TLP Blog

How you can manage better your Vista!
This presentation was held on Wednesday, September 9
2:00 – 3:00 pm
Presenters: Scott Kodai, CSU, Chico Distributed Learning Manager, and Mark Kauffman, ITC & Vista Integration/Administration

In this TILT session, Scott Kodai and Mark Kauffman explain how the product was developed and show participants how to use it for Vista course management. This CSU, Chico developed tool allows users to: add or remove guest section designers, add or remove community members, add or remove prep areas, reset sections, and hide or show sections.

Watch the archive of this session.
Type your name in the PARTICIPANT window and select Enter.

Twitter Hash Tag for CSU Chico TILT sessions is #CHICOTILT

Yesterday’s LMS news that Blackboard purchased competitor, Angel, has created much conversation in academic technology circles. Those of us in the Technology and Learning Program have been reading as much as possible to stay informed. We thought we might share with you some of the resources we have found and let you form your own opinions about the recent “merger”.

Inside Higher Ed News

Campus Technology

eSchool News

Michael Feldstein’s Blog

Blackborg on Flickr

Twitter #blackborg Feed

Twitter #bbplusangel Feed

In part, as reported today, July 15, by Inside High Ed:

“The company is partnering with Syracuse University to develop a way to integrate Blackboard with Sakai, one of the primary open-source alternatives.”

“The partnership with Syracuse, a Blackboard client, reflects the many ways the university’s professors use Sakai. As an example, some professors use the software’s e-portfolio capabilities on top of or separately from Blackboard.”

To read the article in its entirety, go here.

Anyone who is a client of Blackboard Academic Suite or Enterprise License who didn’t get the marketing email might want to have a look at the “sneak peek” video that Blackboard posted about their “project NG” or Next Generation LMS:

Okay, now that we’ve sucked down a heaping helping of hype, let’s actually dissect what we’ve seen. I’ve taken the liberty of chopping some freeze frames out of the video for us to decode. Keep in mind that I’m looking at these snaps from the perspective of a Blackboard WebCT Vista user, so if anyone else has a perspective on this as an Academic Suite user, I’d love to hear from you in the comments or by email.
Begin after the jump:
(more…)

Just as we’re supporting a vibrant and expanding set of campus communities in Vista (for faculty dept’s, staff, and interdisciplinary groups), so is Cal State Fullerton – and they’re twice as large a campus as Chico in terms of FTEs.

One difference is that Fullerton is using the Blackboard Community System, which will soon be available to our campus through the Blackboard Learning Connector layer in Vista 8.

I’m hearing common themes – content sharing among instructors of large multi-section courses, department collaboration. A very interesting comment from presenter Shariq Ahmed: “Not having a wiki available on our campus, we have added every person into this community as a designer so they all can add, delete, and modify content.” – For me, that solution is at best inadequate, because there’s no opportunity for true collaborative writing or for edit histories (versioning). Is the killer app not a Vista LMS (or community system) shell with an integrated wiki space? Such a solution could be managed by its leaders through a web-based application which simultaneously manages the associated wiki group/space permissions and membership.

One comment though- Blackboard’s community feature is pretty ugly. Not having spent any time with their original (non-webCT-acquired) products, I’m rather shocked at the Spartan interface. However, the self-enrollment feature is about 300x more simplified and obvious than in the Vista LMS.