Welcome Back to Profhelp!

To the left you see Dinah Kennedy, otherwise known as "ProfHelp" and her husband Jim. From Dinah:

ProfHelp for Faculty Teaching in VISTA:

The good news is that this spring semester many of you are now teaching in VISTA for the second time and you can once again go to ProfHelp for assistance. (And of course, the few faculty who are still teaching CE classes can still go to ProfHelp too.)

Remember also that many problems can be solved by referring to the "WebCT Vista FAQ's" page of the Faculty Wiki (www.facultywiki.ccconline.org). If you've looked on the Wiki but haven't been able to find the info you need, ProfHelp will guide you to the links there which hold your answers; or ProfHelp will provide infomation and instructions if the Wiki doesn't hold your answers.

For example, if you want to edit/change some quiz questions then ProfHelp will help you find how-to's on the Wiki for changing quiz questions and walk you through the process of changing the questions. In this example, you would go to the "WebCT Vista FAQ's" page (http://www.facultywiki.ccconline.org/~www66/index.php?title=Vista_faq#Assessments_Tool
), click the link to "Assessments Tool", and then click "Changing A Quiz Question In A Database".

Here's how ProfHelp will assist when the help you need is not available on the Wiki:

1. ProfHelp will iprovide individual instruction on how to solve your problem - particularly those problems which fall under content covered in the VISTA professional training classes faculty have taken. For example: If you want to delete some questions from quizzes, ProfHelp will provide instructions on how to do that - since these instructions are not currently on the Wiki nor in the training classes.
1. In rare cases, you may need help with minor course design issues such as a table in the Syllabus which contains outdated code that can't be edited or updated in the normal manner. In these cases, ProfHelp will fix the issue for you since you probably won't need to know how to do that a second time.
   
2. If you are having major course design issues beyond the scope of ProfHelp assistance, we will refer you to the Design Team for assistance.
2. ProfHelp will sometimes refer you to another resource person if we cannot assist with your issue. For example: If you are having a technical problem that is an true bug in the system (meaning something more than human error) then ProfHelp will refer you to the Academic Tech (AT) Department for assistance.
3. If one of your students is having a technical problem outside the realm of what you can address in the course, then ProfHelp will typically advise you to refer them to Deb Michel (Student Support Desk) or Roxanne Manske (Registrar's Office), whichever is appropriate.
   

Remember, ProfHelp is on the job Monday through Friday. (Also on the first weekend before a semester starts). We respond to requests in 24 hours or less on those days (usually less than 24 hours). So if you send a request for assistance but don't hear back quickly, please resend it, since occasionally requests fail to arrive in our inbox. Enjoy your semester, and contact us at ProfHelp@cccs.edu if you need us.

Dinah Kennedy / ProfHelp

Do You Have a Rubric to Share?

So many of the CCCOnline Faculty have great instructional practices, including the use of rubrics. To that end, this post is a request on behalf of Beck Mangin and Beth Kitts who are devleoping a rubric workshop for CCCOnline faculty development:

“Becky Mangin and Beth Kitts are writing a workshop on the use of scoring and feedback rubrics. If you have an exemplary rubric that you would like to share with other faculty, please send it to Becky Mangin at becmangin@msn.com ASAP as well as a statement for permission of use. Please include one- two paragraphs about why and how you use the rubric. Thank you, Becky Mangin”

Best,

Alice
"Share what you know, it's like throwing stars into the night sky."--Mitch Albom

Smarthinking Seminar

CCCOnline currently offers the Smarthinking tutorial service to registered students at no additional charge. Here's an opportunity for you to learn what Smarthinking offers students. (Note: Contact Phyllis Dobson at dob101@aol.com, not me, for details on how to attend the seminar.)

• Want to provide your students with an online tutoring service in Math, Accounting, Writing, and Science?
• Want to help your students produce better writing assignments?

SMARTHINKING provides online tutoring in Mathematics (Basic Skills - Calculus II), Writing, Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Introduction to Human Anatomy and Physiology, Accounting, Economics, Introductory Finance, Spanish and Statistics. Online Math tutors are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week during the school year.

