These sessions will provide an opportunity for 杏吧原创鈥檚 teaching and learning community to receive updates about the LMS review process and to provide feedback on their needs and hopes for our learning management system. There are two campus-wide sessions scheduled in the coming weeks.聽Space is limited, so please register in advance for the session you鈥檇 like to attend.

• Friday, March 15, 1-3 p.m.
• Thursday, March 21, 1-3 p.m.

The listening sessions are open to all instructors, administrators, teaching assistants, students, support staff, and anyone who uses the LMS. We want your input. Come and let us know what you need in an LMS! If you cannot attend, you can find more information about the LMS review process, consultations and feedback opportunities on the聽LMS Review website.

These sessions will provide an opportunity for 杏吧原创鈥檚 teaching and learning community to receive updates about the LMS review process and to provide feedback on their needs and hopes for our learning management system. There are two campus-wide sessions scheduled in the coming weeks.聽Space is limited, so please register in advance for the session you鈥檇 like to attend.

• Friday, March 15, 1-3 p.m.
• Thursday, March 21, 1-3 p.m.

The listening sessions are open to all instructors, administrators, teaching assistants, students, support staff, and anyone who uses the LMS. We want your input. Come and let us know what you need in an LMS! If you cannot attend, you can find more information about the LMS review process, consultations and feedback opportunities on the LMS Review website.

As we ramp up to what is sure to be a very busy Fall term, getting cuLearn set up and ready to go is a priority for many of us at 杏吧原创. Whether this is your first time using a learning management system or you are an old pro, there is always opportunity to improve your courses.

Your courses can take the size and shape that you want them to have depending on your teaching philosophy, your students鈥� needs and your discipline. cuLearn offers several layouts, resources and activities that you may wish to consider. Explore cuLearn layouts.

General best practices for course setup include keeping the navigation simple and consistent, and posting key information in a single, clearly labeled place. Posting documents as PDF files makes them software agnostic and accessible on most mobile devices. Explore course design.

Make sure you make it clear, whether in you course or course outline, how students can get technical help from the university and how long it will typically take you to answer their emails. You may wish to consider adding a forum in which students can ask questions and answer technical or course-related questions, or have them introduce themselves online. Explore setting up forums.

According to a recent study at two universities in Australia, students leverage technology to connect, stay organized and manage time. The learning management system provides a hub for research, review and collaboration, but to be game changing, digital technologies should be an extension of practices of engagement and reflection. Ask yourself what are some of the best opportunities to improve engagement or save time.

Because we can copy content from term to term, much of the course setup only needs to be done once, freeing you up to add updated content or refine assignment designs to be more active. You might start with the syllabus and gradebook at first and then each term focus on additional resources 鈥� lessons, interactive content, assignments, online quizzes, polls, assignments or peer review exercises. You might also want to explore midterm feedback options or examine how learning analytics can help you reflect on your own teaching practice and further inform changes to your course.

The EDC is here to help with your cuLearn courses. You can get help in any of these ways:

• Self directed/online – website guides for instructors, students and TAs
• Workshops – group sessions on a range of topics
• Consultations – bring your questions and course materials and we’ll work together to create an engaging experience for your students

The EDC is hosting a number of cuLearn sessions in the coming weeks to help you get the most out of 杏吧原创鈥檚 learning management system.

Introduction to cuLearn
Aug. 18, 9 鈥� 10:30 a.m.; Aug. 25, 10 a.m. 鈥� 12 p.m.; Aug. 29, 5 鈥� 7 p.m.; Sept. 6, 10 a.m. 鈥� 12 p.m.

Come to our introductory session for a hands-on tour of 杏吧原创鈥檚 learning management system to learn how to navigate cuLearn and set up your course. By the end of this session, you鈥檒l know how to post a welcome announcement for your students, upload a personal profile and contact information, add course resources, such as a course outline and external URL links, setup and modify your course layout, and more!

cuLearn Drop-In Sessions
Aug. 23, 1 鈥� 3 p.m.; Aug. 30, 1 鈥� 3 p.m.; Sept. 12, 10 a.m. 鈥� 12 p.m.; Sept. 15, 10 a.m. 鈥� 12 p.m.

