will need a copy of the completed for for all I grades issues.

Thanks!
Lisa

Vista Update

From David:

UPDATE

Vista is now working normally, according to the Hosting and Support Team. They have and I have run a couple of tests on section creation, and it is back to normal responsiveness.

They still need to provide me with reasons for the problems that were occurring. So far, no one has suggested that it was the number of students or any other user activity. I know there has been some speculation on this today, and I am sure we are all wondering what is causing this. It is natural to fill in the blanks when no one is providing a complete answer yet. One of the nodes in particular was so unresponsive, they had to power it down and bring it back up. As to causes, we are still waiting for them to determine that. Let me know if there are any further issues.

David

New report from Sloan Foundation

FYI -- this is a very interesting report that points to continued growth in online education, particularly at the associate degree level. We responded for CCCOnline as part of their survey. If we can just get through the pain of this migration (and stability with our LMS), then I think the future is very bright!

Ever UpwardThe Sloan Consortium released a new report today highlighting continued growth in online education. There are no signs that enrollment in online programs will plateau, according to the report, titled Making the Grade: Online Education in the United States, 2006 (http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/survey/index.asp). Students, especially older ones, are still attracted to the convenience of completing their degrees over the Internet. The report, based on a survey of 2,200 colleges, found that nearly 3.2 million students took at least one online course in the fall of 2005, up from 2.3 million the previous year. Even the rate of increase is going up, the report says. And a good majority of chief academic officers believe the quality of online education is equal or superior to the quality of traditional instruction. --Dan Carnevale

Vista is faster

Blackboard performed a rolling restart on the nodes yesterday late afternoon and evening, so you should see performance improvements.

The full re-start scheduled for Saturday morning (1:00 to 3:00 am) did not occur as planned, that may have contributed to yesterday's issues.

Once again, we have conference calls scheduled with BB staff to discuss the ongoing problems. I should have some usage and performance statistics to pass on to you for the past month shortly. We have also asked BB to gather those performance statistics for the coming month and for the first two weeks of December.

In a nut shell, we appear to have concurrency rates of around 10%, when national averages are more like 3 to 5%. That means we are very heavy users of the application. (not bad, but interesting.) FRCC appears to have concurrency rates back down in the 3 to 5% range and they are the only college which has moved all of it's LMS operations to Vista. That would seem to imply that when everyone has moved all online, hybrid, and web-enanced courses to Vista we will be back down in the more normal range and our forecasts for purposes of hardware sizing may be more accurate. :^) (I'm looking hard for a bright side here folks, so help me out.)

We also have scheduled the update to the system (application pack 1 and Service pack 1) for December 20th. That means Vista will be unavailable for all of December 20th, probably until 8:00 am December 21st.

I believe that day should be low impact for everyone except CCA faculty. I appologize to CCA - we were afraid to schedule any later than that as we wanted to have time to test the upgrade before Christmas break.


best,
Lisa

Vista is very very slow

You may feel like you have seen this message before... and believe me you are not nearly as unhappy as David is right now. We are in communication with Blackboard now.

More news when we have it.

Lisa

Vista is now back up

Greetings, All,

We are operational once again. Thanks for your resilience!

Best,

Alice

Monday Morning Vista Logon Issue

Good Morning, All,

Here is a note from David Chatham. We will continue to update. Best, Alice

From David Chatham

The Login page on CCCOnline's Vista server is not functioning. We were setting up the student survey this morning and got an error. We are working with Black Board support to get it back to normal. I apologize for this break in your access to Vista.

David Chatham
CCCOnline

WCET 4 - Learner Authentication

I went to a presentation at WCET on authenticating learners -- follow this link to a blog with a good summary of that presentation: http://desire2blog.blogspot.com/2006/11/e-learner-authentication.html

It was more than a little creepy as far as I was concerned and I am not sure it would stop any really determined cheaters. I think I still fall into the group of people who would use pedagogy as a way to deter cheaters (ie designing assignments for group work, written assignments with many steps, etc.)

I'd love feedback from you on how critical this issue is and how you would choose to solve it.

Lisa

Survey on Health Benefits

Here is the information on the adjunct survey on health benefits from the Human Resources office:

Adjunct Instructor Survey

In the 2006 legislative session, a bill was passed, SB06-144, directing higher education institutions to study the need for and cost of providing health insurance benefits to instructors. In addition to health insurance, other topics related to the terms and conditions of employment for instructors were discussed during the various stages of testimony on this bill. As a result, the Colorado Community College System has developed a survey as a tool for collecting information regarding the employment of instructors across the community college system.

