Houston, we have lift-off. Following another very successful Comm 293 Midterm exam for 570, we now have five other ’large section (+200)’ instructors wanting to move their entire exam structure into Vista. The beauty is that they now understand how moving to the online environment does NOT mean moving to just multiple choice questions that do not challenge the student, or produce reliable and valid data. Hello folks, the exam is online, which means that we can take advantage of all that this cool new thing called the internet has to offer I predict that within two years, all of Sauder’s exams will be fully online and invigilated. If anyone is interested to see the summary exam results, contact me.

So much going on right now that no time for a full post, other than to throw this out to everyone:
Via: Voxy Blog

So here’s a new one…we’ve had a fire today in our building so the Learning Technologies group has relocated to the warm confines of the CTLT offices in Ike Barber. Thanks to Marianne and the rest of the crew for getting us back on our feet so quickly. It’s days like today that I’m glad that i’ve made the commitment to working and playing in the cloud so the fact that we had to leave with only the jacket on my back causes me no stress. Find a browser, connect back to the key sites, and get back up and running. I wonder if we are going to get any new customers re. online exams, due to water damaged student papers…

Collaboratory is once again resurrected at Sauder (Henry Angus) in room HA 296. If anyone wishes to drop by to further investigate any of our service catalog offerings and/or drop by for a conversation. Any and all welcome.

Currently sitting in HA 492 while an instructor conducts a final exam review from Patagonia. 30 students in the room and their using all the bells and whistles. Live classroom is the platform and it’s working to full capacity…. It’s a brave new world…

An interesting read from our view. Anyone have a contrarian view?

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2010/12/09/5-higher-ed-tech-trends-to-watch-in-2011.aspx

And another day to celebrate on the bleeding edge…or at least breath a sigh of relief that all went well. Last night we had three marketing presentations that were delivered to three remote clients in such exotic places as Dawson Creek and Vancouver Island. The students did an amazing job and the new V/C room (HA 492) performed to perfection. And to be clear, I’m celebrating that it all worked so well that it blended into the background and was not the center of attention…as it should be.

Well…all in all it’s been a great semester for the the bleeding edge here at Sauder. We’ve brought iPeer successfully into our service catalogue with at last count close to 1000 Sauder students having been involved in group evals. As well we’ve also had 3 more faculty and divisions join on board with the Vista template architecture which is exciting…but without question the two that we are most proud of are:

1. the successful running of the Comm 293 fully online invigilated midterm exam for almost two hundred students

2. the great press that COMM 101 has been getting from both the Vancouver Sun (http://bit.ly/90NgJQ) and our own internal public affairs (http://bit.ly/er8kT5)

Life is good…

Focus of our life at the moment will be the preparations and testing for the first online, invigilated exam in Sauder history, being done for over 200 students… But do have to mention the iClicker software version issue that is floating around…if a person has downloaded the updated 5.4 version directly from the iClicker website, the synchronization will not work and there is no obvious indicator. In order for the fully automated clicker syncs to work with Vista, we all need to be using the version available from the CTLT website here:
http://www.elearning.ubc.ca/toolkit/clickers/

We were hoping to get a Hotseat pilot up and operating this week here at Sauder but unfortunately we can’t get all the pieces of the puzzle in place; really hoping that we can get some other resources from UBC large in place to help out…hint hint, wink wink