You are invited to attend an online presentation from SmarThinking this Thursday, Jan 11th at 2:00 Mountain time.

Contact Phyllis Dobson at dob101@aol.com for details on attending this informative session!

Note from the Design Team

Hi Everyone-

I have a couple of design team notes for you today. Some of you may have noticed that the type of the home page of your Vista courses is very very small. You can leave that alone. Here's what Cheryl Comstock has to say:

We've reported that issue to BB via the Academic Technology Team. They are working on a fix right now. If BB is unable to correct the issue in a timely manner the Design Team can change the basic style sheet to correct it at least temporarily. We'd prefer to correct it through the style sheet so that we can more easily change again to adapt to any fix BB eventually makes.

So please ignore the tiny type. It will magically fix itself before the term begins.

I also have the design team's instructional design note for faculty teaching in Vista. Remember that you are generally welcome to make appropriate changes to course content and assessments as long as the class continues to meet the official outcomes. If you are interested in major changes to your course please talk with your program chair. We do sometimes cover some expenses.

From the Design Team:

The CCCOnline Design Team has worked with the Community Colleges-wide committee on the design and layout of courses offered online in planning the Vista course offerings. The format adopted is reflected in the way this course has been laid out for use by students. It provides a consistent approach for all courses to minimize student confusion about course content access.

We ask that you please observe the following guidelines:

• Please do not remove the Welcome Message posted on the Homepage. Announcements posted on the Course Homepage create large opening pages with long loadup times for students. Also, we are striving to maintain a similar "opening page" experience across the CCCOnline system to provide a level of comfort in consistency for our students. Instead, use the Announcements Tool to Post course announcements.
• Vista's Announcements Tool allows you to post your Announcement as a"pop-up" in the student view when the student logs in the next time.
• Please be judicious about the use of colors and animated graphics in the course--ADA requirements specify what colors can be used by persons with disabilities. Those selected by the Course Design Team meet those requirements.
• Last, please do not UNSUBSCRIBE the BasicStyles.css and the syllabus-coursepolicies.htm files. CCCOnline may need to adjust these from time to time with official changes. If these files are not subscribed, the changes will not be added to this course.
  

If you have any concerns about any of the above items, please direct inquiry about them to Cheryl Comstock, cheryl.comstock@cccs.edu or your course designer.

(Photo credit, Aaron Leonard)

Five Things - Roxanne

Today I get to introduce Roxanne Manske to you! Roxanne is our registrar and manager of all things student. She keeps the incomplete forms, watches adds and drops, builds sections in Banner (much more difficult and time-consuming than it sounds) and manages much of the communication between CCCOnline and the colleges.

She also spends a lot (and I do mean a lot) of time talking and emailing with students.








Here are Roxanne's 5 things:

1. I was born and raised in Mankato, MN.
   
2. After completing business school, I took a job with Prudential Insurance, in Mankato. Four years later I transferred to Prudential's Colorado Springs office, then to their Denver office when I accepted the position of Office Manager. Our office of 60 employees had the distinction of being #1 in the nation in sales three times. I thoroughly enjoyed my 28 years at "the Rock". My three brothers and their families still live in the Mankato area, with the exception of one nephew who discovered the secret of life in CO and lives in Arvada.
3. I have two cats, Callie (a tabby) and Shatze (a calico - "Shatze" is German for sweetheart).
4. I'm a scrapbook consultant; I held "crops" (gatherings to work on albums) at my home for two years; however, after creating Bob Norden's retirement album, discovered I am most passionate about creating albums for people who have neither the time nor the desire to do the work on their own albums. Are you someone who has a shoebox or two of pictures they'd like made into a beautiful album? :)
5. Like Charlie Brown's little friend Frieda, I have "naturally curly hair", which makes life easier every morning.

And here are Roxanne's cats, one working hard (or just ensuring Rox takes the occasional break...)



Thanks Roxanne!