In order to effectively analyze this issue and prepare an adequate report for the general assembly, we need your help in completing our on-line survey. The survey data will also be a valuable tool for the administration of CCCS, which will allow for informed decision making regarding the employment terms and conditions of instructors, valuable and significant contributors to assisting CCCS achieve its educational mission.

Please complete the survey on-line no later than November 15, 2006 at the following link on the Colorado Community College System web page: www.cccs.edu/InstructorSurvey

The final report will be available on-line at www.cccs.edu to anyone who is interested in the compiled results from this survey. Thank you for your time and effort in responding to this survey.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to send an e-mail to CCCS.Instructors@cccs.edu.

best,
Lisa

Server Time - Vista

From David:

Time on assessments, assignments, discussion posts advanced by two hours after the Thursday upgrade on nodes. I began getting email that the time was wrong on Saturday from one Math instructor. When I checked my email early Sunday morning, it seemed that the time was okay on Vista. I asked the instructor from Saturday's note to check and he responded it was now okay.

I heard from another CCCOnline instructor that it was off early Monday morning. I checked and others also checked her course and could not see the time as wrong, yet I have screen shots showing that indeed the time was off on Monday 5 AM in her course.

I heard again yesterday afternoon that the time was wrong, off two hours, from PPCC. In this case, the instructor took screen shots also of the issue, then logged out and back in and the time corrected itself. He also sent screen shots of this.

Fall-out on this has been some disagreement between instructors and students as to when their assignments / posts, etc were actually submitted, if they had the misfortune to do so close to the time it was to close.

As far as I can tell, the situation resolves itself but it has caused confusion in a few cases. A ticket was submitted to make BB aware of the issue so that we can prevent it during any other maintenance session.

Please just be aware of a possible issue when you talk with your students.

Best,

Lisa

WCET Conference Part 3

More summary from the WCET conference:

In the box:

• delivering courses through a commercial course management system
• courses as silos
• utilizing publishers for the majority of course content

Out of the box:

• social authoring software for course delivery and creation
  
• content aggregated from a variety of sources

Web 2.0, the read-write web was a hot topic. We will have a many decisions to make over the next couple of years about how we want to create and deliver courses and how Web 2.0 will impact our decisions.

Forgot to ask you at the end of yesterday's post -- can anyone who looks at elgg.org and elgg.net let me know if you think faculty and students would use something like this as a student union sort of space. We'd probably move the faculty lounges there, the blogs, etc.

And don't forget to look/post on the faculty wiki -- www.facultywiki.ccconline.org.

best,
Lisa

WCET Conference

I started to post on the Faculty Source Blog, but think I need to be here really ...

From last week:

Hi All-

I'm hanging out in Portland at the WCET conference. I thought I'd bring you the conference highlights via blog.

Today's opening keynote speaker was Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia and all things wiki. He was an enthusiastic and fascinating speaker. I recommend you visit some of the wiki initiatves such as www.wikia.com. Wikia is a wiki housing discussion groups and information on a huge variety of subjects. It's not meant to be another wikipedia, but an area for a different type of discussion and writing. I visited the economics portal -- there is a lot of information there and much that would be of use and interest to students. (But, you are right Paul, not a lot under Chemistry. Economics on the other hand, has lots of stuff.)

If you haven't visisted www.wikibooks.com, that's another interesting web site -- the goal is to replace the textbook with free, open-source wiki-books. As many of you know we are looking for solutions to the high cost and frequent updates of the traditional textbooks -- this site might give you an additional source for information for your students.

From wikipedia I wandered over to a session on the national repository for Online Courses. This is another initiative CCCOnline has joined. You can see some of their content on www.hippocampus.org; there is more available from within the community that I can give you access to. NROC is another group looking at the social authoring model for course content development.

More updates as the week goes on....

best,
Lisa

I ended the conference with several sessions on Social Software. One by Terry Anderson of Athabasca University and Chris Lott from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, was particularly exciting. Chris's wiki from the conference is available at http://community.uaf.edu/~cde/wiki/WCET06/HomePage.

Chris particiapted in two presentations, both can be reached from the WCET link on the left hand navigation bar. The links on the page lead to interesting reading material and to examples of the use of wiki's in the classroom.

Terry passed on links to social software such as elgg.org, which I think may be an option for us to use as a social site for our students and faculty. An example of that can be seen at http://me2u.athabascau.ca/. https://www.umanitoba.ca/virtuallearningcommons/ is an example of a wiki as a social space for students and faculty.

Rhonda Epper moderated a session from several publishers on their current thoughts regarding how to provide content for the future. There was a lot of discussion around our own digital content initiative as well as some publsher bashing. :^) It is clear that faculty expect the method of providing content to change, but no one is sure how to manage that change.

More thoughts soon.
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.

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