These drop-in sessions provide an opportunity for you to work on your cuLearn course with an educational technology consultant nearby who can answer questions and help with course preparation.

cuLearn Gradebook Session
Sept. 6, 1 鈥� 2:30 p.m.

Explore the power and flexibility of the cuLearn gradebook. In this session you will setup your gradebook and explore gradebook options, including setting up categories, exporting/importing grades, setting default grades and communicating grades.

To learn more and to register for these sessions, visit our events page.

If these times don鈥檛 work with your schedule, you can also聽book an appointment for one-on-one consultations聽about any aspect of cuLearn, including the gradebook. Don鈥檛 forget to check out our聽support site聽for answers to frequently asked questions and other resources to help you along.

The annual upgrades are a means of continually improving the system. The overall look and feel will be very similar to the current version, however there will be significant improvements to the gradebook and the overall system performance, including:

• Smoother assignment grading
• Easy retrieval of deleted course files and activities
• Improved course editing
• New quiz question types
• Greater usability for students and enhancement to several activities such as the forum, workshop and lesson

Please note that this upgrade will take place within the 10-day period for the submission of final grades to the E-Grade system for approval. If you plan to calculate grades in cuLearn, please download them to your computer prior to September 3, because the cuLearn gradebook will not be available from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. on this date. If you need any help with this, please contact edc@carleton.ca.

This upgrade will not affect any data or content added to your courses and you will be able to continue working on your courses after 3 p.m. on September 3.

If you have any questions about the upgrade, contact the EDC at edc@carleton.ca.

The annual upgrades are a means of continually improving the system. The overall look and feel will be very similar to the current version, however there will be significant improvements to the gradebook and the overall system performance.

Please note that this upgrade will take place within the 10-day period for the submission of final grades to the E-Grade system for approval. If you plan to calculate grades in cuLearn, please download them to your computer prior to September 3, because the cuLearn grade book will not be available from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. on this date. If you need any help with this, please contact ryan.kuhne@carleton.ca.

This upgrade will not affect any data or content added to your courses and you will be able to continue work on your courses after 3 p.m. on September 3.

If you have any questions about the upgrade, please contact the EDC at edc@carleton.ca.

The annual upgrades are a means of continually improving the system. The overall look and feel will be very similar to the current version, however there will be significant improvements to the gradebook and the overall system performance.

Please note that this upgrade will take place within the 10-day period for the submission of final grades to the E-Grade system for approval. If you plan to calculate grades in cuLearn, please download them to your computer prior to September 3, because the cuLearn grade book will not be available from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. on this date. If you need any help with this, please contact ryan.kuhne@carleton.ca.

This upgrade will not affect any data or content added to your courses and you will be able to continue work on your courses after 3 p.m. on September 3.

If you have any questions about the upgrade, please contact the EDC at edc@carleton.ca.

Before Fall 2012, I knew there were plans to retire WebCT this April. These plans left me with two options for the next two terms: (1) keep going with WebCT until it was no longer an option or (2) start using cuLearn now that it was available to me. The first option was appealing insofar as I knew the system and had already taught the same class in it the previous year. The second option would require a bit more work with getting to know and use a new LMS.

I spend a bit of time each spring/summer reflecting on the previous year with a class and using such reflections as the impetus to make a few changes for the upcoming year. I was already putting energy into the course redesign while working a new job at the EDC, which involved designing programs for teaching and professional development. In other words, I was already learning a lot of new things and found myself wondering if it was wise to add yet another item to my list. At the same time, I had two recurring thoughts. First, I felt that since I teach a first year seminar, it made perfect sense to get these incoming students started in their post-secondary educational experience with the new system. Second, since I worked at the EDC, I wanted to be able to answer questions faculty, contract instructors and teaching assistants might have about the new LMS. These two recurring thoughts finally won out and I decided that it made the most sense for me to switch to cuLearn.