Lisa

Five Things - Randy

Hi Everyone-

I had planned to move on to Roxanne today, but I am ready with Randy instead. Randy is CCCOnline's Faculty Coordinator which means he is the one that makes sure you get paid. That has been particularly challenging lately as we gradually move systems from the old HR and finance systems to the new Banner modules. Randy also looks after a lot of the office functions, from keeping track of the Christmas tree to making bringing in gourmet food for some of our meetings. And on the side Randy teaches music classes for us. Randy has been with CCCOnline from day 1; he came over from CCD.


Here are Randy's 5 things:

1. Still waters run deep – I’m a very complex person. However, my bark is worse than my bite!
   
2. “Ich bin ein Musicker” (Gustav Mahler). Although my graduate degree is in Public Administration, music is my first love. I have been on the music staff of First Mennonite Church in Denver for about ten years and regularly perform in other venues as well. I’ve also been a Music Director for a summer stock Vaudeville Dinner Theatre and founded a couple of Broadway Revue groups.
3. One goal in life is to build a “green” adobe house (anywhere far, far away from the city) when I retire. I would like to be able to provide scholarships to a couple of students from Mexico for the Red Rocks Online Construction program in exchange for help in building my house. Of course once that is complete I would like to tour National Parks/Senior Resorts as part of a two-piano duo.
4. Woodworking is something that I enjoy even though it’s not a very salubrious pastime for a pianist. I do have two former piano teachers that run all over heaven summoning my guardian angels whenever I get near a table saw or other power tools.
5. In my life before state government I spent a great deal of time in the restaurant industry. I cooked my way through my undergraduate and first graduate programs. For fifteen years I worked for one of the top caterers in the U.S. - some of the people I worked for were Presidents Reagan and Clinton, Governor Romer, Mayors Pena and Webb, Supreme Court Justices White and O’Conner, Representative Schroeder, Senator Campbell, many well-known personalities as well as most major corporate heads in the Denver area. $100,000+ weddings and bar/bat mitzvahs were the norm.
   

And of course almost everyone at CCCOnline has a pet or two, here are Randy's dogs:

Five Things

Hi All-

I've watched quite a few bloggers play "Five Things" with each other and their readers. It's been interesting learning things I didn't know about bloggers I read regularly, so I thought you might enjoy reading five things about some of the CCCOnline personnel you interact with now and then. Let's start with the student services staff:

John Schmahl is our Director of Student Services. He oversees the student services department, is our data guru, our Banner expert, and has been with CCCOnline almost since day one.


Here are five things he thought you might like to know:

1. Born in Toul, France in 1965, but raised in Colorado Springs.
2. Undergrad work at Ripon College, Ripon, WI (politics and government), grad work at at George Washington University (MA in Educational and Human Development with an emphasis in Educational Technology Leadership - try fitting that onto a business card.)
3. Spent 8 years with the Army and Army Reserve, inclouding time during operations Just Cause (Panama invasion) and Desert Storm.
4. Loves to read history and politics and spend weekends camping in the mountains (my infantry training hooked me!
5. Have a wonderful cat (Tonka) and a wonderful, if slightly senile, Basenji (Niki).

Here's a picture of Niki. :^)

Next week we will all learn five things about Roxanne Manske!

Happy snow days again!

Lisa

Out with Two Blogs, In with This One

Happy New Year Everyone!

As we evaluate how we are using blogs for CCCOnline faculty communications, we see that using only one faculty blog would provide easier access to both faculty news and sources. To that end, we will stop using Faculty Source, but leave up what it contains. The link to the old resources is entitled Faculty Source Archive and is located under the Links section at the right side of this blog.

We’ve also added a link to the bookmarking site at De.licio.us (CCCOnlinefaculty Bookmarks) so you can continue to view new resources and add those you would like to share.

If you have links you would like to share, go to http://de.liciou.us and login as ccconlinefaculty with the password ccconline2006.

Cheers,

Alice

Happy New Year from CCCOnline Staff

At long last -- the CCCOnline staff holiday picture! In the back from left to right you see Aaron Leonard, Alice Bedard-Voorhees, Jonathan Fuller, Linda Shaw, John Schmahl, David Chatham, Cheryl Comstock, Roxanne Manske, Mary Cash, Karen Kaemmerling. In front you see Rick Hadley, Judy Patrick (now retired), Kathy Miles, me, Rhonda Epper, Donna Welschmeyer, Carol Verver (just barely visible), and Beth Kitts. We are missing Deb Michel, Randy Macy, and Frank Vazquez, but otherwise all office staff is in the picture.

