Because students don’t have to be in Boulder to take the courses, we wanted them to have information about D2L that was easy to access from anywhere. One of our work study students, Brandon Poulliot, developed an overview student video that will help them learn about D2L.

For several weeks we’ve been manually migrating our Independent Learning self-paced courses from CULearn (Blackboard) to D2L. We’ve migrated 71 courses and are now starting on the process of making updates and improvements to the courses. We are ahead of the projected schedule and so we may also move some of our term based courses to D2L later this summer.

We’re developing resources and videos to help students and instructors with the transition. Watch for updates on our progress and tips and tricks we learn as we transition to D2L.

Manual Migration CULearn to D2L Part 1

Manual Migration CULearn to D2L Part 2

We are working on a checklist to accompany the videos.  It will track information and additional notes on courses and be used to check quality assurance once courses are migrated and redeveloped in D2L.

We have completed initial accessibility tests of our homepage designs with the help of the accessibility services on campus. We are hoping that this process will help us define some design standards for increased accessibility in our courses as we transition to the new LMS.

ITS Project Updates

It not only gives an overview of the importance of accessibility but also gives addition resources ranging from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), articles, and screen reading programs. Some of them are:

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
http://www.w3.org/

Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
http://www.w3.org/WAI/

“How People with Disabilities Use the Web”
http://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/Drafts/PWD-Use-Web/Overview.html

Jaws – screen reading program
http://www.freedomscientific.com/products/fs/jaws-product-page.asp

FireVox (free, Firefox add-on)
http://firevox.clcworld.net

Using the the speech recognition software Dragon NaturallySpeaking, we listened to a video and by repeating what was heard, produced a transcript that was 90-95% accurate.  The text was produced in a word processing program so could be edited to correct any misspelled words or names.

Using a free  program, Subtitle Workshop 4, we then took the transcript and added captions to our video.  This program allowed us to create time stamps and then by copying and pasting the text from the transcript we made an .srt file. This worked for us because we could make future edits if necessary.

The process we developed looks like it will work for our Summer Session pilot course, but will probably be time intensive.  For adding transcripts and captions to our other courses, we need to explore other possible solutions.

So, what is accessibility? Web accessibility means people with disabilities, including visual, auditory, speech, physical, learning, cognitive and neurological disabilities, can use the Web. With our courses, if a page has poor accessibility, people with disabilities might not have the same same learning experience as their classmates.

Along with improving accessibility, we are also looking at improving our course usability. Accessibility and usability have things in common, but are not the same. Usability is designing pages to be more effective and efficient for everybody.   If a web page is more accessible, it also usually improves its usability which can improve how a page is viewed by people who use devices with small screens,  slower or older devices or computers, or who have language fluency or literacy issues.

As we work through the accessibility and usability process we will post the steps we take and our progress.  We will also share our successes, challenges and the lessons we learn along with interesting and helpful resources.

IL faculty have been asking for this opportunity to meet with their peers to exchange ideas, stories and best practices; we hope this meeting will be the first in a series of networking and professional development opportunities available to our faculty. We intend to follow up this first informal get-together with a hands-on workshop in late Spring focused on using lecture capture technologies to enhance the online course experience. Each Fall we will encourage and sponsor all interested faculty to attend the Colorado Learning and Teaching with Technology Conference on the Boulder campus.

We are piloting the first online proctored exam in the Spring of 2011. We are still in the process of preparing and updating at least five computers in the current proctoring room (1B40). These computers will use a lockdown browser to restrict student’s access to the computer and internet.  We are currently testing a trial version of the lockdown software and are hoping to begin piloting the first online exams by mid February.

The goal of this project is to reduce or eliminate the need to mail physical exam documents to distant proctors and then back to instructors for grading. With an online proctored exam we will be able to load the actual exam contents in the appropriate CULearn course and protect it will a password. When a student comes to Continuing Education to take an online exam, they will log themselves into CULearn and then the proctor will log them into the exam. This same process can be employed with distant proctors. Instructors can then grade the exams directly within CULearn which should significantly reduce the time required to complete the proctored exam process.

Alan Lester is piloting the first use of an online proctored exam in Spring 2011 in both self-paced and term-based versions of Geology 1010.  This raises the concern that all local term-based students will need to schedule their computer-based online exams during the same week to take midterm and final exams.  This is in addition to the self-paced students who may coincidentally schedule exams during this same testing period.  Depending upon overall Spring enrollments for these two sections, we may additional workstations moving forward.

GEOG 1010 Spring 2011 online proctored exams