Once I made this decision, I gave myself a weekend to play around with my course in cuLearn to find out what I would or would not be able to figure out without any training. I used the material to set up a course page arranged by date: each day had a description of what we would be doing, including content, activities and items students would need to bring with them. I also included all due date and reminders about assignments in the appropriate date section as well as in the course calendar. I was very proud of myself when this design seemed to work really well. Halfway through the fall term, however, I realized that it had become less than ideal; as the semester progressed, students in the class and I had to scroll through a lot of material 鈥� the class was offered twice a week 鈥� before getting to the appropriate class for the day. While this was clearly not an 鈥渆nd of the world鈥� situation, it was certainly annoying and tedious. I realized that while I might have been able to figure out some of the technicalities of using cuLearn, might have helped me to anticipate these kinds of issues.

Over the month of December, I designed the Winter 2013 cuLearn page for my FYSM. This time, I had the benefit of training as well as the benefit of having seen various ways of setting up cuLearn pages from speaking with colleagues at the EDC and in FASS. I divided the page into a welcome section where I listed all assessments, due dates and grade weighting followed by one section for PowerPoint slides for the term and a section for each assessment item, which included the directions and rubric. I also added some colour to the page by inserting a one-by-one table for each topic. I was able to colour-code the cuLearn environment so that students and I knew to look for the blue section to find all relevant deadlines, the pink section to find information about the paper outline assignment or the green section to find anything related to their reading responses, for instance. This meant I had a page with only six sections which students found much easier to navigate.

I encourage anyone to sign up for the EDC鈥檚 training or to email any of us here to ask questions about cuLearn. The transition may be difficult at times, but it can also be invigorating!

For the last year, the Educational Development Centre (EDC) and Computing and Communication Services (CCS) have been collaborating to transition the university from (actually Blackboard Campus Edition 8) to (actually Moodle). We are now in the final couple of months of our transition and 杏吧原创鈥檚 long history with WebCT (beginning in 1997) is coming to an end in just a few weeks.

After May 10, our WebCT license expires and we will lose our ability to directly access content and information stored in it. A large part of our initiative to move to the new system has been the efforts to extract all the content and grade information stored inside of WebCT and convert it into a format that cuLearn can use. Thanks to the cuLearn migration team, we are almost done extracting all this material.

As we get closer and closer to May 10, it is important that we think about our next steps for cuLearn. How should we improve it? Are there tools that we should integrate to make it more helpful for teaching and learning? When should we upgrade to a newer version of Moodle (we are currently using Moodle 2.1; Moodle 2.5 is about to be released)? Can we better integrate cuLearn into existing 杏吧原创 systems (i.e., e-grades)?

A key part of the decision to select Moodle as 杏吧原创鈥檚 LMS was the ability to customize it for our teaching and learning needs and to extend and grow with it. The first steps to improve cuLearn will begin on April 25, 2013 with the kickoff of the LMS Advisory Meeting. This group has been formed with representation from all five teaching faculties, undergraduate students, teaching assistants, staff and senior management.

The group will meet throughout the summer to identify and prioritize our roadmap for the LMS. Some priorities have already been identified: integrate cuLearn鈥檚 gradebook with e-grades to improve the workflow for final grade reporting, improve the performance and upgrade to a newer version (but which version 2.4? Or 2.5?). Should we add a plugin that would facilitate online marking of assignments ()? What about ways to improve how the list of courses is displayed in the course menu page? It鈥檚 these types of questions that this group will help answer.

Would you like to provide input to direction of cuLearn? Please do not hesitate to contact the committee at edc@carleton.ca or contact one of the committee members.

Meet the committee:

Andrew Barrett 鈥� Assistant Director, Educational Development Centre
Scott Bennett 鈥� Faculty Member, Political Science, Faculty of Public Affairs
Brian Cousens 鈥� Faculty Member, Earth Sciences, Faculty of Science
Devin Fraser 鈥� 1st Year Undergraduate Student, Accounting
Ryan Katz-Rosene 鈥� Teaching Assistant, PhD Candidate, Geography
Denis Levesque 鈥揅hief Information Officer, CCS,
John Logan 鈥� Faculty Member, Psychology, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Patrick Lyons 鈥� Director, Teaching and Learning, OAVPTL 鈥� Committee Chair
Pat Moore 鈥� Associate University Librarian, MacOdrum Library
Osman Naqvi 鈥� 1st Year Undergraduate Student, Criminology
Cheryl Schramm 鈥� Faculty Member, Systems and Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Design
Vacant – Faculty Member, Sprott School of Business