Here's Frank, because I took a picture of him awhile ago:












And here's Deb on another day also:












Lisa

Welcome Back! Happy New Year!

So did any of you feel like this about half way into the second snowstorm? :^)

We actually had a lovely Christmas and New Year and were even able to get out of the driveway once between storms and briefly yesterday. Today the county decided to plow the road again, so we're probably stuck now. (Yep, that is one of our dogs... I would have uploaded the picture of my hubby, but it was really scary.)

I thought having to stay home for nearly two weeks would leave me with lots of accomplishments, but it turns out all I do when snowed in is play games with the girls and drink a lot of hot chocolate. I did knit a pair of baby socks for my sister who is having a turning 40 crisis.

I think I forgot to send all of you the link to the student evaluations from last semester, so here is the email from our guru of surveys, Rick Hadley. You use your old login information to access your results (not the new S# and P/W). We'll change that for the spring term. Please email Rick if you can't remember your old login information at Rick.Hadley@cccs.edu.

After a tangle or two...

The survey is up and running and available for viewing at the following URL:

https://www.cccodevelopment.cccs.edu/survey/frameset-survey.html

Rick Hadley
Academic Technology Professional

Happy New Year Everyone!
Lisa

Christmas Eve Gift

My family has a tradition of opening one gift on Christmas Eve. From Blackboard this year we have the gift of our Vista CMS back up again. (Actually yesterday late morning).

You should be able to log into your Vista classes again now, using the same URL - Online.CCCOnline.org. (CE server uses the instructors url between terms, the exact link is in an old blog post.) If you see the BB screen instead of the Vista login screen try clearing your cache, deleting cookies, or a different browser.

Have a wonderful vacation!

Lisa

Leaving our troubles behind us....

Hi Everyone-

Blackboard has completed the upgrade to Vista and are now doing QA and adding our requested powerlinks! We think we may be past the most challenging parts of the upgrade now.

(Those are the Olypmic Mountains from a Seattle ferry a couple of weeks ago.)

best,
Lisa

Afternoon Update

Real progress has been made! We are two steps beyond the step the upgrade was bogging down on! More like this picture of our development now....

Happy Holidays!
Lisa

Upgrade update

The good news is the county has been around our development and a neighbor has plowed out our driveway.

The other news is that the upgrade is still continuing very very very slowly. It is moving and BB product developers are writing scripts to increase the speed. Plan B (or is this W or X?) is for BB to bring in a huge team of developers and programmers beginning Tuesday to "take the code apart piece by piece" if that is what it takes. Probably you shouldn't plan on working in your classes until the new year, but I'll let you know if things change.

Happy Holidays,
Lisa

Vista Upgrade Update

This is what Franktown looked like early this morning. My family is planning on being snowed in through Christmas. That's Joy on your left and my youngster, Carbon Copy, on the right. (For those of you who are horse people too, I apparently only buy chestnut mares. Just color me weird.)

Oh and the update on the upgrade... let's just say you probably shouldn't plan on working in Vista tomorrow or over the weekend. You might be able to get there next week, but I wouldn't make that my only option. I may have more news tomorrow, but as of late this afternoon the upgrade is moving very, very, very slowly. We will probably continue to run it rather than roll back to our initial version over the weekend, with a re-grouping planned for mid-next week if the whole thing grinds to a halt.

Happy Holidays everyone!

Lisa

Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays Everyone!

This is the post where I send you the picture of all of us at the office in our Christmas attire. Unfortunately we were going to take that picture today......

Only your faithful IT staff made it to the office (David and Rick).

Many thanks to all of you for all of the hard work this semester, particularly for those of you teaching in Vista but also those of you teaching in CE, but with students who also had courses in Vista. (I think that is just about everyone). Everyone made it through the challenges of the semester with incredible grace. Believe me, those of us at the office really do appreciate that!

