Learning Management System Update

Hi Everyone-

As most of you know we are planning to move to the Desire2Learn learning management system in the coming year. Work on that project began last summer with an informal market survey which eventually led to the contract with D2L signed a few weeks ago.

Our primary goal for the summer is to migrate a course shell for each of you. For many of you this will be an individual course shell, for some of you your chair is taking advantage of the move to bring faculty together to develop a joint shell again.

The summer has three primary tasks: 1) At this moment D2L is building the production server for us. We expect that to be available at least for the Academic Technology group towards the end of June. 2) The Training and Professional Development group is beginning to develop training materials for traditional facilitated online workshops, face-to-face workshops, webinars, and just-in-time modules for the wiki. 3) The intructional designers are working on checklists that will show everyone what they have checked and updated in all migrated courses and what you as faculty will need to check and update. (So far those checklists are fairly short for both groups.) They are also working with D2L to fine-tune the migration script - limiting the changes and updates that will need to be made in each class as much as we possibly can.

This fall should bring two milestones: first, we will run a *small* pilot program in D2L; and second, faculty will gain access to their own courses in D2L. The faculty conference this fall (September 25th) will be a great chance for everyone to spend a little time in their D2L shells and to begin to get ready for spring.

Spring 2011 is planned to be the first semester truly using D2L. While our Blackboard contract doesn't expire until June 30, 2011, we are currently planning to have all of our courses moved to D2L for the spring 2011 term.

Wow!

Lisa Cheney-Steen