I hope you and yours have a special time together over the break. We will see you all back again next year!

best,
Lisa

Overall Grades

Hi All-

Here's a note from John re grades in general:

And for some added fun, here is a quick summary of the total grades for
Fall: (when I have some time, I'll do a breakdown by section of this
information)

Total Grades entered - 8,821
(does not count students withdrawn)
Percentage of "A" - 31.04%
Percentage of "B" - 19.79%
Percentage of "C" - 11.89%
Percentage of "D" - 4.16%
Percentage of "F" - 28.69%
Percentage of "I" - 0.58%
Percentage of "W" - N/A

Comparison to last Fall

Total enrollments - 9,223
(includes students withdrawn)
Percentage of "A" - 33.13%%
Percentage of "B" - 22.08%
Percentage of "C" - 12.19%
Percentage of "D" - 3.87%
Percentage of "F" - 18.03%%
Percentage of "I" - 0.40%
Percentage of "W" - 9.53%

It looks like last year many of the F's were awarded W's. That might be because the colleges were not able to process drops for non-payment this year. That's just speculation though. Interesting inverted bell-curve though. :^)

Merry Christmas!
Lisa

Last Grades and Last Remarks to Students and Thank You

Hi All,

John Schmahl is providing reports on the grades that have been coming in. Thanks to each of you -- we all look forward to having the last cross the finish lines also! Please help us close the grades piece on this term!

Last, given what Lisa mentioned in the post before this one, please let your students
know the last date you'll be checking the course for their questions and their concerns regarding the final grades--

As she put it:

Students get an extra week of access to the course shells now (two weeks total) because the colleges prefer that and this was a decision we needed to make as a group. We do not expect you to check email, etc. for two weeks after classes end. Would you do me a favor though and post a note to your students letting them know the last day you will be checking the course shell. That is probably the day you plan on turning in grades, so no later than Thursday this week.

Please direct students to the student support form if they need to reach you after the last day you plan to access the course shell. The form is located at http://www.ccconline.org/support/form/ or the support center phone number is 1-800-801-5040.

Of course if you want to check on your course for the full two week period you are welcome to. :^)

Thanks-
Lisa

Thank you again for all you have done to forward the learning of those who take courses through CCCOnline during the term of new implementations. Here's wishing you a great break.

All Best,


Alice

End of Term Request

Hi Everyone-

Students get an extra week of access to the course shells now (two weeks total) because the colleges prefer that and this was a decision we needed to make as a group. We do not expect you to check email, etc. for two weeks after classes end. Would you do me a favor though and post a note to your students letting them know the last day you will be checking the course shell. That is probably the day you plan on turning in grades, so no later than Thursday this week.

Please direct students to the student support form if they need to reach you after the last day you plan to access the course shell. The form is located at http://www.ccconline.org/support/form/ or the support center phone number is 1-800-801-5040.

Of course if you want to check on your course for the full two week period you are welcome to. :^)

Thanks-
Lisa

Thanks! and a Scheduling Tip

Thanks to everyone who has already turned in grades! Student service staff (Roxanne, Deb, John, and Carol are 'happily' entering those grades into Banner.)

I know some of you are already thinking about the spring term, so here's my spring assignment due date tip of the week. Set your due dates and times during the week (M-F) and between 8:00 am and 3:00 pm. Why you ask? So your students have a place to call for technical support!

Deb Michel is available and manning the student support desk during those times. That way the student who waits until the last possible minute to submit an assignment, thus maximizing his or her chance of having technical difficulties can call Deb and get some help. And you won't have to read and respond to the same email you've read many times already asking for another day to get an assignment in because of those technical difficulties.

best,
Lisa

Entering Fall Grades

Dear CCCOnline Faculty;

As you may already know, because of the way in which Banner has been configured, you are not able to enter grades into Self-Service Banner. Therefore, we have set up a secured form for your use so that you can enter grades for your CCCOnline courses. To enter grades, please follow the directions at the bottom of this e-mail. I would also strongly recommend that you save a copy of your grade book from the course just in case. Also, I wanted to let you know a few key pieces of information about the entire grade process with banner that will impact all students (not just CCCOnline).

Once you have entered grades through this form, they will be manually entered into Banner for each college. However, students will not be able to view their grades through Banner until their home college “Rolls” grades to Banner Academic History. This is a process that each college must do before grades are viewable to students. All colleges plan to roll grades starting December 18, and will roll once a night through the end of the year. Therefore, you may hear from students who cannot view their grades yet, even though you have entered them. Please let the students know that grades should be viewable starting December 18. We will be sending an e-mail to all students letting them know this as well. Students will continue to have access to their online course through December 31 so they can view their final grade in the grade book if they are entered there. If you have any students who need an official grade sooner, they must contact their home college’s registrar’s office to have a transcript printed manually.

Finally, if you have any grade changes or incompletes, please complete the attached forms and send them to Roxanne Manske at Roxanne.Manske@cccs.edu or myself (at john.schmahl@cccs.edu).

I would also like to take a moment to thank all of you for your hard work and strong support this semester. It has been a great learning experience for all of us and I look forward to working (and learning) with you again next semester! Have a wonderful holiday season!

John H Schmahl
Director, Student Services
CCCOnline
John.schmahl@cccs.edu

How to Enter Grades for Fall 2006 (200720)

- Go to: https://www.cccodevelopment.cccs.edu/gradebook/input/login.php
If you get the “Security Alert” dialogue box, click “Yes” to proceed
- Enter your Username and Password
These are the same that you use to login to your online course(s)
- Click “Login”
- Select the course you wish to grade
If you do not see all of your CCCOnline courses, please contact frank.vazquez@cccs.edu
- Enter the appropriate grade for each student in the “Choose a New Grade” column, the listing of accepted grades is below
- If you enter a grade of “F” or “U/F”, you MUST enter a “Last Day of Attendance”
- When you have finished entering all grades for that course, be sure to verify the grades and then click “Update” at the bottom of the page.
Grades will appear in the “Grade” column
Last day of attendance will appear in the “Last Day of Attendance” column if applicable
The “Modified” column is the date/time stamp that the grade was last modified
- Click the “back” button on your browser to return to the listing of course(s) to select another course.
- When you have completed grading all courses, you can close the browser. You do not need to log out.

Listing of Acceptable Grade Symbols
For Standard Courses (those with a course number of 100 or greater
A
B
C
D
F
I

For Developmental Courses (those with a course number below 100)
S/A
S/B
S/C
U/D
U/F
I

Call for Telecoop Proposals Due December 14th

Telecoop Link

Greetings All,

Telecoop is a terrific conference. We do send a few faculty presenters each year, and presenting to peers is great professional development.

If you do apply and have a proposal accepted, please let us know :). I'm also open to questions during this very short timeline.

Best,

Alice

Assessments

I had an interesting question from an instructor/designer a few days ago about whether or not assessments should be standardized across sections of a course.

The policy side of the answer is that they don't need to be. We have standardized course outcomes, so the state has specified which outcomes you should assess, but not how. Alice comments:

The assessment needs to measure the level of learning about the subject matter as stated in the course competencies.

This could allow for differing assessments from course section to course section, as long as they are measuring the same outcome and the same level as indicated by the verb in the competency. (For example, if the verb is "demonstrate," a strict concept based multiple-choice task wouldn't cut it.)

We commonly use pooled questions on multiple choice exams, so even students within sections taking those exams are not evaluated based on exactly identical assessments, although they all face the same assessment method.

My instantaneous reaction to the question was that we would not want to require all faculty teaching the same class to use the same assessments, however I think we can make a case for some sharing of assessments (that isn't based on students complaining to me that their best friend in the other section has different/easier homework assignments). Good assessments are very difficult to design and most of us don't have a background in assessment design. If we share the development time we can all have better assessments without killing ourselves. We can also update the assessments or consider developing a few pools of assessments in order to avoid students sharing with each other in ways we don't feel are appropriate.

As usual in these discussions we end up trying to walk the line between sharing the workload and sharing the costs of development. :^)

Lisa

Grades

Look for directions for turning in grades tomorrow afternoon. :^) We're down to the wire on this one, but we wanted to make it as painless as possible for all of you. Frank Vazquez has been working hard on a form for grade entry that is similar to what you've used in the past with Web4Faculty. He was testing today and will load courses and students tomorrow morning.

Grades will be due as usual by the Thursday after classes end -- that is one week from today. :^)

Thanks for all of your hard work!

Lisa

Vista was down from 1:20 to 1:54 pm today

Hi All-

Apparently the rack housing us at BB hosting lost power today for about half an hour. More on why when I hear.

best,
Lisa

December Featured Faculty: Judy Meza

Editor's Note: Meet Spanish Faculty Judy Meza. As is our practice, we asked Judy to share her bio with us. Thanks, Judy :)



I never had to think too much about my future career. As a child, I would get my 4 younger sisters and brothers (my older sister would have no part of this) together and teach them whatever I was currently studying in school. Strangely, they were usually an attentive audience. My most beloved childhood possessions were my chalkboard and multi-colored chalk. Since then I have always been drawn to being part of a learning community, whether as a student or as a teacher (in both cases, you're learning).

I have always been fascinated by different cultures and languages. I began to study Spanish in elementary school and immediately it became my favorite subject. When I was 14, I spent six weeks in Spain with a summer abroad program, and my desire to travel and experience other cultures was ignited.

After finishing my BA, I continued my studies in Spanish language and literature, and this led me to spend a year in Spain, where I took classes at the University of Barcelona. During my time in Barcelona, I began teaching English in companies. After returning to the U.S., I earned a Master's Degree in Linguistics, and soon after completing it, I moved to Puerto Rico, where I taught English to college students and Spanish to Americans working there. Since that time, I have taught English and/or Spanish in Mexico, the United Arab Emirates, Houston and Denver. Since I moved to Colorado eight years ago, I’ve worked at Red Rocks Community College, Arapahoe CC, Metro, and for the past three years, CCC Online. I love teaching Spanish and sharing this passion with others. Teaching English gives me the opportunity to work with people from all over the world. Especially in the current political climate, I am thrilled and inspired to see students from all different cultures and religions bond in the classroom community and support and learn from each other—a microcosm of what would be nice to see happen on a grand scale.

For me, the key to a successful class lies in promoting a classroom atmosphere that is mutually respectful and supportive, one that is encouraging, engaging and fun, and one in which learning is as valuable an outcome as progress toward a degree.

I have to admit that, like many of you, I don’t have much free time these days. When I do, I enjoy taking online classes, reading, and spending time in the mountains. I would love to learn another language and to play a new musical instrument. Some day!

Below is a text of an email from Cindy Hesse on the loss of personnal data. I understand many of you were probably new hires in that time period because of the way the state submits information for bi-weekly payroll.

All,

The company that contracts with the Colorado Dept. of Human Services for New Hire reporting and for Family Support Registry (the central registry for child support payments in Colorado) had a laptop stolen in October that contained records of all new hires reported for the previous 6-8 months. If you were hired by CCCS during this time frame, you may be receiving a letter regarding this incident. The information sent in to this company from Department of Personnel - Central Payroll Office is name, SSN, and date of birth. The report is created at central payroll for any new employees entered in to CPPS, our current payroll system. The reporting of this data is a federal requirement.

Human Services compiled a letter with information for all State employees who could be affected, and they should be sending it out shortly, if you haven't already received a letter. You may recall that there were several articles in both the Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post when this happened back in October.

Please note that any of you potentially affected by this incident should monitor your credit information closely for at least the next year. I have been previously advised by police officers that often in these situations, the people who take this data with the intent of committing identity theft, will sit on the information for up to six months until the affected individuals and alerted credit agencies 'let their guard down'.

I would also advise you to file a report of stolen information with the credit agencies so that your information may be more closely monitored and in the event you have illegal activity under your identification, you will have an easier time correcting the problem.

As far as we know at this time, there have been no reported cases of identity theft from the theft of this computer.

If any new information becomes available regarding this situation, we will let you know as soon as possible.

Thank you and don't hesitate to call my office with any specific questions or concerns.

Cindy Hesse
Director of HR - CCCS
Cindy.hesse@cccs.edu
303-595-1634

sorry,
Lisa

Planned Downtime for Vista

Hi Everyone -

Here's a note from David:

Update:

The upgrade to Application Pak1, SP1 is scheduled for Wednesday, December 20 at 12 AM. The maintenance window will proceed for an estimated 48 to 52 hours. There will be no access to Vista during this time or until the server is back online. There will be another maintenace window perhaps a week later, but I do not have a time on that. The second one is to backup the data for us. All of this is planned for after the end of term and at a time of least activity. The students will continue to have access to their courses until two weeks after the end of the term. I will put up a notice to all users about the Dec. 20 maintenance window at the beginning of that week and also again when needed possibly the following week.

David Chatham
CCCOnline

I kind of doubt many of you were planning on spending a lot of time online those days, but just in case....

When you come back in January we may be on Application Pack 1, which is actually nice because we get some interesting features out of that including the new rubric grading tool and goals page. Phyllis and Sharon are working on developing some training on new features for all of us.

best,
Lisa

Finishing the Term, Planning for the Next

Hi All,

This link provides information for bringing closure within your course, handling incompletes, and saving the gradebook:

Ending the Term

You May also want to consider communication tools and adding RSS feeds like those just posted at CCCOnline Faculty Source:

CCCOnline Faculty Source
(A link to this blog can also be seen under Links at the right.)

And that includes your own professional development. To that end, please check out new and ongoing Training Sessions for 2007:

2007 Training

The end of term and traininglinks have been saved in Del.icio.us under the tag CCCOnlineFaculty.

To add links you would like to share, logon at delicious as user: ccconlinefaculty and with password: ccconline2006 (lower case, no spaces).

Thanks again for all you are doing. Here's wishing you a smooth end of term.

All Best,

Alice

Community Software

Hi Everyone-

We get occasional requests from faculty and students to provide a learning community. In response to that I've been doing a little research around software we could use to provide the infrastructure.

I've been watching my resident teenager use MySpace, so I was looking for something with similar features, but even cooler. (Cool is important when you are living with a teenager). It would need to be able to host multiple communities, so we would have a space for faculty lounges, administrative blogs, student groups, study groups, etc. We have a lot of faculty who do neat things online or in your other lives, so I'd like to have a way for people to let us know what else you are doing and how it intersects with your teaching life. What I have found is ELGG.

ELGG has a free space at www.elgg.net (and information at www.elgg.org). I joined and set up a community called CCCOnline Faculty. If you go join ELGG to try it out please join that community also. This is open space software, so if we really want to use it we will probably install it on our own servers, so we have a more private/controlled space. For now though, I am interested in opinions other than my own. What do you think both for yourselves and for students?

(Side note re why not to simply do this in Vista -- 1) Not a recommended use of the software, they don't really expect course shells with more than 5,000 users. 2) When Vista is down, this would still be up, improving communication. 3) Different purpose usually means different software because the features we want are different. 4) user control -- which we can't give in Vista.)

On a completely different note-- several of you read the article in the Chronicle on adjunct faculty (http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2006/11/2006112901c/careers.html). I also read that article and followed the link to the AAUP article on "contingent faculty". Many years ago CCA used a two tiered adjunct faculty system that assumed many adjuncts had a strong and long-term relationship with the college. I was a part of that and appreciated the additional committment the college made to those adjuncts. CCCOnline does not have the ability to write longer term contracts at this point, but we do talk about possibilities and understand the benefits both sides of the equation would receive. It's not a conversation that is moving forward particularly swiftly, but at least it has begun.

best,
Lisa

Vista Downtime for Midnight - 2AM Thursday AM

Greetings, All,

This is the update from David for Tonight's Vista Maintenance

Nov. 30, Thursday Morning 12AM - 2AM
This maintenance will affect WebCT Vista courses only (CE courses are not affected). The WebCT Vista Courses will not be accesible from 12 AM (midnight)- 2 AM (MT) on Thursday morning November 30.

Regards,

Alice

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